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We use a CAT system (Computer-Aided
Translation)
to speed up and enhance the quality of our work.
It is not about
language translation software, also known as "machine translation",
maybe useful for an on-the-fly translation of a small text or a
web page, but not for
our purposes.
 The
system that we use, as every good tool, will be most
useful if handled by skillful hands. And a good human translator is, and will always be,
indispensable. Let us see some advantages to our clients:
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CAT uses glossaries that are created by ourselves.
When we open the client's source file, the system automatically
highlights every word found in our glossaries. With a simple keyboard
shortcut, their stored translations are pasted into the target text, one
at a time, so that the human translator can choose to accept, or not,
the suggestion;
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Our database has nearly 6,000 terms of
the Information/High Technology industry, over 7,000 expressions of the Financial, Banking, Accounting, Capital Market and Insurance sectors, a
multilingual glossary with over 5,000 terms and expressions on trade as
defined by FTAA and WTO, as well as
many other lists of specific business areas and knowledge fields;
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If
the client has its own organized glossary, we can easily input it to
our system so that our finished translation will already bring its
peculiar terms and jargons. That feature dramatically reduces the
very common problem of the client receiving a translation job
(a
product manual, for instance)
and having to assign an employee,
usually an experienced, overworked (and expensive!)
technician, to
spend two, three, or maybe more days, "adapting" the translation to
the company's own terms;
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Another feature of
our system is the capability to recall every
translation that we have already done. Using fuzzy logic recognition,
the system advises that an identical sentence, or one with, say, 85%
or 90% similarity, was already translated in the past and displays the
solution we gave then. In addition to the obvious gain in quality and
uniformity, it can save a lot of time;
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The
system also has an analysis feature that scans the source text in
order to determine the "repetition rate", either within the text
itself and in relation to our database. A very technical text, for
instance, may have some sentences, or expressions, repeated a number
of times. Therefore, two texts, both
with the same word count, will have different
estimates if their repetition rates (or their coincidence
with our database) prove to be different,
resulting in substantial savings for clients with more repetitive texts, or the ones who use our services
more frequently;
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In addition, if the client already has a good translated text,
previously done by another translator, on the same subject or using a
similar terminology, and submits both the
original and the translated texts, we can integrate them to our
system, creating a "translation memory" that will
certainly bring more
uniformity to new translations;
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Last but not least, our CAT system is compatible with the industry
leading word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and desktop
publishing programs. We can even directly translate texts written in
HTML, with no need to convert them, and keeping the document's
original formatting.
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