Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: I have translated manually 2 million words, no CAT tools. Best software to take advantage from it?
Poster: Philippe Locquet
Post title: Clean is a must
[quote]Hans Lenting wrote:
"Clean is overrated"
I don’t waste much time on cleaning up: I only use aligned TMs for concordancing during HT. [/quote]
As mentioned, it seems that a proper article on the theme is sorely needed, I look forward to Stepan’s article if he gets around to make one.
The truth is that alignment is not always used to full potential, although it can provide tangible ROI in the long run.
Historically, alignment is perceived as yielding poor quality TMs and thus aligned TMs usually have an align attribute which gets them a penalty of high percentage in CATs. This makes sense when alignment was machine-performed with little to no human revision. Such scenarios are only good for concordancing, true.
Now modern real-life applications of alignment differ from that model. Here are two scenarios:
_An agency takes on a new customer that has no TM but has existing translations which they are happy with. Creating a proper alignment, good enough for matching and pre-translating will help provide translations that the customer will be familiar with giving the LSP immediate customer satisfaction and fast turnarounds.
_You want to train an MT (as Stepan mentioned): your MT will only be as good as the data you’re training it with. Misaligned segments or segments where the target language is not the desired one (happens often) will hurt MT performance.
Past translations performed by accurate translators with good writing skills are a “premium” product, with modern CAT technology it seems unreasonable to let them drown in a sea of garbage and just fish for a few words.
My two cents 😊
Topic: I have translated manually 2 million words, no CAT tools. Best software to take advantage from it?
Poster: Philippe Locquet
Post title: Clean is a must
[quote]Hans Lenting wrote:
"Clean is overrated"
I don’t waste much time on cleaning up: I only use aligned TMs for concordancing during HT. [/quote]
As mentioned, it seems that a proper article on the theme is sorely needed, I look forward to Stepan’s article if he gets around to make one.
The truth is that alignment is not always used to full potential, although it can provide tangible ROI in the long run.
Historically, alignment is perceived as yielding poor quality TMs and thus aligned TMs usually have an align attribute which gets them a penalty of high percentage in CATs. This makes sense when alignment was machine-performed with little to no human revision. Such scenarios are only good for concordancing, true.
Now modern real-life applications of alignment differ from that model. Here are two scenarios:
_An agency takes on a new customer that has no TM but has existing translations which they are happy with. Creating a proper alignment, good enough for matching and pre-translating will help provide translations that the customer will be familiar with giving the LSP immediate customer satisfaction and fast turnarounds.
_You want to train an MT (as Stepan mentioned): your MT will only be as good as the data you’re training it with. Misaligned segments or segments where the target language is not the desired one (happens often) will hurt MT performance.
Past translations performed by accurate translators with good writing skills are a “premium” product, with modern CAT technology it seems unreasonable to let them drown in a sea of garbage and just fish for a few words.
My two cents 😊