Using CAT tools among Iranian translators
Thread poster: Abdulvahed
Abdulvahed
Abdulvahed  Identity Verified
Iran
Local time: 09:24
English to Persian (Farsi)
Dec 18, 2009

I want to know about using CAT tools among Iranian translators.Is it widespreadly known and used by translators in Iran and what about its local market and so on....

[Subject edited by staff or moderator 2009-12-18 11:57 GMT]


 
Stephen Franke
Stephen Franke
United States
Local time: 22:54
English to Arabic
+ ...
May help to post your query also in the Persian Forum here in ProZ Dec 18, 2009

Greetings... salaam...

Very good question.

You might elicit more response if you also posted your query in the Persian [listed as "Farsi"] Forum here inside ProZ. When I last visited there yesterday, the contents did not include any queries about any CAT or similar tools. Befarmaa'idtoon...

I may be misinformed, but most commercial multilingual CAT products, as least those of which I am aware, seem to lack both [1] right-to-left (RTL) drivers and/or [2] s
... See more
Greetings... salaam...

Very good question.

You might elicit more response if you also posted your query in the Persian [listed as "Farsi"] Forum here inside ProZ. When I last visited there yesterday, the contents did not include any queries about any CAT or similar tools. Befarmaa'idtoon...

I may be misinformed, but most commercial multilingual CAT products, as least those of which I am aware, seem to lack both [1] right-to-left (RTL) drivers and/or [2] specific support for Persian fonts (those products -- even some with RTL functionality --tend to default to Arabic, which does not have several distinctive and important Persian characters).

Hope this helps and that other subscribers will answer your interesting question better than I could, in shaa' Allah.

Khudaa Haafez.

Regards,

Stephen H. Franke
San Pedro, California
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sztyblewsky1997
 
Abdulvahed
Abdulvahed  Identity Verified
Iran
Local time: 09:24
English to Persian (Farsi)
TOPIC STARTER
CAT tools Dec 18, 2009

As you mentioned it I,d posted my question at first to Farsi section of Proz.com forum
but moderator placed it here as an appropriate forum.Any way I just know that CAT tools has no place yet in the general iranian educated mind and market; and nearly all computer stores I v asked about have heard nothing of it or confused it with CAD.That,s why I decided to ask it here to be made clear.


 
Lucia Leszinsky
Lucia Leszinsky
SITE STAFF
Thread moved back to Persian/Farsi forum Dec 21, 2009

Hello Abdulvahed & Stephen,

On account of the last two posts here, I have moved this thread back to the Persian/Farsi forum.

I apologize for the misunderstanding.

Best regards,

Lucia


 
Edward Plaisance Jr
Edward Plaisance Jr  Identity Verified
Local time: 01:54
Member (2008)
Persian (Farsi) to English
+ ...
CAT Aug 16, 2010

On the question of using CAT tools, I can speak from my own experience and comment that virtually none of the Persian to English work I have done could have been done using CAT, at least not the way it is mainly designed to be used.

1. You cannot really use CAT tools when the source document is anything other than an electronic Word (or Word type) document. Everything that I have translated has been a fax, photocopy, handwritten, scanned, or dot matrix print-out (or all of these tog
... See more
On the question of using CAT tools, I can speak from my own experience and comment that virtually none of the Persian to English work I have done could have been done using CAT, at least not the way it is mainly designed to be used.

1. You cannot really use CAT tools when the source document is anything other than an electronic Word (or Word type) document. Everything that I have translated has been a fax, photocopy, handwritten, scanned, or dot matrix print-out (or all of these together). There is no point it trying to use CAT programs with these, as far as I can see.

I have used Wordfast experimentally for myself. To find usable source material I went to the BBC Persian site and downloaded news stories as text. Then I was able to dump that into Wordfast and practice using it for translation.

My guess is that the majority of Iranian translators have the same experience.

2. CAT software is not cheap. If by chance, translators of English to Persian in Iran receive electronic documents to translate, and if they could use CAT programs, no one is requiring them to use CAT. So why spend the money? And I seriously doubt that the documents/texts that they are translating are delivered to them in electronic form.
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sztyblewsky1997
 
sztyblewsky1997
sztyblewsky1997
English to French
+ ...
CAT tools and RTL languages Jun 29, 2018

Edward Plaisance Jr wrote:

On the question of using CAT tools, I can speak from my own experience and comment that virtually none of the Persian to English work I have done could have been done using CAT, at least not the way it is mainly designed to be used.

1. You cannot really use CAT tools when the source document is anything other than an electronic Word (or Word type) document. Everything that I have translated has been a fax, photocopy, handwritten, scanned, or dot matrix print-out (or all of these together). There is no point it trying to use CAT programs with these, as far as I can see.

I have used Wordfast experimentally for myself. To find usable source material I went to the BBC Persian site and downloaded news stories as text. Then I was able to dump that into Wordfast and practice using it for translation.

My guess is that the majority of Iranian translators have the same experience.

2. CAT software is not cheap. If by chance, translators of English to Persian in Iran receive electronic documents to translate, and if they could use CAT programs, no one is requiring them to use CAT. So why spend the money? And I seriously doubt that the documents/texts that they are translating are delivered to them in electronic form.



They could get the free versions but the free ones (and in my case the free Macintosh-compatible ones) don't seem to work with Persian and I have trouble getting them to work with Arabic depending on the original file. If I can get the original file successfully converted into a usable .doc or .docx file then, yay me. If not and it's a brochure or flyer or something that needs to be re-formatted back in with graphics and such, then I simply can't do it. Fortunately with TWB so far I've not seen any penalty for returning a file un-done; with Translated.net I think I've been blocked permanently for one Arabic one whose source file seemed to come to me already corrupted. That wasn't my fault but I've never gotten another paid assignment from them. I have to keep looking for paid work so I don't starve while I try to get something like I.T. help desk or call centre support or something.


 


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