29 ottobre 2014

Designed to make translators smile

If you are a professional translator sick of your TM program rebooting again and ended up thinking that a CAT tool is only a piece of string used to play with your feline, well, get rid of it and smile: you can finally enjoy translating! 

Translators are being held back by lack of innovation, forced to pay big bucks for a CAT tool license that are hard to use, slow, plenty of advanced functions and sometimes unable do the simple stuff.

Jost Zetzsche, in one of his conferences, said that the language industry is stuck at 15 year ago. Progress stopped when big providers started focusing more on selling their products than listening to the real needs of translators.

Translators need more than a CAT tool, they need a real mate, and this new CAT tool, MateCatworks for us - not against us.

I tested it and it is really easy to use:
    • It is web based: available anytime and anywhere, I didn't need to setup any servers or to install any software.
    • Easy UI: Easy interface, I didn't need any training or watching tutorials. I just logged in and started translating.
    • It's open source and most important free! 
The average translator spends 20% of his/her time looking up terminology when he /she possesses key competences in the subject matter, and up to 60% of the time if not*, basically half of the day! It goes alone then, that productivity can be really spiced up if terminology issues can be fixed by specific terminology features provided but the CAT tool itself. 

MateCat performs a context-aware translation and its suggestions by MT are consistent with the already edited segments and the whole document. As a result, terminology will be consistent with the style of the whole text, and once the translator corrects an error this should not occur again in the following text segments.

Massive translation memories. MateCat provides more matches than any other translation tool by leveraging My Memory, the world’s largest Translation Memory built collaboratively via Machine Translation and human contributions. Of course any other Translation Memory can be added. With such a huge resource available, the translation will be a lot more efficient, with less time spent on translating and more time to focus more on the essential, that is, a more accurate terminology.

Concordances at your fingertips. MateCat is equipped with concordances. By checking them directly on your Translation Editor, you are no more forced to leave your workbench to look up online. What you have to do is just typing the text segment in the related search box and check all the related combinations. You’ll never get 0 matches, results are always provided.

Glossary on the fly: While translating and checking concordances, you can add source term and equivalent target term on the glossary. Every time the added term appears on your text, it will be underlined, meaning that it is in your glossary. Result? Same terminology, style and register throughout the project.


You can try it. It's Free: http://www.matecat.com/


*Source: Economic Value of terminology

Best Retweets :) 

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