STAR's Language Technology Division has just launched a new product in the Transit family of computer assisted translation tools which aims to help Frank and countless other independent translators put low productivity working methods behind them.

The name of the new product tells it all. Satellite PE is a 'personal edition' of STAR's translation memory tool cum editor, Transit. It was tailor made to be downloadable from the Internet and so available as and when needed anywhere in the world to these remote or 'satellite translators'.

Satellite PE is a technical achievement in the qualified sense that a fully functional variant of Transit has been rendered in a file sufficiently compact to be normally downloadable even where broadband services are not available. It is not only easy to download, but also easy to install. It runs on computers with modest specifications (64 MB Ram) such as are widely found in Latin America, China and in field locations in much of the world. All this makes exchange of projects with project managers extremely simple.

However, the real significance of Satellite PE is in the realm of marketing, where it seeks to re-write the rules of competition among vendors of CAT tools and to vastly open up the use of this technology among potential beneficiaries, who are now defined as anyone working in a bilingual, not to mention multilingual environment.

It is no great secret that the penetration of CAT even within the translating profession remains modest. The number of licenses sold by all vendors together comes in well under 100,000, which is a fraction of the known professionals in Europe and North America, not to mention emerging markets like China.

If one looks farther afield among general businesses and organizations, the penetration is derisory. Here virtually the only known and used products are electronic dictionaries and terminology managers. In a word, the challenge before the designers of CAT remains immense.

Satellite PE is intended to remove one of the principal obstacles to the dissemination of the technology, namely the cost of entry. Satellite PE is offered free of charge to any and all. A website, www.star-transit.com was specially created as the delivery vehicle for the downloadable product. And CD-ROM's are being made available to all interested parties for the widest possible circulation.

Satellite PE also addresses directly a second obstacle to the spread of CAT tools, the feared complexity they present to technophobes. The user options in Satellite PE have been stripped down for the sake of simplicity. And a specially conceived Computer Based Training file walks the newcomer through the technology in a manner that very quickly and painlessly builds confidence.

The intended effect of Satellite PE is to broadly serve the interests of the globalization and localization industry.

From the standpoint of agencies, Satellite PE makes it possible to cheaply and quickly build resource around the world. It plays fully to the distributed working environment that comes from the Internet. And this building of resource is most relevant today when volumes of translation are constantly rising and resource is scarce.

From the standpoint of freelancers, Satellite PE is a dream come true. It is a full-bodied and robust software tool which is easy to learn, which renders them instantly employable among the word's leading translation houses and which costs them nothing but their time.

Last but not least, for large enterprises the benefit of Satellite PE is that whatever translator resources they want to include in their globalization or localization processes, they can be seamlessly fitted in: painlessly, quickly and without driving up costs.

Gilbert Doctorow (Gilbert.Doctorow@star.spb.ru) is a marketing consultant to The STAR Group. For more than 25 years, he has served multinational companies across Europe both in industrial and consumer marketing.