Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: Sick of tags. Which CAT is easiest with tags & works with Mac?
Poster: Samuel Murray
Post title: @Derek
[quote]Derek Silva wrote:
Recently, I started with another provider who uses MemoQ and my first few experiences were nightmarish, dealing with all of the tags. [/quote]
While it's true that some CAT tools give too many tags (and some give too few, e.g. Wordfast Pro 3), the number of tags is also affected by the source document. This is why some people here recommend utilities like CodeZapper, which "cleans" up unnecessary tags from e.g. Word files, so that they result in fewer tags when converted to a CAT format.
[It would be interesting to see a comparison between various CAT tools in which the same source files are opened in all of them, to see which of them produce more tags.]
So, it may simply be that the types of files that you have received so far were tag rich, and that other files opened in the same tool (MemoQ) would produce fewer tags. I often translate RTF tables that were converted from MemoQ XLIFF files, and I don't think those files have too many tags.
[quote]Is there a CAT which:
- makes it easy to work with tags (or don't even need to touch them, is that even possible?)
- allows you to still deliver the final product, even if a few tags are unresolved [/quote]
Well, inserting tags in Wordfast Pro 3 and 5 relatively simple, and inserting tags in OmegaT isn't hard either; all three of them (WFP3, WFP5 and OmegaT) allow you to deliver files with tag errors. You can open MemoQ's XLIFF files in all three these tools, although OmegaT's support for it is rather basic and requires tweaking (you need to install a plugin and make sure you select the file type correctly).
It's entirely possible that opening a MemoQ XLIFF file in e.g. WFP5 will result in the same number of tags, but if inserting tags is quicker, then it may be useful for you. In both OmegaT and Wordfast Pro 5, the next tag is either automatically selected or becomes the top available option after you've inserted a tag, which is useful if you insert tags in the same order in the translation as they are in the source text.
In OmegaT, once you've inserted a tag, it no longer appears on the list of tags that you can insert, so in segments with a lot of tags, the list gets shorter each time you insert a tag. The shortcut in OmegaT is Ctrl+spacebar, but then you have to use the arrow keys to select the tag, so unless you select the tag at the top of the list, you need to move your hands in a way that would normally require you to look down at the keyboard.
In all versions of Wordfast, you have to select the tag using Ctrl+Alt+left/right before you can insert the tag using Ctrl+Alt+down, but some versions of Wordfast (e.g. WFP5) the next tag is automatically selected.
(WFA is free but it doesn't automatically select the next tag when you've inserted a tag. Wordfast's web site [url= [url removed] ]says[/url] that WFP5's unpaid version is 30 days non-demo and thereafter it's limited to TMs of 500 TUs.)