Getting Started on TM-Town

TM-Town User Guide

Registering

To register for a TM-Town account click here and:

Register for TM-Town
  1. choose a username
    Your username should be between 3 and 30 characters and may only contain letters, digits or an underscore. No spaces are allowed.
  2. enter your email
  3. choose a strong password

Your Profile basic information

Upon registering you will be prompted to fill in some basic information about yourself to start building your TM-Town public profile.

TM-Town - Basic Profile Info

You will be asked to enter your top language pair and field(s) of expertise. You can choose up to 3 fields of expertise.

Additionally, you can begin to build out your TM-Town profile by filling in your:

  • Name e.g. Manuel López
  • Preferred Name e.g. Manny
  • Country
  • Gender (used to set the default avatar)
  • Account Picture

You can edit your profile information at any time by visiting your Account Settings.

Why will TM-Town only let me choose 3 language pairs and 5 fields of expertise? I have way more than that!

TM-Town's mission is to create a better translation world through technology and specialization. Therefore, the restrictive nature of only allowing Professional tier members to choose up to 3 language pairs and 5 fields of expertise is on purpose to encourage you to specialize.

Regardless of your chosen language pairs and fields of expertise, there is actually no restriction on the number of language pairs or fields of expertise you can ultimately load work in. TM-Town is also built on the principle of 'showing' what you can do, not just saying it.

Can I change my chosen language pairs and/or fields of expertise?

For members on our Basic (Free) tier, there is no option to change the top language pair and fields of expertise that you select when you register for TM-Town. This is to discourage translators from continually changing fields or language pairs to 'game' the system. If you mistakenly selected an incorrect language pair or field of expertise please contact TM-Town support and the issue will be corrected.

For paying members you can edit your chosen language pairs and fields of expertise on your Account Settings page.


Your Profile additional information

To show yourself in the best light on TM-Town it is highly recommended to take the time to fill out as much additional information about yourself as possible. In your Account Settings you can fill in fields such as:

  • Native language
  • Tagline *Limit 45 characters
  • About me *Limit 300 characters
  • Don't Bother Me Rate
  • Years of experience
  • Software you use
  • Education
  • Associations and memberships
  • Social media and other profiles
  • Payment methods accepted and preferred currency
TM-Town - Account settings

Apart from filling in the above information, the most important action you can take to improve your profile is to load work into TM-Town's system. On TM-Town, translators don't just say what they can do, they show it by loading in examples of translation work they have done. Any work you load in stays private and confidential.

The only data that is made public from an upload is:

  • Number of translation units
  • Any fields of expertise you tag the document with
  • Any language pairs in that document

The above data, along with the information you enter in your Account Settings, is used to help generate your TM-Town public profile as shown in the profile image below.

TM-Town - Sample Profile

Loading Work

On TM-Town, all of the interesting things you can do revolve around the work you load into the system.

There are 4 main types of resources you can load into TM-Town:

  • Translation Memory (TM) files
  • Terminology files (aka glossaries or termbases)
  • Source documents (the original document that was translated)
  • Target documents (the translation)

TM-Town's uploader makes it simple to load your work. Just drag the file(s) into the dotted orange rectangle. Additionally you can click the + ADD FILES button to select files from your computer's file system. To learn more about TM-Town's uploader please see this blog post.

TM-Town - File Uploads

Accepted File Types

TM-Town currently supports the following files types:

TM Files .tmx .xliff .xlf .sdlxliff .sdltm .txt (Wordfast) .txml .xlsx .xls
Terminology files .tbx .sdltb .csv
(learn more)
.xls
(learn more)
.xlsx
(learn more)
.tsv
(learn more)
.csv (CafeTran) .txt
(learn more)
Source and Target Documents (text) .pdf .doc .docx .ppt .pptx .xls .xlsx .odt .ods .odp .numbers .pages .keynote .yml .idml
Source and Target Documents (OCR) .pdf .jpg .jpeg .tif .tiff .png .gif

For the best OCR (optical character recognition) results it is recommended that your document:

  • has a DPI of at least 300 dpi
  • is not skewed or crooked
  • has clear text (lack of noise, shadows from scans, etc.)
  • does not have dark borders around the text

OCR is supported in the following 47 languages:

  1. Albanian
  2. Arabic
  3. Azerbaijani
  4. Bulgarian
  5. Catalan
  6. Cherokee
  7. Chinese
  8. Croatian
  9. Czech
  10. Danish
  11. Dutch
  12. English
  13. Esperanto
  14. Estonian
  15. Finnish
  16. French
  17. French, Old (842-Ca.1400)
  18. Galician
  19. German
  20. Greek
  21. Hebrew
  22. Hindi
  23. Hungarian
  24. Indonesian
  25. Italian
  26. Japanese
  27. Korean
  28. Latvian
  29. Lithuanian
  30. Norwegian
  31. Old English
  32. Papiamento
  33. Papiamento
  34. Polish
  35. Portuguese
  36. Romanian
  37. Russian
  38. Serbian
  39. Slovak
  40. Slovenian
  41. Spanish
  42. Swedish
  43. Tagalog
  44. Tamil
  45. Telugu
  46. Thai
  47. Turkish
  48. Ukrainian
  49. Vietnamese

After loading a file it will appear in the table below the upload box.

TM-Town - Your Work

Aligning Documents

TM-Town has an alignment tool that can help you convert a source and target document into a translation memory (TM) file. For an introduction to the concept of alignment see TM-Town's blog post Alignment the TM-Town Way.

For additional details on how TM-Town's alignment tool works please refer to this blog post or watch the video below.


Building and Maintaining Glossaries

Terminology glossaries are an important tool in a translator's tool belt to help maintain consistency in a project and also to help improve efficiency. On TM-Town it is easy to build new terminology glossaries from terms automatically extracted from translation memory files.

TM-Town also has editing tools to help you maintain and improve the quality of the glossaries in your TM-Town account.

For more details on building glossaries please see the blog post Creating a Multilingual Termbase is Now a Simple, Stress-Free Process or watch the video below.


Selling Glossaries

The TM-Town Terminology Marketplace is a central location where translators can buy and sell high quality terminology glossaries. The terminology files in this marketplace cover a wide variety of language pairs.

It is easy to get started selling glossaries on the marketplace. First upload the glossary into your TM-Town account and then click the Sell Glossary button to submit your glossary for approval.

Remember that while you can sell terminology glossaries, you can not sell translation memory (TM) files. The difference being that a TM file typically consists of segments that are generally a sentence in length. Glossaries, on the other hand, consist of terms that are generally 1 or 2 words in length.

For a full list of seller guidelines and frequently asked questions please refer to this page.

To learn more about selling your terminology glossaries please refer to this blog post or watch the video below.


Redacting Confidential Information

TM-Town's Confidential Information Redactor is a tool to help translators semi-automatically redact confidential information from a document. This feature allows translators to benefit from TM-Town's unique matching platform without having to save any confidential client data in TM-Town's system.

TM-Town takes privacy and security very seriously. Every document a translator loads into TM-Town's system is automatically private and secure. Even with these protections, some translators have mentioned they would be even more comfortable if confidential information could be redacted from a document.

Documents that are under 1MB in size are eligible for TM-Town's confidential information redaction tool.

For more details on how to redact confidential information from your document, please see the blog post Confidential Information Redactor or watch the video below.


Sharing Documents

On TM-Town it is easy to share documents with other TM-Town members. This may be useful if you are collaborating with other translators in a team setting.

Shared documents can be searched, edited or updated by the translators the document is shared with. The shared document can not be deleted and other 'Document Management' options are disabled.

This feature can also be used with TM-Town's CafeTran Espresso integration to allow multiple translators to collaborate on and update a shared translation memory file in real-time.


CafeTran Espresso Integration

CafeTran Espresso is the first CAT tool that TM-Town has integrated with. While working in CafeTran Espresso you can access, search and update your TM-Town documents.

It is also possible to upload files directly to TM-Town from CafeTran when you finish a translation.


Sending Your ProZ.com Portfolio Samples to TM-Town

It is possible to connect your TM-Town account to your ProZ.com account so that you can easily send your ProZ.com portfolio samples to TM-Town. This is a great way to get started on TM-Town. Once your samples are sent to TM-Town, they will be automatically aligned for you. Watch the video below to learn more.


Getting Started on TM-Town by Translating a Sample Source Text

If loading prior work into TM-Town's system is not an option because all of your prior work is under NDA or similar restrictions, one option to get started on TM-Town is to translate a short sample text in your field of expertise. TM-Town provides sample source texts in various fields of expertise. Click here to browse the samples.

If you can't find a sample in your source language or field of expertise please email us and we'll try to add a sample in your source language and field of expertise as soon as possible.


Deshi - Offline TM Analysis

Some translators may not have work which can be uploaded to TM-Town the traditional way in order to gain credit in a specific language pair and field of expertise.

That's why we created Deshi, a free offline desktop application that analyzes your TMs in the safety of your own computer.

Learn more about Deshi, and add this to your workflow today.

deshi tm-town
 

Tracking Your Daily Productivity

It is easy to track your daily productivity on TM-Town. You can submit a new productivity report here. To learn more about this feature please check out this blog post or watch the video below.


More guides coming soon...