This day and age, the use of Computer Aided Translation tools is a must for any professional translator. Translation agencies rarely award jobs to suppliers without CAT capabilities, and as one of my fellow translators once put it in a forum post, “...a big fat TM is one of the major productivity boosters”. I would like to point out that this article is not about comparing or benchmarking different CAT tools against each other. Assuming that you are familiar with the basics of computer aided translation, I will instead try to outline a few strategies that have worked for me so far. Also, I will not dig into terminology management, since this topic deserves a separate article (which I plan to add at a later point). Below are a few approaches to working with CAT tools that have helped me become more efficient.

Neat folder structure – While your desk may be kept in a state of creative chaos most of the time, you should adopt a standardized folder structure on your system’s hard drive when working with locally stored translation memories. Otherwise you are bound to generate “uncreative” chaos and waste time looking for the files you need. The basic idea is that you will be creating and receiving client and project specific TMs, while at the same time you should maintain a master TM for your language pair where all or most of your translation work is stored for future use and reference. My own folder structure looks similar to this:

The basic idea is to use the client or project specific TM whenever required, and to import the data into your master TM on completion of the project. If you happen to work for a specific client for many years, you can easily grab the TM folder from the past year and place it in the current year folder. Short, generic and one-off translations can be done straight into your master TM. You may also want to use a desktop search engine to index your top-level work folder and quickly retrieve content from past translations.

Import & export – As mentioned earlier, exporting and importing data is what you should do to populate your master TM with the content of separate small TMs. The importance of maintaining one master TM per language pair cannot be stressed enough. If, for example, you do a lot of website localization work, you will regularly translate similar navigation menus and identical dropdown fields that contain e.g. country names or currencies. This data should reside inside your master TM, and once a country list pops up, the concordance feature should automatically bring up the translations needed. Additionally, you can use the TMX format to exchange data between different CAT tools. This is why you should be aware of the different data exchange formats, know their pros and cons and perhaps even be able to edit exported TMs in a text editor to fix possible incompatibility issues.

Word templates vs. dedicated editors – To my knowledge, Trados and Wordfast are the most widespread CAT tools around. Both programs integrate with MS Word by way of a global template, producing the following working environment familiar to most professional translators:

On the other hand, Trados TagEditor and most other flavors of CAT tools feature a dedicated GUI and handle a range of tagged and other file formats. These editors look similar to this:

I find using such tools rather tiresome due to their cluttered interfaces and poor spell checking capabilities. What’s more, none of these programs allow you to hide already translated source strings and assume control over the style and flow of your translation in real time. It is way more convenient to watch nothing but your translation coming to life above your cursor and make instant changes where necessary. If you, like myself, prefer your favorite word processor’s features and WYSIWIG capability over a messy GUI, you might benefit from the following bit of information.

Translating tagged files in Word – So, what is a tagged file? Basically anything that looks like this in a plain text editor:
<some_tag>Translatable text</some_tag>
Examples are HTML, XML, ISC (Story Collector for Adobe file types), LATEX and more. Prior to translating a tagged file in Word, you must separate the markup from the translatable text using the tw4winInternal and tw4winExternal formatting styles that are part of both the Trados and the Wordfast global templates. In MS Word, the result should look similar to this:

But how do you convert the tagged text into the above? One solution is a utility created by Aleksandr Okunev (www.accurussian.net) called Tortoise Tagger. If you want to check out my own approach to website translation using Tortoise Tagger, feel free to download this small package and read the included quick start guide.

Computer Aided Translation is a complex topic in itself and I am aware that some of the aspects mentioned here may not be of great concern to other translators. I still believe that it is important to (a) keep your hard drive neat and tidy, (b) populate and maintain a Master Translation Memory and (c) familiarize yourself with workarounds that enable you to work with a human-friendly interface. If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to get in touch with me. Many thanks for reading this article.

© David Seycek, English to German translator