Comments on: Reader survey: the best and worst things about your CAT tools

By: Riccardo ：GT4T 评测 | DALLASCAO.COM

Riccardo ：GT4T 评测 | DALLASCAO.COM — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 12:40:33 +0000

[...] 作者： Riccardo 张贴于： http://thoughtsontranslation.com/2010/01/25/reader-survey-the-best-and-worst-things-about-your-cat-t… [...]

By: Roman Mironov

Roman Mironov — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:04:54 +0000

I have had a short experience with OmegaT recently, and here is what I have come up with after testing (as my testing was really short, there is a great chance that I am wrong or settings exist that can eliminate the below problem):
1.OmegaT does not support shared access to translation memory which means limited teamwork capabilities.
2.My opinion is that the GUI, although usable, does not comply with the usability standards of today. It is difficult to understand which segment is currently open, switching between non-adjacent segments is possible with mouse only, source highlighting is possible again with mouse only.
3.As far as I understand, the only way to search the TM is through the standard Search feature. I do not think that this is convenient enough compared to what we have in other common translation environments. The search results are not highlighted. I also did not find the “search and replace” feature.
4.The tags are not protected by default.
5.I experienced problems with copying text into the clipboard, which might be attributable to Java environment.
The advantages include:
1.Automatic project structure creation.
2.The selection is automatically inserted in the Search field when you open the Search feature.
3.I liked the way the “clean up” feature is implemented.
4.Open source, which allows modification.

In general, it is quite good for a free software. For small translations, however, I’d rather use the more sophisticated Wordfast Pro that is free until 500 segments in the TM.

By: JonJ

JonJ — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:16:33 +0000

I’ve been using OmegaT for a relatively short time, and work with Japanese pdfs which do produce lots of useless tags when I OCR them. My solution is simple, but probably very unorthodox. I just ignore the tags; when I’m through, I just copy the whole translation, paste it into a Word file, and make it into a proper document. This last step requires some time and effort, but on jobs like patents, with lots of repetitions, I assume that I’m still saving time.

By: Riccardo

Riccardo — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:57:51 +0000

GT4T Pro (Google Translator for Translators, available from http://dallascao.com)

Pros: If you want to speed up your translation by taking advantage of Google Translate’s suggestions, this tool allows you to do it from within any program you are using to translate: just select the sentence to translate, hit Ctrl+J, and the selected source text is replaced by the Google translation. I tested it from within Workbench (using both the Word and the Tag Editor interfaces), and from within SDLX. It works, and can help speeding up your translation. The tool is cheap, and allows for a generous trial period.

Cons: Apart from the obvious (the quality of the MT provided), the tool sometime only translates parts of the text, if the selection is too long. Also, concerns have been voiced about the use Google will make of the texts you pass through their translation engine, and they also apply if the text is processed by Google through another interface such as this one.

As regards the quality of the MT provided by Google, your mileage may vary, depending on the type of text and language pair. In some fields I find it is good enough as a first rough draft. In others it is still quite useless.

By: Kevin Lossner

Kevin Lossner — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:18:26 +0000

The ergonomics of Across are appalling, or at least that was the case in the last version I tried. You really do get what you pay for in this case unless you are a corporate licensee.

Right now among the major commercial products I think MemoQ has the best mix of features, support and ease of use. The things I am seeing in the soon-to-be released (Feb 1) version 4 are exciting.

I am fascinated by what a colleague said recently about CafeTrans (from Poland) and plan to have a look. It’s multi-platform, inexpensive and has an impressive spiel.

By: Ruben de la Fuente

Ruben de la Fuente — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:28:39 +0000

Hi Corinne,

I’d like to comment on Trados Studio. The down side is that it is very pricy and the customer service is not optimal. The good news is that it is very powerful: supports a lot of formats (xliff, native DTP formats, even pdfs), it is integrated with machine translation for no matches, predictive text (Auto suggest dictionaries), extended QA features.

A very interesting tool I haven’t used yet but looks very promissing is Across: translator version is free and has all capabilities (unlike lite versions of other tools). Has anyone tried it yet?