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CAT Tool Use as Terminology/Glossary Search & Replace Tool
Thread poster: Mathias S. (X)
Mathias S. (X)
Mathias S. (X)
Germany
Local time: 04:52
German
Mar 25, 2019

Hello,

first of all I am inexperienced in CAT tools. So sorry if my question may be a little off. I digged around the forums and tried some CAT tools. The topic area is larger than expected. So I hope you can give some advice, at least also link references are welcome, if this has been discussed before.

In our company we have a respectable term database (>10.000 words/phrases) based on our software product which has a multilingual interface. So far we have translated do... See more
Hello,

first of all I am inexperienced in CAT tools. So sorry if my question may be a little off. I digged around the forums and tried some CAT tools. The topic area is larger than expected. So I hope you can give some advice, at least also link references are welcome, if this has been discussed before.

In our company we have a respectable term database (>10.000 words/phrases) based on our software product which has a multilingual interface. So far we have translated documents (Word files) manually. But to ensure terminology and simplify the translating process it is overdue to use a CAT tool. But we do not need all the advanced translation options like state of the art CAT tools do offer. We have only a couple of documents to translate per year.

The desired, basic case of application would be to use in a first step a simple search & replace on the source documents with our term database. In CAT tools I've tried (DejaVUX3, memoQ) this works mostly with pretranslate functions and copy source text. But there are some options to figure out, like prefering exakt matches only. Of course CAT tools surely will have some advantages we can also benefit from (esp. I'm interested in flexions), when get to know its features better.

So the question is, do you know some lightweigt CAT tools which (mainly) offer a termbase search & replace function on word files at low cost?

thanks in advance
Mathias ▲ Collapse
 
Tuan Dzung
Tuan Dzung  Identity Verified
Vietnam
Local time: 09:52
Member (2014)
English to Vietnamese
+ ...
Wordfast CAT tool Mar 25, 2019

I think Wordfast (www.wordfast.com) is a suitable CAT tool for you. As I know it is free (but can only save 1000 translation units to Translation Memory) but you can use Background Translation Memory.
You can try Wordfast Classic, Wordfast Pro or Wordfast Anywhere.


[Đã chỉnh sửa 2019-03-25 23:46 GMT]
 
DZiW (X)
DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
Simple Mar 25, 2019

 First of all, working with online CATs like WordFast Anywhere (FreeTM.com) one should really consider the NDA.

 On the other hand, besides free old Wordfast [Classic] 3.35x with free PlusTools (mind the Unicode!), free WordFisher, free Anaphraseus (from OpenOffice), and free OmegaT, a decent freelance programmer would cope with such a simple task no problem.
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:52
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Mathias Mar 26, 2019

Mathias S. wrote:
The desired, basic case of application would be to use in a first step a simple search & replace on the source documents with our term database.


This is not how CAT tools work, though. CAT tools attempt to match the source text to text in a database, so if you're going to go and replace some of the source text with target text before loading it into the CAT tool, the CAT tool will have a much harder time finding matching texts. With a CAT tool, replacing terminology in the target text is done on a segment-by-segment basis. This means that you should have a CAT tool that will show the translator which terms were found in the current segment's source text, with a feature that allows the translator to easily select a translation and drop it into the segment. Most CAT tools can do that (some more effectively than others).

I suggest you try OmegaT to begin with, just to get a feel for how a CAT tool works. OmegaT's glossary pane is not the most user-friendly, and it has the unfortunate bug/feature whereby it merges glossary entries with identical source texts into a single entry on screen, which makes it harder to match the right description to the right target text, but it'll do, mostly, and especially as a free introduction to how CAT tools work or can work. What OmegaT can't do, is pretranslate non-100% matches.

Trados' glossary display isn't very nice to work with, and it is very difficult to set up a glossary in Trados. Trados, MemoQ, Wordfast Pro 3 and Wordfast Pro 5 all suffer from the design idea that the glossary pane should be unobtrusive and only consulted in an emergency. I found MemSource's glossary pane and glossary matching to be quite something, so perhaps you should look into that.

In CAT tools I've tried (DejaVUX3, memoQ) this works mostly with pretranslate functions and copy source text.


Yes, CAT tools start off with an empty translation memory (TM) (i.e. database of translated sentences), and you add translations as you go. If there is no matching text yet, you can type your translation or insert the source text (and with inserting the source text, some CAT tools offer the feature of automatically replacing terms from the glossary).

But there are some options to figure out, like preferring exact matches only.


This is often achieved by either setting the match threshold to e.g. 100%, or by telling the CAT tool not to automatically insert matching segments when a match is found.

I'm interested in flexions)...


Not all CAT tools offer that (OmegaT does, for example).
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 04:52
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Re: Wordfast Mar 26, 2019

Tuan Dzung wrote:
I think Wordfast is a suitable CAT tool for you. [The demo version] is free (but can only save 1000 translation units to the translation memory), but you can use background translation memory.


Yes, Wordfast's demo limit used to be 500 segments per TM, but it now is 1000. Some CAT tools allow you to use multiple TMs, but Wordfast Classic (WFC) allows only one writable TM (called the TM) and one read-only TM (called the "background TM"), and the demo version of WFC allows around 1000 segments per TM before it stops working and you have to create a new TM.

WFC does offer pre-translation while replacing terms from the glossary, but it is not instantaneous as in some other CAT tools, since WFC works inside MS Word as a macro. Wordfast Pro 3 is different from Wordfast Classic, and Wordfast Pro 5 is a completely different from both of them. And "Wordfast Anywhere" is an online version of a mixture between WFC, WFP3 and WFP5. I'm not sure what pre-translation with automatic glossary-replacement features WFP3 and WFP5 have, but I do know what WFP5 has nice colouration of terms.
 
Mathias S. (X)
Mathias S. (X)
Germany
Local time: 04:52
German
TOPIC STARTER
OmagaT Mar 27, 2019

Thanks a lot for your detailed answers! OmegaT looks promising. I've already started some tests and created a glossary from my excel termbase. New questions have arisen, I've aksed in the forum OmegaT support -- here --.
 


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CAT Tool Use as Terminology/Glossary Search & Replace Tool







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