Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: How to import bilingual source text into CAT tool
Poster: Samuel Murray
Post title: @David, off-topic
[quote]David Oliver wrote:
BTW, what CAT tools do you all use these days? [/quote]
For 99% of my work, I use WFC 6. However, I do have licenses for MemoQ, Trados and WFP, and I regularly do "CAT hopping" between the different tools. Recent developments in CAT tools have made CAT hopping easier (and safer!) in many cases.
A few years ago, if I wanted to translate an SDLXLIFF file that was fully untranslated, I would open it in Trados, copy all source to target, run an external script that added "[[" and "]]" on either side of the target text, and then open it in Word as plain text, run a macro that marked untranslatable text as tw4winExternal, and then translate it in WFC. Then save the result as plain text again, and open it in Trados just to check that there are no technical glitches. These days, for the same kind of file, I open it in Trados, copy all source to target, then open the SDLXLIFF file in WFP3, export a bilingual table, and translate the second column in WFC (and then reverse the steps in the end). Much faster and much safer. If the SDLXLIFF file is partially translated, then I do the same thing, except with MemoQ instead of WFP3. MemoQ's bilingual export feature works reasonably well (it only fails about 1-2% of the time), but WFP3's export/import is both faster and safer than MemoQ's, except that WFP3 can't handle non-source=target files properly. Trados' own bilingual export feature is abysmal (it regularly fails to import whole documents after translation, which leads to a last-minute struggle to get the text back into it via some other hack).
Topic: How to import bilingual source text into CAT tool
Poster: Samuel Murray
Post title: @David, off-topic
[quote]David Oliver wrote:
BTW, what CAT tools do you all use these days? [/quote]
For 99% of my work, I use WFC 6. However, I do have licenses for MemoQ, Trados and WFP, and I regularly do "CAT hopping" between the different tools. Recent developments in CAT tools have made CAT hopping easier (and safer!) in many cases.
A few years ago, if I wanted to translate an SDLXLIFF file that was fully untranslated, I would open it in Trados, copy all source to target, run an external script that added "[[" and "]]" on either side of the target text, and then open it in Word as plain text, run a macro that marked untranslatable text as tw4winExternal, and then translate it in WFC. Then save the result as plain text again, and open it in Trados just to check that there are no technical glitches. These days, for the same kind of file, I open it in Trados, copy all source to target, then open the SDLXLIFF file in WFP3, export a bilingual table, and translate the second column in WFC (and then reverse the steps in the end). Much faster and much safer. If the SDLXLIFF file is partially translated, then I do the same thing, except with MemoQ instead of WFP3. MemoQ's bilingual export feature works reasonably well (it only fails about 1-2% of the time), but WFP3's export/import is both faster and safer than MemoQ's, except that WFP3 can't handle non-source=target files properly. Trados' own bilingual export feature is abysmal (it regularly fails to import whole documents after translation, which leads to a last-minute struggle to get the text back into it via some other hack).
