ProTran® is a Professional Translation Organization that encourages the use of Linux and Open Source computer-assisted translation tools. The Organization was founded in 2000 by a programmer. All members and developers in our organization use free software.

ProTran® is a network of professional translators who use techniques such as user-customisable segmentation using regular expressions, translation memory, fuzzy matching, match propagation, glossary matching, context search in translation memories and keyword search in reference materials.

The requirement for membership is the use of Java 1.4 on Linux.

The name ProTran® (the name registered on the UK2 network site) is now a registered trademark and means in favour of going across a barrier. Currently, only the software released by the FSF under the GPL is allowed to be used by ProTran®.

ProTran® History

ProTran® was first developed by a programmer called James Snyder in November 2000 in Lisbon Portugal.
ProTran® offered technical support for StarOffice documents, plain text and Unicode text, and HTML, using paragraph segmentation.


ProTran® Development

Code development for Software Localization projects is currently handled by a worldwide team with designated leaders in each terrotory. The developers respond to bug reports and requests for enhancements filed on the development site wiki.

ProTran® Releases

In 2001 ProTran® invented a stable process life-cycle for customers of localization projects.
The manual for the workflow process life cycle is now available.

Members currently use flexible segmentation rules which makes sentence segmentation possible, much improved TMX support, regular expressions based searches, DocBook, and the GNOME graphical user interface on Linux.

ProTran® Workflow

Our members place source documents, existing translation memories and glossaries in specified subfolders of the translation projects. When a project is "opened", we extract the translatable text from all recognised documents. As our translator translates each segment, we add the translation units to a translation memory. Finally, we creates the target documents by merging the translation memory with the source documents.


Whenever additional source documents, translation memories or glossaries are added to the project, or when manual changes are made to those files, our translator reloads the project, so that the organization recognises the newly added segments. The project must also be reloaded when changes to the segmentation rules are made in mid-translation.

ProTran® helps collaboration between translators

Translators using different computer assisted translation tools can share their translation memories with our members if both programs can import and export an intermediary format. We can import and export the industry standard intermediary format TMX (Translation Memory eXchange).

ProTran®'s glossary files are tab-delimited plain text files with the source term in the first column and the target text in the second column, a third column can be used for user comments.

ProTran® Supported source document formats

ProTran® members can directly translate the following formats:

* text files, Unicode,
* HTML/XHTML,
* Java properties files,
* StarOffice, OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument (ODF)
* DocBook files,
* Portable Object (PO) files
* files with a "Key=Value" structure.

We handle formatted documents using tagged text in a way which is similar to that of other commercial translation memory tools.

ProTran® supports OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org can be used to convert MS Office 2007 file formats to OpenDocument, that ProTran® natively supports.

ProTran® uses Translate Toolkits

The Translate Toolkit, a python tool set, provides users with a number of converters to and from Portable Object, including Mozilla .properties and dtd files, CSV files, Qt .ts files, XLIFF files. It includes a number of tools to manipulate such files before or after their translation.


ProTran® Supports memory and glossary formats

ProTran®'s internal translation memory format is not visible to the user, but every time we autosave a translation project, all new translation units are automatically exported and added to three external TMX memories. We use the most advanced CAT tools.

For glossaries, we use tab-delimited plain text files. The structure of our glossary files are extremely simple: the first column contains the source language word, the second column contains the corresponding target language words, the third column (optional) contains comments on context. Such glossaries can easily be created by exporting 3 columns spreadsheets to CSV format with the following parameters: field delimiter={tab}, word delimiter={space}.

ProTran® Documentation

When a ProTran® project starts, a quick guide called "Instant Start" is displayed. A comprehensive User Manual is bundled with all ProTran® projects. The manuals have been translated into several languages by Professionals. The archived messages of ProTran®'s user groups are searchable.

ProTran® Localizations

ProTran® has worked on user interfaces, documentations and localization projects in the following 25 languages:

Albanian
Italian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Serbo-Croatian
Slovak
Belarusian
Danish
Esperanto
French
German
Greek
Japanese
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Turkish
Basque
Catalan
Czech
Hungarian
Japanese
Dutch
Slovenian
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese

ProTran® The ProTran® Project

The ProTran® Project is also a sort of "computer literacy" group that focus on translators' needs.

ProTran® users are encouraged to contribute tools written by themselves in response to translators' needs which are not yet addressed by the main ProTran® Organziation.

ProTran® Related software

Linux: Novell SuSe, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Canonical Ubuntu