The IAEA Safety Glossary defines and explains technical terms used in International Atomic Energy Agency safety standards and other safety-related IAEA publications, and it provides information on their usage.

PDFs of the 2007 edition are available in five of the agency’s six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Russian. The Spanish version is still being translated. The English version is monolingual; the others give English equivalents along with same-language definitions.

Thanks to Hank Phillips for the tip.

I finally broke down and bought a laptop with the Windows Vista operating system preinstalled. The reason was that my 5-year-old laptop running Windows XP was simply no longer fast enough for the programs I needed to use.

I specifically chose a machine with Vista Ultimate. Here are the reasons why:

• Vista Ultimate allows you to download and install language packs that change the interface language (menus, buttons, messages, etc.) of Windows. This is an enormous advantage for translators who often translate computer manuals or localize software. In the past, you could download Microsoft glossaries to find the official translations, but recently Microsoft replaced the complete glossaries with a limited version. Therefore, Vista Ultimate is really useful when you have to translate sentences such as "Click on Start, then Settings, then on Control Panel" into Spanish, or French or German or any of the other 36 supported languages (see a list of features of various Vista versions here).
    
• You can switch between interface languages or associates languages with specific user accounts, which is nice in a multilingual household.
    
• Another advantage of Vista Ultimate is Ready Boost, a technology that allows you to use a (sufficiently fast) USB stick as "extra RAM".

So far, my Vista Ultimate experience was better than expected. The laptop recognized my wireless network and connected to the internet without any problems. By default, the operating system is a bit overcautious, constantly asking whether you really want to do this or that…

Of course I still do most of my work on an XP desktop and have not tried to hook up older peripherals to the Vista machine. Yet sooner or later, Vista will be unavoidable, and when you select your next computer, you might want to consider Vista Ultimate for its multilingual features.

You might have received files in .docx format that your version of MS Word did not know how to handle. The reason for this is that Microsoft uses a different file format for Word 2007. Users of the new version of Word can save documents in the familiar .doc format, but they have to remember to do so, as the default format is now .docx.

So what can you do if you only have Word 2003 or Word 2002? You can download a compatibility program here that covers Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This is not a perfect solution, as Microsoft points out that some elements in Word documents will be changed by using it:

Although you can open Office Word 2007 files in previous versions of Word, you may not be able to change some items that were created by using the new or enhanced features in Office Word 2007. For example, equations will become images that cannot be changed.

In the long run, we will end up using Office 2007, but if you are not quite ready to make the jump and usually deal with simply formated documents, this compatibility program might bridge that gap for the time being.

Have you ever asked yourself: “If I can postpone something why can’t I prepone it?”

Well, you definitely can. It’s just that sometimes we are not aware of the word. Prepone is an everyday word in India, where meetings, elections, weddings, movie releases, exams, court cases, and more are preponed all the time:

prepone (pree-PON) verb tr.
To reschedule an event to an earlier time.
[Modeled after the word postpone, from Latin pre- (before) + ponere (to put).]

This item was published by wordsmith.org. Those interested in words might like to visit this site and sign up for their word-a-day.

The March issue of The AATIA Letter, now online as a pdf, features Frank Dietz’s article "Getting Your Files from There to Here"(posted here earlier) and Tony Beckwith’s mini-memoir "The Caledonian Ball," plus the news about AATIA’s HQ office in the heart of downtown Austin and the new blog (you’re reading it!).

I remember the olden days, when we translators had to wrap our cuneiform tablets in mammoth hide and saddle our saber-toothed tigers to deliver … well, not quite. Yet the business of receiving files from agencies and direct clients and delivering finished translations to them has changed somewhat over time.

Gone are the days when the fax machine (preferably on a separate fax line, so you could be reached 24 hours a day) was the main conduit of information. I actually retired my trusty fax machine, as 95% of the incoming faxes were junk faxes.

Now I use a web-based faxing service named Trust Fax to send and receive the few faxes that are still needed. The fee for this is much lower than the cost of keeping a separate fax line and buying toner cartridges for the fax machine, and it actually offers a toll-free number for clients to reach.

In many cases, though, agencies might state that they want contracts signed and faxed to them, but they are perfectly happy if I convert the files to PDFs, sign them digitally and then e-mail them as attachments.

Most translators, of course, use e-mail for file transfer these days. If you have a broadband connection, with its greatly increased transmission speeds, this works so much better than in the case of dial-up.

Just remember that compressing your files with a program such as Winzip or Filzip can shrink them considerably (depending on the file type) and also makes life easier for the recipient who won’t have to deal with 37separate attachments.

Yet even with increased mailbox sizes and compression programs, e-mailing files sometimes is not always an option, as some files, such as PDFs or graphics, might simply be too large to send this way. Many agencies have reacted to this problem by setting up FTP servers (FTP stands for file transfer protocol) and will send you instructions containing FTP address, username and password that allow you to download these files.

While you could use Internet Explorer for this purpose, it is much more convenient to employ a dedicated FTP client such as Core FTP with its more user-friendly interface. However, a direct client might not have an FTP site available for file transfer. What do you do then?

There are a number of free or low-cost web-based file transfer services available. I have used YouSendIt that allows transfers of up to 100 MB. Other services of this type are Big Upload and Send This File. The client will then receive an e-mail with a URL that allows for the download of the large file you sent.

Project Gutenberg makes available to the public many titles in many languages. They are available to be downloaded for free since their copyright is no longer valid. AATIA members Hank Phillips and Thelma Sabim are among the many volunteers for the project, he as a reviewer and she as a Portuguese-language proofreader.

At the time of this post, more than 12,400 books have been processed by volunteers and are now available, more than 1600 are undergoing final checks before being assembled into completed e-books, and another 1000 or so are currently being proofread through the site. However, there are many more titles waiting to be proofed. The volunteer can proof just one page, or one page per day, or the whole book. Other ways to participate in this non-profit project include procuring eligible paper books, burning CDs and DVDs for people who don’t have Internet access, and making monetary donations.

Visit the website to find a book to read or to contribute your time to the project.