The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2017 - 32

RESOURCE REVIEW

BY JOST ZETZSCHE

Speaking with OmegaT's Project Manager

here are only a handful of opensource translation environment
tools primarily geared toward
the professional freelance translator.
Without a doubt, the platformindependent OmegaT, a free opensource translation memory application,
is the king of the hill.
When you start the program, the initial
screen displays information on how to
get started with OmegaT in five minutes.
(See Figure 1 on page 33.) And they're
not kidding. To use the basic features,
you just start using the program and it
works. When it comes to fine-tuning
the OmegaT setup, you might find some
items available in menus with an easy-touse graphical user interface, but for other
features you'll have to manually set up
files and edit configuration files.
I decided to talk with Didier Briel,
OmegaT's project manager, about the
tool and its users. After a first career in
computing, notably as product architect,
technical director, and marketing and
strategy director within European
enterprise software vendors, Didier
became a translator and a consultant in
2004. He started contributing to OmegaT
in 2006, became development manager
in 2007, and project manager in 2014.
In parallel to his translation activities, he
provides consulting, training, support
and development services, mostly on
free translation environments. He is
also a member of the Société française
des traducteurs. You can contact him at
didier@didierbriel.fr.

Can you give us some idea of
OmegaT by the numbers?
Date of first release: November 28, 2002
Number of supported file formats: 40
native formats, plus 15 formats provided
by the Okapi plugin, for a total of 55.
Number of current OmegaT team
members: I'm the project manager
and the Twitter community manager.
For development, we have occasional
contributors rather than a fixed number
of developers who might contribute
after months or even years of inactivity.
32

The ATA Chronicle | November/December 2017

users, but there are plenty of users we
only hear about by accident.
Percentage of Windows versus Mac
versus Linux users: Based on downloads
for 2017, the breakdown is 70%
Windows, 12% Linux, 11% Mac, and
4.5% "Unknown."

What makes one decide to become a part of
the OmegaT team?

Didier Briel

Currently, we only have two people
contributing regularly (the integration
manager and I), but we had seven
different contributors in 2017. We
have one documentation manager, one
localization manager, and two Facebook
community managers. We also have
a large number of translators, some
regular and some occasional. OmegaT is
available in 35 languages, with complete
documentation in 14 languages.
Frequency of updates: We don't schedule
updates. We release them when we feel
they are stable and contain enough new
things to justify a release. We have two
versions: a "Standard" one, with mostly
bug fixes, and a "Latest" (or "Beta") one
with new features. The Latest is generally
stable, but may not have an up-to-date
manual. We've released three updates so
far this year for the Standard version and
five for the Latest version.
Number of downloads per month:
10,000
Estimated number of regular users: We
don't have reliable numbers for this. We
have 2,596 members in the Yahoo user
group. Not all these members are regular

We're an informal association. This means
that apart from very specific roles, such
as localization manager, you don't even
have to be a permanent member of a team
to contribute to the program. In addition
to development, some of the areas where
we ask for volunteers include document
authoring, localization, and testing.
Volunteers can choose to contribute a
single time, once every few months, or
several times a month.
I think there are two main reasons
to contribute to the program. The first
is "selfishness," as defined by Linus
Torwald, the creator of the Linux
operating system. He explained that
the best reason to contribute is because
it does something useful for you. For
instance, I started to contribute because
OmegaT didn't have a filter for the HTML
Help Compiler files I had to translate.
By contributing, I also make the project
more useful for others, who will then
contribute to the project for their own
"selfish" reasons, and I will benefit.
The second reason is gratitude-to give
something back to the project. When a
free application is your main tool, some
will want to show their gratitude with a
donation and others by volunteering their
time to help make it better.

What makes one decide to become a user
of OmegaT?
Our user base is very diverse.
■■

Some like the fact that OmegaT is free
of charge (gratis).

■■

Some because it's one of the few
computer-assisted translation tools
running on their platform (Mac,
Linux, but also BSD-Unix-based
operating systems).
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