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MadCap Software Debuts MadCap Lingo, Rewrites the Rules for Translating Documentation

Tuesday 15. January 2008 - The Most Integrated Translation Memory System and Authoring Tool the Industry Has Ever Seen Eliminates File Transfers Susceptible to Content and Formatting Corruption

MadCap Software, the leader in multi-channel content authoring and a showcase company for Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft XPS, today announced the launch of MadCap Lingo, which rewrites the rules for translating documentation.

MadCap Lingo, an XML-based, fully integrated translation memory system and authoring tool, eliminates the need for file transfers in order to complete translation. As a result, documentation and localization professionals no longer have to risk losing valuable content and formatting. Instead, document components, such as tables of content, topics, index keywords, concepts, glossaries, and variables all remain intact throughout the translation and localization process, so there is never a need to recreate them. MadCap Lingo also is tightly integrated with MadCap Flare and MadCap Blaze, and it is fully Unicode enabled to ensure that documentation professionals can deliver a consistent user experience — in print, online, and in any language.

MadCap Lingo is being announced today in conjunction with the new MadCap Analyzer, the industry’s first software that proactively recommends documentation content and design improvements (see press release also dated January 14, 2008). Together, the products represent a significant milestone in MadCap’s development of the industry’s most complete documentation suite, delivering solutions for authoring, collaboration, analysis, and translation. Based on native XML and offering full Unicode support, MadCap’s software uniquely addresses the documentation requirements of today’s global, Internet-enabled economy.

“The Internet has played a central role in fueling the growth of global business, but too often traditional documentation and translation tools have lagged behind in supporting the consistent communications that multi-national operations demand,” said Michael Hamilton, MadCap vice president, product management. “Today, fully supporting Unicode and having an XML-based approach to translation are requirements for meeting the time and cost demands of companies with a global presence. MadCap Lingo leads international documentation into the twenty-first century, bringing these capabilities together for the first time in an integrated authoring and translation solution that takes the redundancy, risk, and pain out of multi-lingual, multi-channel publishing.”

MadCap Lingo works with MadCap Flare, the company’s flagship native-XML authoring product, and MadCap Blaze, the native-XML alternative to Adobe FrameMaker for publishing long print documents, which will be generally available in early 2008. A user simply creates a MadCap Lingo project to access the source content in a Flare or Blaze project via a shared file structure. Working through Lingo’s intuitive interface, the user accesses and translates the content. Because the content never actually leaves the structure of the original Flare or Blaze project, all the content and formatting is preserved in the translated version. Once a project is translated, it is opened in either Flare or Blaze, which generates the output and facilitates publishing.

“We are one of the world’s leading providers of software and services for the mining industry, so it’s a top priority to ensure that our customers and employees have accurate and easy-to-navigate documentation. In many cases, that content has to appear in multiple European and Asian languages, as well as English,” said Rowdy Bristol, technical communications manager of Gemcom Software Australia Pty. Ltd. “That’s why I jumped at the chance to try the beta version of MadCap Lingo. Without any training, I was able to install it on one of our translator’s computers, and in less than a day she was productive. True to its promise, Lingo enabled translation while preserving all of our document structure and formatting, and my translator reported back that this is going to make her job much simpler.”

Using MadCap Lingo with Flare and Blaze maximizes the ability of documentation specialists, trainers, HR professionals, and translation experts to take advantage of their existing content and deliver localized content in their formats of choice. At the front end of the process, Flare and Blaze can import a range of document types to create the source content. Following translation, the products provide single-source delivery to multiple formats online and off, including the Internet, intranets, CDs, and print.

MadCap Lingo sets new standards for functionality and ease-of-use in translating content. Key features include:

— Comprehensive translation memory. MadCap Lingo features the Lingo
Server built-in translation memory system, as well as the ability to
connect with third-party translation memory systems. Lingo also lets
users translate text using the integrated Google service.
— Difference projects. With MadCap Lingo, users can create “Difference”
projects, where differences in content are highlighted, making it easy
to focus only on the changes.
— Quick shortcut keys. MadCap Lingo provides several handy shortcut keys
that let users quickly perform translation functions and move around
the interface.
— Side-by-side translation editors simplify the process of localizing
topics, tables of content, index keywords, concepts, glossaries,
variables, and much more.
— Multilanguage support. MadCap Lingo is fully Unicode enabled and
provides support for both single-byte and double-byte languages.
Extended language support provides full functionality for translating
Eastern European languages as well as Western European and Asian
languages.
— Ease-of-use is enabled by several features in the user interface. A
file list window eliminates the need to guess which files require
translation. There is a visual document structure display, and users
can view and edit multiple documents simultaneously. The MadCap Lingo
user interface is also customizable to support users’ preferred ways of
working.
— XML support. Like all MadCap products, MadCap Lingo works natively in
XML to support the XML-based content from MadCap Flare or MadCap Blaze
projects.


Availability and Pricing


MadCap Lingo is available today. It is priced at $2,199 per license, but is available at an introductory price of $899 for a limited time. MadCap Lingo also is available on a subscription basis for $649 per year. MadCap’s solutions are backed by a range of service and support options, delivered by MadCap’s US-based team of authoring and technical documentation experts. Fees for support start at $449 per year.