In this episode, Eve and Corinne discuss computer-assisted translation tools. What are CAT tools? What are they useful for? When are they not useful? What flavors of CAT tools are out there for translators to choose from? How do TM tools differ from MT tools?
Links mentioned in this episode (note: none of these are affiliate links):
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- Polilingua’s fairly comprehensive list of CAT tools on the market
- OmegaT, a free and open source TM tool
- Wordfast
- SDL Trados Studio
- memoQ
- Parallels (to run Windows software on a Mac)
- Lilt (a so-called “machine-assisted translation” tool)
- User review of Lilt (from Corinne’s blog)
- XBench (external QA tool available as a CAT tool plugin)
- PerfectIt (editing plugin for MS Word)
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Computer-assisted translation tools
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Speaking of Translation 
Thank you Eve and Corinne. I really enjoyed your post. After using WF classic for years, one day I was no longer able to access my biggest TM because it was just too big and crashed. Basically it was a “medical” TM which is my specialist field. I never created customer-specific TMs but field-specific ones to get more hits and my medical TM was huge. I used that opportunity to purchase memoQ and start over with a new TM but I’m afraid the same thing will happen again in a few years. I was wondering what you and other listeners do to avoid this problem. Would you create sub-field TMs like “cancer” and “cardiology” and open them all to make sure you get as many hits as you can?
Hi, Julia, Thanks for listening and for your comments! I have used very large TMs in Studio and it has been okay (However, I have had issues with large files, which is quite annoying – they were really not THAT big and I was surprised). I have also heard from other memoQ users that it deals very well with large memories and large files (I have not had that experience in memoQ yet – very large files or TMs). Do other memoQ users out there have any additional comments?
I’d suggest looking into memoQ’s ability to handle very large TMs first to avoid getting into complex TM management where you might forget to categorize things correctly and wonder which TM has what info. BUT, I am sure there are others out there who use this method and will dispute my assessment. Anyone have comments on this topic for Julia? Thanks!
Thanks Eve!
Hi Julia and thanks for your message! Personally, I have a huge master TM (containing basically everything I’ve ever translated), and then customer-specific TMs. That’s an interesting issue with the TM that was too big to run; did you try contacting WF support about it? Asking that only because the lead developer is still involved and could perhaps help.
To be honest I didn’t contact their support. I had been intending to switch to memoQ because of the great things people were saying. I did try to import my TM into memoQ but got an error message. These things are sent to test us 🙂 I’ve had MemoQ for about a year now so I’m steadily building up a good TM. But it was scary to work from scratch again at first (apart from a few odd translations that I aligned so that the TM wasn’t completely empty!)
Thank you for this very interesting podcast.
I mostly use SDL Trados. I am sure I don’t use half it’s capabilities but find it an invaluable tool. I am looking into PerfectIt now so thank you for the tip.
Thanks, Louise! Glad you enjoyed the episode!
Louise, I know what you mean – there is always so much to learn, whether it is more about the application itself or cool tips and tricks that others come up with. Thanks for listening!
Thank you for the great podcast, Eve and Corinne! Verifika is another powerful QA tool similar to XBench. The Freelancer Plan was free initially, however, it is premium now.
Great episode, thanks :-)! For projects with multiple reference files of various formats (PDF, xls, word, tmx, xml…), full text search engine software like dtSearch or Archivarius 3000 can be very useful to search megabytes of data. I never used though (up to now) corpus software such as AntConc for concordancing.