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Can a translator work without any CAT tools?
Thread poster: joannebenz
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:06
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Indeed Mar 30, 2020

Andrzej Mierzejewski wrote:

With CAT software or without CAT software?... - that is one Shakespearean question.

All depends on the type of texts you translate. My opinion:

When it's a novel (e.g. 'Ulysses' by James Joyce), a poem (you name any author) or any similar text that requires thinking 'what does it mean and how do I say this in the target language without repeating what I wrote three hours ago?' for each sentence, you can rely on your brain exclusively.

But for technical texts like an instructions manual for a large and complex industrial machinery (e.g. 280 standard pages with e.g. 83 long sentences where just two up to five words vary from sentence to sentence), you definitely do need CAT software to assist your thinking. It's just in order to relieve your brain from recalling 'where did I see a similar sentence two days ago?' etc.

Again: all depends on the type of texts you are going to translate.



Indeed. Just out of curiosity I've just loaded an academic paper - the kind of thing I often translate - into OmegaT and there's nothing - absolutely nothing - that OmegaT can do for me.


 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
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English
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But you're new to CAT tools, I believe? Mar 30, 2020

Tom in London wrote:
Indeed. Just out of curiosity I've just loaded an academic paper - the kind of thing I often translate - into OmegaT and there's nothing - absolutely nothing - that OmegaT can do for me.

Have you aligned all your past, similar translations and loaded them into your TM? Maybe you'd get a very different result then.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:06
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Fatica Mar 30, 2020

Sheila Wilson wrote:

Tom in London wrote:
Indeed. Just out of curiosity I've just loaded an academic paper - the kind of thing I often translate - into OmegaT and there's nothing - absolutely nothing - that OmegaT can do for me.

Have you aligned all your past, similar translations and loaded them into your TM? Maybe you'd get a very different result then.


That sounds like an awful lot of work. Is it? First, I would need to find all the "similar" translations I've done, going back years. And none of them are "similar".


Wilsonn Perez Reyes
 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:06
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Fatica Mar 30, 2020

Sheila Wilson wrote:

Tom in London wrote:
Indeed. Just out of curiosity I've just loaded an academic paper - the kind of thing I often translate - into OmegaT and there's nothing - absolutely nothing - that OmegaT can do for me.

Have you aligned all your past, similar translations and loaded them into your TM? Maybe you'd get a very different result then.


That sounds like an awful lot of work. Is it? First, I would need to find all the "similar" translations I've done, going back years. And none of them are "similar".


 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 16:06
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English
+ ...
Translation memories grow with the translator -- just like youw own memory Mar 30, 2020

Tom in London wrote:
Sheila Wilson wrote:
Have you aligned all your past, similar translations and loaded them into your TM? Maybe you'd get a very different result then.

That sounds like an awful lot of work. Is it? First, I would need to find all the "similar" translations I've done, going back years. And none of them are "similar".

Indeed, it would be a lot of work. But if you'd started using a CAT tool all those years ago, you'd now be finding that you had translation memories that were both extensive and useful.


Robin LEPLUMEY
expressisverbis
 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:06
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Yes and Mar 30, 2020

Sheila Wilson wrote:

.... if you'd started using a CAT tool all those years ago, you'd now be finding that you had translation memories that were both extensive and useful.


If I had started doing (whatever) many years ago I'd now be very good at it. That's profound. Now to be even more profound, tell me how to make OmegaT find all the instances of a word that's in my glossary, and change them all without asking me.

[Edited at 2020-03-30 17:01 GMT]


 
Milan Condak
Milan Condak  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:06
English to Czech
Translating proceedings in OmegaT Mar 30, 2020

Tom in London wrote:

Just out of curiosity I've just loaded an academic paper - the kind of thing I often translate - into OmegaT and there's nothing - absolutely nothing - that OmegaT can do for me.


I downloaded all proceedings of MT Summit2019 (topic which I monitor)

http://www.condak.cz/nove/2019-09/02/cs/02.html

and happily translated them by MT from English to Czech in OmegaT.
OmegaT translate from PDF only a plain text, so for saving formating in documents I previously converted PDF to DOCX. By reading the proceedings I learned about database Paracrawl.

To enable OmegaT to work you've got to give it some suitable food (TMX, TBX, MT, glossary, dictionary).

Milan


 
Christel Zipfel
Christel Zipfel  Identity Verified
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Italian to German
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You need to feed it... Mar 30, 2020

[quote]Tom in London wrote:

If I had started doing (whatever) many years ago I'd now be very good at it. That's profound. Now to be even more profound, tell me how to make OmegaT find all the instances of a word that's in my glossary, and change them all without asking me. /quote]

... of course!
I don't know about OmegaT, but like every CAT tool, surely it needs some input. No CAT, even the most sophisticated and expensive, is able to translate by its own. That's profound.


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
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English to Afrikaans
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@Tom Mar 31, 2020

Tom in London wrote:
Just out of curiosity I've just loaded an academic paper - the kind of thing I often translate - into OmegaT and there's nothing - absolutely nothing - that OmegaT can do for me.


Can you clarify, Tom? What did you expect OmegaT to do or to be able to do?

I assume you already know that OmegaT is a CAT tool, i.e. it takes the source file and breaks it up into separate segments (usually sentences) so that you can focus on translating one segment at a time, and in the end, it generates a final file that is your translation put into the same formatting as the original file. During this translation process it allows you to store your translation in a database and to consult your and other databases that contain your or other translators' previous translations, either automatically (on a per-segment basis) or manually (when you search for specific words). It also performs automatic look-up of glossaries (if you give it those glossaries) and has some typing assistance features.

Does it not do all of these things for you? Was there something else that you had hoped OmegaT would do?

Tom in London wrote:
Sheila Wilson wrote:
Have you aligned all your past, similar translations and loaded them into your TM?

That sounds like an awful lot of work. Is it? I would need to find all the "similar" translations I've done, going back years. And none of them are "similar".


What Sheila means by "similar" are translations that are likely to contain sentences that are similar to or are of the same subject field as the sentences in the academic paper. If you do not have such translations from the past (or you can't find them), in order to add them to the database, then obviously you're going to have to start with a new, empty database. There is nothing really odd about that.

After a while (weeks, months, years), once you realise which subject fields or which client's jobs or which types of text will benefit greatly from having a populated database, you can set aside a day or two to dig through your old translations to find a goodly number of source and target files to align into such a database. Note however: you're going to have to use an "aligner" to do that, and OmegaT doesn't have a good aligner built in, so you're going to have to figure out which other aligner works and looks nice enough for you.

I think Sheila's main point is: Do you have an existing TM or are you starting with an empty TM? Do you have an existing glossary, or are you starting with an empty glossary?

If you start with nothing, well... then, let me ask you this: what are the other benefits of CAT tools that those of us who extol the virtues of CAT tools so frequently mention?
- Segmentation helps you focus on one segment at a time.
- You always type in the same font.
- Typing assistance helps you type faster (sometimes).
- You typically don't have to worry (too much) about getting the final file's formatting and layout right.
- If you have a long file or multiple files, you can find out much quicker how you translated a word or phrase previously.
- You can add terms to the glossary while you translate, to remind you of how you decided to translate certain terms.
- If you have a subscription to a machine translation service, you can get alternative suggestions for translations.
- If you have time to convert a dictionary to a format that OmegaT accepts, then OmegaT can automatically look up all the words in each segment in the dictionary for you.
- etc.

What was it that you had hoped that OmegaT would do for you?



[Edited at 2020-03-31 08:33 GMT]


 
Kay Denney
Kay Denney  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 17:06
French to English
. Mar 31, 2020

[quote]Christel Zipfel wrote:

Tom in London wrote:

If I had started doing (whatever) many years ago I'd now be very good at it. That's profound. Now to be even more profound, tell me how to make OmegaT find all the instances of a word that's in my glossary, and change them all without asking me. /quote]

... of course!
I don't know about OmegaT, but like every CAT tool, surely it needs some input. No CAT, even the most sophisticated and expensive, is able to translate by its own. That's profound.


... which is why it is Computer-Assisted translation rather than machine translation!

So Tom, the first few translations will take longer using a CAT, as you get used to the interface, learn about the various tips and tricks, feed your TMs and TBs. You start reaping benefits once you get updates of files or files on a very similar subject. Since you have various specialist subjects, there ought to be some repetition at least?

Personally I hate CAT tools but they do come in useful on occasion when you do repetitive stuff. I actually love doing fashion catalogues with them, I can go so fast I feel like I have, like, superpowers )


Christopher Schröder
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 17:06
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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@Tom Mar 31, 2020

Tom in London wrote:
Tell me how to make OmegaT find all the instances of a word that's in my glossary...


Does OmegaT currently find words in your glossary at all? If not, then we can try to figure out why.

...and change them all without asking me.


I wonder what gave you the impression that that is a feature that OmegaT offers.


Joe France
 
jyuan_us
jyuan_us  Identity Verified
United States
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English to Chinese
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What does "pen and paper" mean in your context? Mar 31, 2020

joannebenz wrote:
And I do not mind pen and paper (meaning the use of WORD and the good old dictionary.


Did you mean working with Microsoft Word is a type of "pen and paper" work?


 
jyuan_us
jyuan_us  Identity Verified
United States
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English to Chinese
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What is the reason for your clients not want you to use CAT tools? Mar 31, 2020

Yurim Jung wrote:
I can say this because I am working with clients who do not want me to use CAT tools.


Did they say the use of CAT tools is prohibited? It would be interesting to know.


 
Andrzej Mierzejewski
Andrzej Mierzejewski  Identity Verified
Poland
Local time: 17:06
Polish to English
+ ...
CAT tools prohibited? Mar 31, 2020

jyuan_us wrote:
Did they say the use of CAT tools is prohibited? It would be interesting to know.


AFAIK a large percentage of clients (

[Zmieniono 2020-03-31 13:22 GMT]


 
Andrzej Mierzejewski
Andrzej Mierzejewski  Identity Verified
Poland
Local time: 17:06
Polish to English
+ ...
...continuing... Mar 31, 2020

... or

 
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Can a translator work without any CAT tools?







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