Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: Why are more and more agencies these days choosing memoQ or SDL Studio as their "preferred" tool?
Poster: Rolf Keller
Post title: TMs are no philtres anyway
[quote]Michael Beijer wrote:
Personally, I think this is very bad for the industry>. What about you?[/quote]
Agreed. But no direct client, no agency, no tool provider and - last but not least - no translator will ever orientate its individual behaviour to what the industry would benefit from in the long term. All humans work for money and/or for joie de vivre, although some of them don't admit that fact. [/quote]
[quote]their tools are contributing negatively to the landscape of our profession, on a large scale.[/quote]
Agreeed again. But this holds for any Translation Memory tool as well. These tools are definitely needed for certaintasks like "Produce a manual for a new or a different car model, taking an existing manual as a starting point." Essential precondition for this workflow: There is a unbroken and linguistically monitored communication & proofing chain in both directions between the final text product and the original authors. Otherwise the translation memory will be turned into a huge heap of scrap sooner or later. But in reality there is no such chain which means that even for such TM-appropriate texts the TM tools are not really valuable – they just save time at the expense of quality, i. e. at the expense of the car manufacturer (angry buyers, unnecessary service requests, frustrated translators who will refuse to rework the stuff next year, ...)
And of course there are many texts for which a TM tool is counterproductive, because it tempts the translator to a "chopping style". Depending on the language this is more or less bad regarding the style, but in any language it leads to unprecise or false translations because the way one reads original & translation is an inappropriate way. At KudoZ you can see many young people who have never translated without a TM tool and thus are on the same low level as many young non-translators: They never have trained to read more than one single sentence in connection, so they are not able to grasp obvious meanings, logical references and so on, if these info isn't given bite-sized in the very same line. The most poular statement from such people reads "Unfortunately there is no context at all", which means "I'm not able to see a page of text as a whole, let alone more than one page."
Unfortunately some agencies urge translators to use such tools even for things like media releases or ads. Phew, do they really think that this will save money or time? Actually the translator needs additional time for the TM handling, compared to a simple, overtypable .doc file. So, as good translators are a rarity, why not release them from unnecessary TM fiddling? Just get "text mechanics" do that work. Architects don't want to lay bricks.
Topic: Why are more and more agencies these days choosing memoQ or SDL Studio as their "preferred" tool?
Poster: Rolf Keller
Post title: TMs are no philtres anyway
[quote]Michael Beijer wrote:
Personally, I think this is very bad for the industry>. What about you?[/quote]
Agreed. But no direct client, no agency, no tool provider and - last but not least - no translator will ever orientate its individual behaviour to what the industry would benefit from in the long term. All humans work for money and/or for joie de vivre, although some of them don't admit that fact. [/quote]
[quote]their tools are contributing negatively to the landscape of our profession, on a large scale.[/quote]
Agreeed again. But this holds for any Translation Memory tool as well. These tools are definitely needed for certaintasks like "Produce a manual for a new or a different car model, taking an existing manual as a starting point." Essential precondition for this workflow: There is a unbroken and linguistically monitored communication & proofing chain in both directions between the final text product and the original authors. Otherwise the translation memory will be turned into a huge heap of scrap sooner or later. But in reality there is no such chain which means that even for such TM-appropriate texts the TM tools are not really valuable – they just save time at the expense of quality, i. e. at the expense of the car manufacturer (angry buyers, unnecessary service requests, frustrated translators who will refuse to rework the stuff next year, ...)
And of course there are many texts for which a TM tool is counterproductive, because it tempts the translator to a "chopping style". Depending on the language this is more or less bad regarding the style, but in any language it leads to unprecise or false translations because the way one reads original & translation is an inappropriate way. At KudoZ you can see many young people who have never translated without a TM tool and thus are on the same low level as many young non-translators: They never have trained to read more than one single sentence in connection, so they are not able to grasp obvious meanings, logical references and so on, if these info isn't given bite-sized in the very same line. The most poular statement from such people reads "Unfortunately there is no context at all", which means "I'm not able to see a page of text as a whole, let alone more than one page."
Unfortunately some agencies urge translators to use such tools even for things like media releases or ads. Phew, do they really think that this will save money or time? Actually the translator needs additional time for the TM handling, compared to a simple, overtypable .doc file. So, as good translators are a rarity, why not release them from unnecessary TM fiddling? Just get "text mechanics" do that work. Architects don't want to lay bricks.