Translators’ adventures in CAT-land

Blog post by Elvira, Thomas and Laura

This post is the brainchild of 3 brains, 6 hands, 6 eyes and 3 pairs of glasses.

You will find below some examples of how our activity became easier with the use of a CAT tool, as well as some information on the Trados 2021 and Trados live workshop we are organising for the Romanian members of our community.

Have you ever wondered how you can translate up to 10K words in a day working less than 8 hours? 

Elvira

Well, my personal best was 10K words in 5 minutes (roughly 3-4 days worth of work while in-house for a not-so-nice employer who knew nothing about CAT tools), because the two user manuals I had to translate were almost identical. 

While this is a rather rare occurrence, there are several projects I have with a client I am working with for 10 years already where my productivity might, depending on other factors, too, reach an average of 8K words/day.

How can you do that? First, use a CAT tool. Second, use said CAT tool at its maximum potential. In my case, this type of productivity is a combination of documents similar in nature and content, even if not as matchy-matchy as they could be, three good monsters of translation memories (some good tens of thousands of translation units), a termbase I built over the years and the auto-suggest feature of my CAT tool. Third, in case you do translate similar documents often, believe me, even if you think CAT tools are expensive, you recover what you spent on them soon enough.

Thomas

I had to edit an 85K-word project, with about ⅔ repetitions. Unless I wanted to press ctrl+enter a gazillion times, I needed a quick, elegant solution. The answer to my problem was the Advanced Filter option, obviously. First, I filtered out all the repetitions, displaying the first occurrences of repeated segments. I set the Auto-propagation feature to include 100% matches, and by the end of the process, I had all the segments updated accordingly. Now all I needed was a filter for the single occurrences. This was relatively easy to do in the first instance since all Trados had to do was identify the confirmed, but unreviewed segments. However, I wanted to check everything twice… so I bumped into somewhat of an issue. You see, the preinstalled Advanced filter feature in Trados Studio 2019 cannot identify non-reps, which meant I needed to look up a fix or alternative workaround. Luckily, we have Paul Filkin’s enormously useful blog and I quickly found the solution to my problem. There is a community-developed advanced filter feature that you can install as an add-on. More about this here. Basically, this add on allows you to apply reverse filters, and it even includes the option to filter out non-reps by default. 

This is how my CAT tool helped me save a lot of time.

Laura

I had to coordinate the translation of a 47K-word project which was a summary of a 270K-word document, with several chapters, subchapters and sections. 

Unfortunately, the large 270K-word document was translated by more than one person, without using any CAT tool. As a result, the translation of the 47K-word project took more time than it should have and was more expensive than it should have been. 

In the end, the shorter document had to be retranslated because it didn’t include the same key concepts, and because some parts of the text, which should have been identical (e.g. chapter titles), were completely different. 

After aligning the 270K-word document in Trados, I managed to get a valuable translation memory and realised that over 60% of the smaller project was made of repetitions. 

Why would you choose to struggle and make your day a living hell when you have all the wonderful possibilities we have nowadays?

If you think buying a CAT tool might be too expensive, and that the fields you usually translate from don’t require the use of a professional translation tool, you might want to reconsider your thoughts. After all, we tend to specialise after a while and, while the documents we translate will not be identical, they will be similar and having previous translations available at the touch of maximum 3 keys on your keyboard is invaluable. So, how much does it cost NOT to use a CAT tool in your activity?

Together with our friends from SDL, we invite you to attend the first Trados 2021 workshop offered for the Romanian translators from the TranslateCluj community, on Thursday, 10 December 2020, 2 PM.

The registrations are closed, but if you missed the registration deadline and you want to attend, you can send us an e-mail at xl8cluj@gmail.com until Tuesday, the 8th of December.