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