DeepL.com is currently the best AI translator* and is now available as an app for Windows and macOS. This means that users will no longer have to copy text back and forth between their application and the DeepL website:
Just like the website, the app is able to provide alternatives to the suggested translations and adapts the rest of the sentence, if necessary:
The limit of 5000 characters per translation can be lifted by signing up for a DeepL Pro plan.
Wondering why the download for Windows has an impressive size of 135 MB? This is mainly due to the use of the Chromium Embedded Framework, which is included both in a 32 bit and 64 bit version.
*Is the Deepl.com the best AI translator? I think so. Like everything on this blog, this is just my opinion. However, as someone living and working in Luxembourg, a country with three official languages, I sure appreciate DeepL.com a lot.
Alternative apps
QTranslate has been around for several years, is also available for free and integrates several different translation services (including DeepL):
It has additional features like image text recognition, text to speech synthesis and searching in online and offline dictionaries. However, it seems that it can only provide alternative translations for single words. The size of the download is less than 1 MB.
Note: The code above runs synchronously and blocks your application. To avoid this, you could run it in as a task on the thread pool with Task.Run() or you could use XElement.LoadAsync instead of XElement.Load(), if available.
Suppose you have a document with a date and time column. Calculating time differences is easy, you can simply subtract an earlier time from a later one1. In the screenshot below, column C shows the difference between the time in consecutive rows (column B). However, you can see that this simple approach fails just after midnight:
The time difference in row 4 is negative and also wrong. This becomes very clear when you switch to a 24h time format and enable negative times2:
Did you notice that the dates in column A have changed? This was due to the method I used to enable negative time values (see note 2 below).
Solution: Include the date in the calculation
Internally, dates are represented as whole numbers and times as fractional numbers smaller than 1 (1 would be 24h = 1 whole day). This means you can simply add date and time! Therefore, a better formula to calculate time differences is:
=A2+B2-(A1+B1)
By including the date, this formula works fine after midnight.
A3-A2 is the simple time difference calculation we used in the beginning. (A3<A2) returns TRUE only when the next day starts and the time is “smaller” than in the row above (see row 5, column C). What makes this work for our purposes it that TRUE is evaluated as 1 while FALSE is 0 (see column D). As mentioned above, a date/time value of 1 corresponds to 1 day (24h).
In row 5, Excel is therefore calculating the difference between 24h and 23h 59min 59s, which is 1 second.
1 This will work if Excel correctly recognized the value as a time (not a text). You can test this with the ISNUMBER function which should return TRUE. 2 The easiest way to get Excel to show negative times is by enabling the 1904 date system in the advanced options. 3 If you want to see time values of 24h or more, use an elapsed time format with square brackets, e.g. [h]:mm:ss instead of h:mm:ss.
Your company is selling software and a customer in the U.S. is asking you for form W-8BEN-E? You should supply it or risk having 30% of your payment withheld. Some customers might also not place an order at all before receiving this form.
Disclaimer: This blog post is presented for educational and entertainment purposes only. I originally wrote the instructions below for my own company. They might be incomplete, wrong or not applicable to your situation.
Preliminary considerations
What are software licenses (in tax treaty terms)? For this article, I’m assuming they fall under royalties / copyright.
Does your country have a tax treaty with the U.S.? How much will you save by filling out from W-8BEN-E? Download table 1 (tax rates…) from this IRS page, find your country and look up the royalties / copyright tax rate:
Provide a US taxpayer identification number (TIN) in the form of an employer identification number (EIN) on line 8 or the tax ID assigned in your country on line 9b.
Part III – Claim of Tax Treaty Benefits
Line 14a: Check the box and enter your country.
Line 14b: Check the box at the beginning. Will you have to check another box below? The official instructions say:
If you are a resident of a foreign country that has entered into an income tax treaty with the United States that contains a limitation on benefits (LOB) article, you must complete one of the checkboxes in line 14b. You may only check a box if the limitation on benefits article in that treaty includes a provision that corresponds to the checkbox on which you are relying to claim treaty benefits. A particular treaty might not include every type of test for which a checkbox is provided.
Line 15: As far as I understood the instructions, this line has to be filled out only “if the treaty contains different withholding rates for different types of royalties.”[see IRS instructions]. Remember table 1 from the very beginning of this blog post? Look at it again. Are all royalties rates the same? If yes, skip line 15, otherwise, fill it in. As “n/a” is not a rate (I hope), I skipped this line (all rates were the same for Luxembourg).
Part XXX – Certification
Sign, fill in print name and date in U.S. format, check the box at the bottom.
Even though I really don’t want to deal with this topic again, I’ll leave the comments open so that you can correct me on all that’s wrong with my instructions. However, please don’t ask me to help you fill out form W-8BEN-E for your company!
