CAT Tools
The growing demand for translation services has brought to the fore a new set of technologies that can assist translators with their beyond deplorable and most demanding tasks—CAT Tools. With the plethora of translator-aiding and project-management technologies, CAT Tools’ approach is rather holistic (i.e., their integrated environments are designed with all linguistic needs in mind); and therefore, they offer translators a wide variety of solutions to maintain quality and consistency, and to be punctilious and meticulous, nonetheless.
With that said, CAT Tools have shown to have a rather global application, with many translators finding it rather sordid and excruciating to approach business and financial literatures without their having access to the many solutions CAT Tools offer. Understandably though, CAT Tools are not to be confused with machine-translation technologies (although most of them offer some sort of integrated machine-translation engines)—as the onus is on translators to ‘translate’.
Benefits
As mentioned earlier, CAT Tools offer a rich profusion of technologies and solutions, the benefits of which can be summed in the following:
Post-haste Delivery: Clients can be so ‘one foot in crazy, the other on a banana peel’; and therefore, they might well stir for post-haste delivery—answering to their laundry list of asinine requirements can be surely draining for translators. CAT Tools help translators speed up the translation process through the following:
- File Preparation and Statistics: CAT Tools allow translators to prepare for the translation process beforehand by running a thorough analysis of the projects in hand; the corollary to which is a comprehensive report detailing match rates, wordage, and repetitions—this can very much give translators an estimate on the time needed for the delivery of their tasks.
- Homogeneity and Repetitions: CAT Tools allow for segment matching; meaning that context matches are compared to previous occurrences in older bilingual documents (Translators need to introduce little to no adjustments in most cases). As for repetitions, CAT Tools account for the no-match occurrences in the source file, the remaining occurrences repeated within the same file (As well as cross-file occurrences) are not accounted for and are auto-propagated.
- External and Internal Engines and Resources: CAT Tools offer a great mixture of resources that can be used to speed up the translation process in one integrated translation environment:
Translation Memory—a database of human-made translations aggregated from previous translation work and stored either on a local server or on the cloud.
Term Bases—a terminology module that consists of databases of stored terms.
Plug-ins—external engines and resources designed to facilitate the translation process (some are paid services offered by external partners).
Consistent Terminology: Working with projects of monstrous size imposes a further burden on translators as to maintain consistency throughout the projects in hand—this is made starkly apparent in the PowerPoint slides attached herewith (An excerpt from a previous project we have worked on where the reference files were not consistent). One of the benefits that CAT Tools secure for translators is consistent terminology—one of the many ways to realise this is through Concordance Search; a repertoire of stored human translations that can be utilised in unifying the terminology used (Certain CAT Tools allow for the extraction/exportation of a project-specific glossaries that can be then used as reference materials).
Collaboration Features: as part of their resource allocation and project management solutions, most CAT Tools allow for the assignment of multiple translators to one project; allowing them to work simultaneously thereon whilst maintaining utmost consistency, and to eventually to deliver projects on time—CAT Tools are single-source synchronous and complex software assets that allow for a seamless workflow.