Importance of CAT Tools-Translation Software- Comprehensive Chinese Translation Services. Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation or CAT is a form of language translation in which a human translator uses computer software to support and facilitate the translation process. Computer-assisted translation is sometimes called machine-assisted, or machine-aided, translation (not to be confused with machine translation– Google and Bing translations software). Today’ millions of professional language translators are using the machine translations worldwide in every languages, but the fact of the matter is that automatic machine translation software are not able to produce high-quality translations unaided: their output must be edited by a human to correct errors and improve the quality of translation. It can only help the translators to provide auto translations and also do the secondary translation very fast. Computer-assisted translation (CAT) incorporates that manual editing stage into the software, making translation an interactive process between human and computer. Some advanced computer-assisted translation solutions include controlled machine translation (MT). Higher priced MT modules generally provide a more complex set of tools available to the translator, which may include terminology management features and various other linguistic tools and utilities. Carefully customized user dictionaries based on correct terminology significantly improve the accuracy of MT, and as a result, aim at increasing the efficiency of the entire translation process. How CAT Tools can help in Translations:
- Spell checkers, either built into word processing software, or add-on programs
- Grammar checkers, again either built into word processing software, or add-on programs
- Terminology managers, which allow translators to manage their own terminology bank in an electronic form. This can range from a simple table created in the translator’s word processing software or spreadsheet, a database created in a program such as FileMaker Pro or, for more robust (and more expensive) solutions, specialized software packages such as SDL MultiTerm etc.
- Electronic dictionaries, either unilingual or bilingual
- Terminology databases, either on the host computer or accessible through the Internet.
- Full-text search tools (or indexers), which allow the user to query already translated texts or reference documents of various kinds.
- Concordancers, which are programs that retrieve instances of a word or an expression and their respective context in a monolingual, bilingual or multilingual corpus, such as a bitext or a translation memory
- Project management software that allows linguists to structure complex translation projects, assign the various tasks to different people, and track the progress of each of these tasks
- Translation memory tools (TM tools), consisting of a database of text segments in a source language and their translations in one or more target languages.
Who is using CAT tools?
- 88% of respondents use at least one CAT tool for at least some of their translation tasks.
- Of those using CAT tools, 76% use more than one CAT tool.
- Of those using CAT tools, 83% use a CAT tool for most or all of their translation work.
- Of those using CAT tools, 64% have been using one for upwards of three years now, and 23% have been using one for more than seven years.
- Among those using CAT tools, the main areas of expertise were ranked as follows:
- Tech/Engineering- 34%
- Business/Financial- 15%
- Marketing- 12%
- Medical- 12%
- Law/Patents- 11%
- Art/Literary- 5%
- Social Sciences- 4%
- Science- 4%
- Other- 3%
- Of the 12% who do not use a CAT tool, 68% had used or tried to use a CAT tool before, and 32% had never used one at all.
- Among those not using CAT tools, the breakdown of main areas of expertise were:
- Law/Patents -22%
- Tech/Engineering -17%
- Art/Literary -14%
- Business/Financial -12%
- Medical 11%
- Marketing 9%
- Social Sciences 7%
- Science 4%
- Other 4%
- Only 3.4% of respondents who do not use a CAT tool did not know what a CAT tool is?
CAT Tools being used by INCCS Language Professionals.
- SDL Trados-10-14 ( Latest version- Studios’ 2015 )
- Déjà Vu
- Lokalize
- MateCat
- memoQ
- MemSource
- MetaTexis
- OmegaT
- Open Language Tools
- Wordfast PRO
- SmartCAT
