

Omegat best machine translation professional#
There are computer aided translation packages to help (team of) professional translators. When this quality is good enough, people will not need a collaborative translation tool, nor a translation published in a repository and findable via our translations database. So a machine translation is at best a first draft an expert should have a look at. There is machine translation for many language pairs this works quite well nowadays, but for scientific texts the system may trip up and accuracy is very important. There are already many translation tools, but none really fit this use case.

It would be great if others could finish the job. People regularly make partial translations and stop when they know enough for themselves. Such a combination is easier to find in a team and working in a team motivates. Producing a good translation needs a several skills, it needs skill in two languages and knowledge about the topic. However, the vast complexity of languages and people’s ability to use words and constructions creatively set serious limits to the accuracy of these systems.One of the ideas to promote the translation of scientific articles is to create a collaborative translation tool. Some even used an intermediate stage of a third, abstract language, a sort of Platonic ideal. They attempted to ‘understand’ a sentence in the source language by examining its grammar and content, then constructed a new one in the target language. The earliest forms of MT used an analytical approach. It is quite different from computer assisted translation in that it constructs sentences itself. Machine translation (MT) is a term applied to a computer application that independently translates a text. (See also a recent blog post on this subject here.) Halifax uses a simple but effective one called X-Bench, among others. What is a proofing tool?Ī proofing tool is a computer application that checks a document for consistency, completeness and certain formal errors, like double spaces, repeated words and grammatical faults. Halifax runs a corporate MemoQ server and often uses SDL Trados. There are a number of common CAT tools on the market: MemoQ, MemSource, SDL Trados, Deja Vu, Smartcat, Matecat, Across, OmegaT, Wordfast… Some of the larger translation companies use their own in-house applications.

What Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools do translators use? They therefore discourage a creative approach, and encourage translators to keep source-language structures, even though they may not be ideal in the target language. This can be fine for texts that demand very precise translation such as contracts, but it does not encourage the translator to see a paragraph or page as a whole. They split a text into segments that often correspond to a single sentence or shorter, so the translator works on one sentence or phrase at a time. It can save time, but it can especially improve consistency, so a given phrase is not unintentionally translated in several different ways. Computer assisted translation is a ‘dumb’ tool in that it does not try to guess at the meaning of a sentence, but simply makes a comparison with a store of sentences to find a match. As the tool is used, it generates memories that can be used for suggestions in following translations. They suggest to the translator how a sentence has previously been translated. What is a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool?Ĭomputer assisted translation tools (quite unlike machine translation, see below) are computer applications that help a translator to work. Here are some of the more common types of program. A decade or two ago, applications specially designed to help translators began to be developed, and now computers are being trained to do it themselves. Following the typewriter, the staple translator tool has long been a word processor: Wordperfect, then MS Word, now perhaps WPS or LibreOffice Writer, an open-source application. Like anyone else, translators have always used computers. Computer assisted translation is today an unavoidable professional tool.
