Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: What are the best free CAT tools for beginners?
Poster: Michael Beijer
Post title: Felix!
[quote]Areosa wrote:
Hello,
I would like to know which would me the best free cat tool for someone starting to translate. Something good for me and for whoever I will be working for....and something simple would be good too :)
thank you all for the indications..
Andrea [/quote]
Hi Andrea,
I think that the best free CAT tool currently available is probably Felix: [url removed]
Up until very recently, it was a paid tool, but the developer recently made it 100% open source & free!
The great thing about Felix is that it allows you to work inside MS Word, but unlike for example Wordfast, it leaves your source document alone, and doesn't add all kinds of hidden text. Meaning: your source document still looks just like your source document, which is great for when you want to have maximum context while translating.
Michael
PS: people might also mention OmegaT ( [url removed] ), which is a segment-based* CAT tool, and which is free. However, from a beginner’s perspective, I think that Felix is much more intuitive and fun to use.
* = meaning it cuts up ("segments") your source document into segments, and displays them in the program itself, rather than in e.g. MS Word (thus potentially robbing you of valuable context needed to "see what's going on"); just like CafeTran, memoQ, SDL Studio, and most other CAT tools seem to be doing these days. Some of these offer a previewing feature, but there is nothing like working in the actual document.
Also, after finishing a job consisting of 15 separate Word docs in a segment-based CAT tool, who really feels like opening all these files in Word and going through them again manually, to check that everything looks right, and, even more importantly, that the text actually reads well? I don't. Which is why I now recommend using a Word-based CAT tool for many kinds of more flowing text.
### Edited to change info re OmegaT (based on Samuel's post) ###
[Edited at 2015-11-30 15:28 GMT]
Topic: What are the best free CAT tools for beginners?
Poster: Michael Beijer
Post title: Felix!
[quote]Areosa wrote:
Hello,
I would like to know which would me the best free cat tool for someone starting to translate. Something good for me and for whoever I will be working for....and something simple would be good too :)
thank you all for the indications..
Andrea [/quote]
Hi Andrea,
I think that the best free CAT tool currently available is probably Felix: [url removed]
Up until very recently, it was a paid tool, but the developer recently made it 100% open source & free!
The great thing about Felix is that it allows you to work inside MS Word, but unlike for example Wordfast, it leaves your source document alone, and doesn't add all kinds of hidden text. Meaning: your source document still looks just like your source document, which is great for when you want to have maximum context while translating.
Michael
PS: people might also mention OmegaT ( [url removed] ), which is a segment-based* CAT tool, and which is free. However, from a beginner’s perspective, I think that Felix is much more intuitive and fun to use.
* = meaning it cuts up ("segments") your source document into segments, and displays them in the program itself, rather than in e.g. MS Word (thus potentially robbing you of valuable context needed to "see what's going on"); just like CafeTran, memoQ, SDL Studio, and most other CAT tools seem to be doing these days. Some of these offer a previewing feature, but there is nothing like working in the actual document.
Also, after finishing a job consisting of 15 separate Word docs in a segment-based CAT tool, who really feels like opening all these files in Word and going through them again manually, to check that everything looks right, and, even more importantly, that the text actually reads well? I don't. Which is why I now recommend using a Word-based CAT tool for many kinds of more flowing text.
### Edited to change info re OmegaT (based on Samuel's post) ###
[Edited at 2015-11-30 15:28 GMT]