Translation Aid Software

by Suzanne Falcone
 

 In one of the “Calvin & Hobbes” strips by Sam Watterson

This is not a guide that could help you choose a good CAT program. You will not find many technical details likely to help anyone make a decision to buy a program. In fact, you may not even have to buy any program of that kind, as many translation companies will be all too happy to sub-license their software to you. Consider the comments below as “the voice from down at the bottom end of the food chain,” the first impressions of the end user who gets the software at the same time as the translation assignment. The length of my experience with these programs varies from four weeks to three years, but basically I have always had to start NOW on a job using a program I had never seen before.

Evaluating Star Transit would be a difficult job for me, because the occasional job I did with it required installing the program twice or three times and working with it was very frustrating, but other colleagues who regularly work with Transit sound quite happy with it. Maybe I’m denser than average, or maybe I really lacked time to explore the program and get familiar with it. So if there is a way to translate repeats without having to get back to their previous occurrence and copy/paste them, I didn’t find it. The same applies to a feature that would have enabled me to use one translation to complete other files. This was obviously the client’s job.
   During this short and frustrating time, I did spot a few positive points: the Termstar dictionary is easy to search, edit and update. And the program provides a count of the number of words translated and left to translate, a feature that is not present, or not as visible, in other programs, and is much easier than a percentage to convert into the usual “word-count” metrics used to assess one’s workload.

IBM TM/2 has been much less trouble to learn. Controls are easy, although you may regularly forget to activate the segment you want to change. With the usual mode of extra-fast hands-on learning of CAT programs, I didn’t find a way to do automatic search+replace and spellchecking outside the active segment, but some colleagues say you can do that. Controls are very easy, and the few keystrokes required are quickly mastered. The matching function is quite efficient, with a good hit rate for fuzzy matches. I haven’t tested the new version yet, but they say it allows you to compare various versions of one sentence if it has been translated in different ways, and provides better edition of translation memory files. This is a program I would also recommend to someone interested in buying one, provided the filtering functions with word processing software are easy to handle.

Joust, a.k.a. TSS (Translation Support System) is Alpnet International’s proprietary translation program. This tool is pretty similar to TM/2, and just as convenient. A version for Windows has finally been developed, after years of suffering in OS/2 without even being able to use the mouse.
   This program is basically easy to use, once you’ve learned to use the F5 (Save), F8 (translate next) and F10 (paste source text into target line) function keys. It is hardly a joke, because a lot of work can be done using about 12 key combinations. The dictionary is also easy to update, and an unlimited number of entries can be added and, with a little juggling in the File Manager, used for later work.
  The matching function is quite good, fuzzy matches being within a word. The insertion of matched sentences is automatic, with possible fuzzy matches highlighted (though the “fuzzy” may result only from a lower/upper case difference). However, this automatic feature may be slightly annoying when figures from a table are included in the text. If, for example, one line goes like this :
  

1 to 2 inches

the translation (say, into French) will read :

1 à 2 pouces

But if the next line is :

2 to 5 inches

the matching function will automatically insert the

1 à 2 pouces

line again and make a fuss because the match is fuzzy. This is obviously less of a problem with TM/2, as the program demurely waits for the user to insert the matched sentence, instead of overzealously inserting fuzzy matches (which, in the case of a 4-word/figure phrase, may be 50% fuzzy). But this is a minor disadvantage. On the other hand, if you find out that a sentence comes up every two or three lines and you’re tired of hitting “F8” to insert it, you have the possibility of backing up the project without the “synchronization” file coordinating the target and repetition files, then reload and resegment it, and then all full matches will be automatically completed during resegmenting, and you may gain a few percent points on the “completed segments” counter.
  The repetition file is also a precious help in case of power and/or program failure : the target file containing the translation seems to be more sensitive, so that it is easily corrupted or even (in the late OS/2 version) destroyed. Since the source and repetition files usually survive any incident, it is easy to resegment the project without losing any work.
  The major problem, both with TM/2 and TSS, is caused by improper “segmenting” of text, which may be done without taking the order of words in the target language into account. Staying with the English-French language pair, the program may “filter in” a table with columns reading :

Corrosion	Wear
resistance	resistance

If segmented in an intelligent way, the phrases should read “corrosion resistance” and “wear resistance,” which would be no problem, but if they are filtered as they are in the table they will be chopped up to:

The French will invert the words in each term, so that the first will become, e.g.:

Finally, we have had a mind-curdling experience with Trados Workbench: not the program itself, but what the clients do with it. In fact, some of the latest comments about Workbench among members of the FLEFO forum have been quite enthusiastic, so it seems that those who do have the complete software are quite happy with it. But some of our European clients, both translation companies and industrial clients, use Workbench to provide “pre-translated” text that can be delivered as RTF files and worked with any word processing software. The text then comes as in the following example:

 _{0>Die Abmessungen des Portalausschnitts im Wagenkasten sind in der Zeichnung "Meßblatt Seitenwand, Endwagen", Nr. _{0>2 16106.0.00.040.101_<0} dargestellt._<}0{> Die Abmessungen des Portalausschnitts im Wagenkasten sind in der Zeichnung "Meßblatt Seitenwand, Endwagen", Nr._{0>2 16106.0.00.040.101_<0} dargestellt._<0}

_{0>Folgende Randbedingungen müssen gegeben sein: _<}0{> Folgende Randbedingungen müssen gegeben sein:_<0}

_{0>Die Abmessungen des Portalausschnitts im Wagenkasten sind in der Zeichnung "Meßblatt Seitenwand, Endwagen", Nr. _{0>2 16106.0.00.040.101_<0} dargestellt._<}0{> Les dimensions de l’ouverture de la porte dans la caisse de la voiture sont présentées sur la planche « Cotes de la paroi latérale, voiture pilote », numéro _{0>2 16106.0.00.040.101._{<0} <0}}

_{0>Folgende Randbedingungen müssen gegeben sein: _<}0{> Les conditions secondaires suivantes doivent être respectées:_<0}

See also the review of Atril’s Déjà Vu in this issue of the Translation Journal.