CAT Tools: Virtues and Vices
Translation memory (TM) technologies, the most widely used toolkits in the localization of digital information at HQ-translate agency, enable the linguistic transition and transnational accommodation of electronic content (e-content) for local markets. The idea behind TM systems is to store in a computer system the original e-content and the translation that has been produced by human translators; the stored translated version of the source text has been broken down into manageable bits, generally one sentence long. Today the most popular CAT tools: TRADOS, Déjà vu, Wordfast. The priorities of using CAT systems are fairly obvious: they increase the translator’s productivity and improve translation quality by securing that terminology and statements are used consistently within and across translations. Users in governmental and international organizations submit a 25–60% rise in productivity. Yet, it must be stated that the use of TM systems may also have negative effects on translation quality. One of the major minuses of TM systems is that they usually operate at sentence level. Thus, there is a real danger that the translator will focus too much on isolated sentences, possibly disregarding the contexts in which the sentences are built-in. Moreover, the matching algorithms of TM systems are based on very simple formal criteria, such as the similarity of character strings. Thus, the human translator’s notion of the level of similarity between a segment to be translated and a piece retrieved from the storage base may differ considerably from the level of similarity calculated by the CAT system. This may cause situations wherein exact matches result in wrong translations, or one translation of a fuzzy match requires little or no adjustment but another fuzzy match with the same similarity value is not useful at all (for a discussion on the aspects of evaluating the retrieval mechanisms of memory systems, see Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (1996), Whyman and Somers (1999), and Reinke (2000a, 2004). Despite the drawbacks, it should be noted that TM systems generally incorporate into the translation run relatively smoothly. These CATs leave human translators in control of the actual translation work, while free them from routine work and maintaining translation as a creative act whenever the linguistic resourcefulness of a human being is required. For more information, visit us at: HQ-translate company