Best CAT Tool to Utilise your past translations
Thread poster: Batuhan Yazar
Batuhan Yazar
Batuhan Yazar  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:13
English
+ ...
May 3, 2017

Hi guys,

When it comes to software I consider myself a quick learner (plus my interest in programming) so complexity of the CAT tool does not concern me much. In this regard, what I am wondering is what would be the best CAT Tool for me to use to take advantage of my previous translations?

It should also be a CAT tool that can maintain (at least most times) the format of the translations documents etc. This is not a requisite but strongly preferred.

I fe
... See more
Hi guys,

When it comes to software I consider myself a quick learner (plus my interest in programming) so complexity of the CAT tool does not concern me much. In this regard, what I am wondering is what would be the best CAT Tool for me to use to take advantage of my previous translations?

It should also be a CAT tool that can maintain (at least most times) the format of the translations documents etc. This is not a requisite but strongly preferred.

I feel like I Am between SDL and Deja Vu but then there is MemoQ as well. Having this said I also realise I do not know the other CAT tools much as well. So I thought it is best to get some different opinions.

If you can help me I would be grateful mates.

Thanks in advance!
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Anton Konashenok
Anton Konashenok  Identity Verified
Czech Republic
Local time: 17:13
French to English
+ ...
It may not be reasonable May 3, 2017

Essentially, if your previous translations were done without any CAT tools, the only way to reuse them is to realign them against the source texts using the alignment function of the CAT tool, which takes time and effort (even though semi-automatic, it still requires a lot of manual intervention in most cases). You can certainly do it, but it hardly makes sense unless the new translations are very similar to the old ones.

 
Selcuk Akyuz
Selcuk Akyuz  Identity Verified
Türkiye
Local time: 19:13
English to Turkish
+ ...
Align when required May 3, 2017

Hi Batuhan,

AFAIK, nowadays all CAT tools are shipped with an aligner but you can use free or third party aligners as well.

LF Aligner is a good one. https://sourceforge.net/projects/aligner/

ABBYY aligner is
... See more
Hi Batuhan,

AFAIK, nowadays all CAT tools are shipped with an aligner but you can use free or third party aligners as well.

LF Aligner is a good one. https://sourceforge.net/projects/aligner/

ABBYY aligner is another option (it is free for SmartCAT users) https://www.abbyy.com/en-au/aligner/buy/

For alignment of PDF files, LogiTerm is the best one in my opinion.

Align the files when you need them. It will not take more than 15 minutes is you align a few files. But if you try to align hundreds or thousands of file in one go, you will possibly have problems with your deadlines.

When it comes to CAT tools, consider testing some of them before making your decision. I prefer Déjà Vu X3 because reliability is important for me.

Selcuk
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Batuhan Yazar
Batuhan Yazar  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:13
English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Problem is the accuracy May 3, 2017

Thanks for the messages. To be honest, I do have ABBYY. It works really fine like Selcuk mentioned. Alignment etc is not a problem for me. Sorry if my question was not clear.

Basically I have a bunch of old translations in word and excel format and I want to utilise them but I want to know technically the CAT tool that offers the best way. I actually heard a lot about Deja Vu as well for reliability. But then I feel like what could be different than SDL in that regard? This is what
... See more
Thanks for the messages. To be honest, I do have ABBYY. It works really fine like Selcuk mentioned. Alignment etc is not a problem for me. Sorry if my question was not clear.

Basically I have a bunch of old translations in word and excel format and I want to utilise them but I want to know technically the CAT tool that offers the best way. I actually heard a lot about Deja Vu as well for reliability. But then I feel like what could be different than SDL in that regard? This is what I am trying to understand.

As far as I understand it is more likely to catch words in different grammatical cases etc. but Is it something more than that? How about other CAT tools?



[Edited at 2017-05-03 22:25 GMT]
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Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:13
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Waiting May 4, 2017

Batuhan Yazar wrote:

..... I have a bunch of old translations in word and excel format and I want to utilise them but I want to know technically the CAT tool that offers the best way. ....


That's the CAT tool I'm waiting for. When some intelligent person designs it, I'll go for it. HINT: if there is a manual that has to be consulted or a learning curve that has to be followed, forget it.


 
Mirko Mainardi
Mirko Mainardi  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 17:13
Member
English to Italian
Trial versions May 4, 2017

Batuhan Yazar wrote:

Thanks for the messages. To be honest, I do have ABBYY. It works really fine like Selcuk mentioned. Alignment etc is not a problem for me. Sorry if my question was not clear.

Basically I have a bunch of old translations in word and excel format and I want to utilise them but I want to know technically the CAT tool that offers the best way. I actually heard a lot about Deja Vu as well for reliability. But then I feel like what could be different than SDL in that regard? This is what I am trying to understand.


If alignment is not a problem (i.e. you're able to produce usable TMs out of those files), then IMO the best way to go would be to try the various CAT tools you're interested in yourself and see the differences (mostly in terms of ergonomics, interoperability, price, and of course, personal preference). What's more, all of the CAT tools you mentioned offer a trial for 30 or more days.

As far as I understand it is more likely to catch words in different grammatical cases etc. but Is it something more than that? How about other CAT tools?


Not sure, but for instance I think case sensitivity for terms is more relevant for glossaries than it is for memories. In any case, this should be configurable in most tools. More in general, as long as you're able to feed it a TM, any CAT tool should be able to do with it what it's supposed to, so I think it's more a matter of finding the CAT tool you are more comfortable with, rather than the tool that handles TMs best...


 
Nina Esser
Nina Esser
Germany
Local time: 17:13
English to German
memoQ May 4, 2017

In memoQ you can add so-called "LiveDoc" corpora to your project which come up as TM matches when translating (but with a different colour, I think, so you can tell them apart!). You could add your previous translations to one of those corpora and have them automatically aligned. As you won't be feeding the aligned content into your TM (unless you want to), you don't necessarily have to clean up the alignment manually. Matches will come up anyway when translating and you will see if something's ... See more
In memoQ you can add so-called "LiveDoc" corpora to your project which come up as TM matches when translating (but with a different colour, I think, so you can tell them apart!). You could add your previous translations to one of those corpora and have them automatically aligned. As you won't be feeding the aligned content into your TM (unless you want to), you don't necessarily have to clean up the alignment manually. Matches will come up anyway when translating and you will see if something's wrong and can go back to the actual file (Word, Excel) to get the correct translation (or open the corpus and correct the alignment).
I'm aware this has nothing to do with accuracy, but I thought the funtion might still be of interest to you.
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Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 17:13
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Most widely used CAT tools do May 4, 2017

Batuhan Yazar wrote:
It should also be a CAT tool that can maintain (at least most times) the format of the translations documents etc. This is not a requisite but strongly preferred.


There are some CAT tools that can't retain formatting, but the majority of widely used CAT tools do retain formatting. Of course, you always have to check the final file manually to see if all formatting was retained successfully. Some CAT tools take shortcuts (e.g. they assume that if the source text sentence starts of ends with a certain formatting, then the translation will too), meaning that slightly more checking afterwards would be required.

For what you describe, you could even go for OmegaT.

As far as I understand it is more likely to catch words in different grammatical cases etc. but is it something more than that?


Well, various CAT tools have a variety of ways to perform segment and terminology matching that takes morphological constructs into account. OmegaT has a tokenizer for Turkish built-in, so you're just going to have to experiment with it a bit to see how good it really is for Turkish.

OmegaT's handling of Excel files is quite primitive,though (you can't exclude worksheets or cells, rows or columns, and you can't identify one row or column as the "source text" and then have the translation appear in another row or column). Wordfast Pro 4 and 5 and Trados 2015 all hide hidden rows/columns from the editor, but OmegaT doesn't.


 
DZiW (X)
DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
no fat lucky cat got the tongue May 5, 2017

A colleague of mine decided to go with the time and modernize the work-flow via so fabulous Computer Aided/Assisted Translation, because they told her it would be possible to re-align and re-use even her 20+ year-old translations in any pairs...

Some language pairs are rather specific, and what is common in one is not ok for the other: wording, tempo, strings/paragraphs length/patterns, let alone a client's instructions and the target audience. Shortly, it appeared almost impossible
... See more
A colleague of mine decided to go with the time and modernize the work-flow via so fabulous Computer Aided/Assisted Translation, because they told her it would be possible to re-align and re-use even her 20+ year-old translations in any pairs...

Some language pairs are rather specific, and what is common in one is not ok for the other: wording, tempo, strings/paragraphs length/patterns, let alone a client's instructions and the target audience. Shortly, it appeared almost impossible to align easily and properly, say, 1200+ English segments with some 900 Russian varied sentence type segments or even 400 Japan segments with 300 French ones. She conveyed the idea, yet no sentence for sentence equ, merging and moving the meaning to the bare bones.

When I explained it to her, the alignment relies on the similarities of parallel structures, she exclaimed that it's absurd for no translation could and should be identically segmented, and inquired about another 'better' tool. I must admit, after the final edit my translations also may differ, but no more than a few sentences (if the client permits to combine original short/orphan or delete not so relevant ones). However, she did like the centralized database/backup concept.

Meanwhile I had to refer to the paragraph-based segmentation instead of sentence-based, which significantly lowers the fuzzy, but still works... occasionally.
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