There exist many translation tools online- for example, I imagine Google translate likely came to mind immediately for many of you. In this blog post I would like to talk about another kind of translation tool, one often used by professionals in the translation industries of the world. This kind of tool is referred to as CAT- Computer Assisted Translation. The aim of this technology is not to machine translate, but to have a machine translation tool that assists in human translation. These tools are built to help with consistency and quality of your translations. They include useful features like grammar and spelling check, dictionaries, terminology management and translation memories. I’ll expand on what exactly some of these tools do:
Translation Memories are basically bilingual databases that can update as you go about translating. They can suggest whole phrases based on the database you build within them, and create matches between words and phrases within the memory that can be reused or edited, whichever you need to do. This sort of automatic look up and translation is very useful.
Terminology Management- these are concept centred term bases that can cater to multiple languages.
Some examples of professional translation tools are Trados, Memoq, Wordfast and Deja Vu. Trados in particular is the translation tool of choice for the EU.
Trados works by identifying formatting tags and also refers to sentences as segments. It breaks down texts into these segments and shows them parallel to eachother- you have original segments (in the original language) and target segments (in the target language). This format makes translation a step by step process that is much more simple.
My impression in particular is that CAT tools are very efficient and effective aids for professional/ amateur translators.
My personal recommendation for anyone looking for a free online resource is to use online dictionaries that offer parallel corpora for comparison and checking- two sites that immediately spring to mind are Linguee and Reverso. Both offer parallel corpora to compare, although there are slight pros and cons to each. For example, Reverso offers more languages but it doesn’t state the source of its entries, at least not in the free version.
Linguee on the other hand provides sources so you can verify the likelihood of the accuracy- for example, entries listed on Linguee from the European Union or United Nations are likely to be done by a professional translator, so the accuracy of the expression is higher.
