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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