00:00:10
Ciao I'm Massimo from SDL and today I'm
here to talk about CAT tools.
00:00:15
What does the acronym CAT stand for? CAT stands for
computer assisted translation
00:00:22
and there's actually different explanation
for what it actually means
00:00:26
some people say computer aided
translation but I think if you check out
00:00:30
on Wikipedia that's what you'll find.
00:00:32
Let's carry on. What is a CAT tool?
00:00:35
It's the software used by translators and linguists
00:00:40
It does different things, so first of all it's
there to support the translation process
00:00:48
and actually allows you to edit, create
and store, manage a translation
00:00:55
so it does actually quite a lot of different
things and today we're going to look a
00:00:58
bit more in all the things that a CAT tool does.
00:01:02
So i'm going to tick this box here.
00:01:05
But before we carry on I think what
a CAT tool is not? And I think one of the
00:01:11
key things to bear in mind, a CAT tool is
not something that is going to
00:01:15
translate for you. It is not a machine
translation, so you still have to do your
00:01:22
own translation I'm afraid. It will help
you but it doesn't do all the work
00:01:26
which is great because we'll continue to need lots and lots of translation
00:01:31
to deal with a huge amount of content.
00:01:33
Let's continue on what are the core components of a CAT tool?
00:01:38
What's inside a CAT tool? Lots of different things.
00:01:41
So translation memory, this is one of the key essential components of a CAT tool
00:01:49
and actually it's a technology that has been around for over 30 years.
00:01:53
If you want to find out more there's
lots of information that you can find online.
00:01:57
It's actually really old technology that has evolved over quite long time
00:02:01
and that's kind of at the
heart of a CAT tool.
00:02:06
The second piece is the termbase. We're actually going to dedicate a video specifically on terminology and what a termbase is.
00:02:15
You know at a first, high level it's a place, a database where you're storing terms
00:02:23
and we're going to have to look at what's the difference between a term and a translation memory
00:02:27
and we'll spend a bit more time on that.
00:02:31
There's also lots of other dictionaries that can help you retrieve words
00:02:37
check what you've done before, so there's a lot
00:02:39
of other help that you get apart from
the translation memory and a termbase
00:02:45
and there is actually machine
translation as part of a CAT tool, typically.
00:02:51
So, with not only your translation but with the help of machine translation,
00:02:56
if you want to, you can
translate in a different way.
00:03:02
There's one more thing that Ihaven't put here on the board, which I think it's important
00:03:06
I'm going to kind of add a little box
which is sort of, I'm going to call it DTP.
00:03:11
My writing there is not quite as
neat and I've ruined a really nice whiteboard.
00:03:18
A CAT tool also enables you
to open a lot of different files so at
00:03:25
the end this is another acronym desktop
publishing, DTP, you don't have to do a
00:03:32
lot of work around the file itself. So
you can take a PowerPoint, you can take a
00:03:38
Word, you can take HTML and a CAT tool
will open this files, extract the text so
00:03:47
you can work on the translation, which is
kind of what a translator wants to do
00:03:51
you don't want to spend a lot of time
adjusting text, realigning it you want to
00:03:56
translate and spend as much of your time
as possible on the core tasks which is
00:04:01
translating and a CAT tool allows you to
do that it takes all these steps out you
00:04:06
work on the text and the beauty of it is
that it will put all the text back in
00:04:11
the original format. Of course you're
going to have to do some small
00:04:14
adjustments because languages are tricky
some languages are longer than other
00:04:19
from English through German you might
actually have an extra 30% length
00:04:25
and so you will have to fix it but you
don't have to align and adjust an entire
00:04:29
document so lots of things and different
components in a CAT tool.
00:04:34
So let's introduce a translation memory and what it is.
00:04:39
So first of all, the translation memory do different things.
00:04:43
The first thing is storing the source sentence and their translation
00:04:51
What does it actually mean? It basically store the phrase that
00:04:55
you need to translate and once you
translate it yourself manually
00:04:59
it will store that translation, so that's kind of the key principle.
00:05:04
The second thing of a translation memory is that it's something that you can use again and again.
00:05:11
What does that mean? Once you have
translated that sentence when a similar
00:05:16
sentence or the exact sentence appears
again the translation memory will
00:05:21
retrieve it and gives you the translation.
00:05:25
What's a termbase? That's the other component I mentioned earlier so let's have a look at what's a termbase.
00:05:31
Their kind of similar to a dictionary but I
think most terminology experts would not
00:05:35
be happy if I use this definition of
what a termbase and calling it a dictionary.
00:05:41
I think we're going to have a video specifically on terminology
00:05:43
so we can explain why it really isn't a dictionary.
00:05:46
But at the high level a termbase, first of all it stores single words or expressions.
00:05:55
I think this is already one of the differences with the dictionary because if you think
00:05:58
about it in a dictionary you tend to just store one word
00:06:01
whereas here you can actually store an entire expression.
00:06:05
And the second thing, is you can use it to dedicate words or expressions
00:06:11
for customers or organizations so that when you do need to
00:06:15
translate something in a very
specific way or in fact if you don't
00:06:20
need to translate something and you need to for example
00:06:24
a brand that doesn't need translation you
can continue using the source text so
00:06:30
a termbase is something that can help you deliver a more accurate and
00:06:34
high quality translation after all because we can remind you how some things are translated in a specific way.
00:06:42
There's lots of other help when you're working with a CAT tool and we talked about dictionaries.
00:06:50
I think this is a bigger sense than just a dictionary but just for simplicity
00:06:56
we kind of call them dictionaries and it incorporates lots of different things.
00:07:03
So there's various other ways that a CAT tool can use to help you translate and idea is that you
00:07:10
have as much time as possible to think
about how you translate something and
00:07:16
translating is really difficult. I'm Italian I speak English as a second language
00:07:23
and my native language is Italian but I'm not a translator
00:07:29
and it's so hard to take a phrase from
English and turn it into a nice
00:07:38
authentic sounding sentence in my native language and so we want to
00:07:45
make sure a CAT tool helps you having as much time as possible on the thinking side of the translation piece.
00:07:53
So the most monotonous and repetitive tasks we are helping you with.
00:08:00
So for example, we are helping you with the meaning of some words
00:08:05
so a termbase for example can help or you can introduce your own specific words that you get reminders from.
00:08:15
You have spell checking. Of course you know your native language that you are translating in but spell checking is
00:08:22
always helpful and it's a sort of monotonous tedious task that we want to
00:08:28
minimize the time you spend on it. We
have a concept of AutoSuggest so we can
00:08:34
take a lot of different resources and suggest them as you translate again
00:08:41
so often you might translate something anything I remember I translated this sentence before
00:08:47
or two or three words within a sentence you have that feeling
00:08:51
that you have translated something before and the CAT tool can help you
00:08:55
here it can suggest how you might have translated things before.
00:09:00
You might take that suggestion,
you might scrap it but the CAT tool
00:09:04
keeps on giving you prompts on how
you've done your previous work. and it
00:09:09
And it can also retrieve segment fragments, which is a little bit of what I was
00:09:15
saying now and kind of introduced two concepts there. What is a segment?
00:09:21
And we almost need to look at specifically what's a segment but it's
00:09:24
like a phrase and fragment is a piece of that phrase, so all these different ways a
00:09:33
CAT tool has to help you is all about trying to reduce some of the more
00:09:37
monotonous tasks but also is trying to suggest more and more of what you've
00:09:45
done before. So when you have done a great translation that you were really
00:09:50
happy with you can reuse it and you don't have to take the same amount of
00:09:55
time recreating exactly that same
magical translation that perhaps you
00:10:00
created a month before, six months before,
so that's one of the key features that a CAT tool has.
00:10:09
So we talked about machine translation, so what is machine translation?
00:10:14
So let's have a little bit of a look at machine translation which is one of the components of a CAT tool
00:10:21
but in many ways it's like the opposite of a CAT tool. A CAT tool is there to help you
00:10:26
doing a translation and machine translation can also be a tool that does the
00:10:31
translation automatically from scratch. But in this case it's about an additional tool
00:10:36
that can help translating. So machine translation is automated translation
00:10:42
carried out by a computer. So you are taking a piece of text, you stick it in
00:10:49
and without any help a machine is going to do that translation
00:10:54
and you might think well why do I need to do that I'm the translator?
00:10:57
Well there are times where you might translate a topic that you don't know
00:11:01
you might want to accelerate, there are some studies around how post editing, so
00:11:06
fixing machine translation can be faster than doing a translation from scratch
00:11:11
especially on some type of content, so machine translation can be helpful in that respect.
00:11:19
More recently machine translation has improved its results.
00:11:24
I think we've all seen terrible translations, especially with Asian languages
00:11:29
there are some very funny yet terrible terrible translations that the computer can make.
00:11:35
But there are things to make translation from the machine a bit better
00:11:40
and the usefulness of it is that fixing the same mistake
00:11:44
time and time again that may be suggested from machine translation can
00:11:49
be really boring and again the goal of a CAT tool is really making
00:11:54
translation a little bit less monotonous, when you are translating some really
00:11:59
difficult commercial, chemistry patents
some really difficult text, we want to
00:12:07
give you the most time on doing the hard
work, the heavy lifting of translation.
00:12:14
So you don't want to fix the same mistake, for example that a machine translation
00:12:17
has suggested and I've got some examples on Italian but it would be kind of hard
00:12:22
to explain unless you speak Italian but you know little mistakes really annoying
00:12:28
that a machine translation does but now machine translation can be trained and
00:12:33
can learn from manual translation, so you don't get the same irritating mistakes time and time again.
00:12:43
and there is kind of two ways of training and here
00:12:47
we've got AdaptiveMT, so what's the difference between training an engine and AdaptiveMT?
00:12:53
Typically training an engine is something that you do in a batch.
00:12:56
The big lengthy process that
requires thousands of words.
00:13:01
You take tons of content, stick it into their machine translation and that should improve the results.
00:13:10
But there's now a newer technology, AdaptiveMT, that is something easier to use.
00:13:17
It's instant, it's something is not an extra task but you translate and you are connecting
00:13:24
to machine translation, that machine translation can learn some of your
00:13:29
specific way of saying things and so that improves the quality of the machine translation results
00:13:37
and again the goal here is that machine translation will give you better help.
00:13:42
So perhaps you are kind of trying to translate a sentence
00:13:46
it's sort of not coming out in your head, machine translation can give you that prompt
00:13:52
on how to translate those three or four words and you can
00:13:58
get a more accurate translation with some of the learning systems that are coming into play at the moment.
00:14:04
So let's finish off, what are the benefits of a CAT tool.
00:14:10
There are various sides to it. The first one is quality and I think this is one of the key things.
00:14:18
Often we talk and we think about software as something to make you quicker
00:14:23
but I think when it comes to a CAT tool we've seen all the help that comes into play can help with quality.
00:14:31
When you have done a great translation that great translation can be reused. The fact that we can save a
00:14:37
lot of time doing some of the more boring tasks can actually leave you with
00:14:44
more time to do the more creative side of the translation, which is translating
00:14:49
a complex sentence , a marketing slogan or just a very difficult chemistry expression
00:14:56
to translate those. So that's one of the key things where a cut tool can help in terms of quality.
00:15:05
Of course it improve productivity. What is productivity? Basically it's translating faster
00:15:12
so if you are using a CAT tool you can translate faster.
00:15:17
Some of your translations are reused and you can work, in a quicker way. In some cases this can
00:15:23
be significant, sometimes for some type of content you might have 70%, 80 % of
00:15:30
content translated before. Maybe it's a manual for a piece of product and there
00:15:37
is a new version of that product which is in that different from the previous one.
00:15:43
You know if you have ever seen any of our other videos we've got the photo printer.
00:15:48
Think about a photo printer manual between different models.
00:15:52
There might not be that much of a difference and so a CAT tool can really
00:15:57
speed up the process of translating these different variations.
00:16:04
There's of course the topic of scalability. The amount of content that is created it's huge
00:16:11
and most people, companies, organizations, governments are struggling to translate
00:16:18
all the content they create and in all the languages they want and I have to
00:16:25
bring it home for me being an Italian, if you look at our company content and the
00:16:31
fact that we're not translating everything into Italian it's just a sign
00:16:35
of how hard and the difficulty of scaled amount of content translated and a CAT tool
00:16:42
can make a significant difference in how much a company can translate.
00:16:49
And finally its connectivity. A CAT tool, one
of the benefits is that you also
00:16:54
have the ability to work by yourself on your computer but you can also connect
00:16:59
with others and especially when there are large projects you can
00:17:04
actually share some of the assets you can work with other people and make sure
00:17:09
that your translation is used by other people, terminology shared across an entire team.
00:17:16
So whether you are a translator where you're going to benefit specifically from the quality and the productivity
00:17:22
enhancements and hopefully doing less of the boring
00:17:26
tasks and more the fun tasks of translation. So whether you are a company
00:17:32
or a translation agency who are trying to translate more or stay on top of your
00:17:37
content a CAT tool can really make a difference.
