Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: TMLookup
Poster: FarkasAndras
Post title: Yes it is
[quote]Michael Beijer wrote:
Strange. I actually find those 895 hits in my screenshot very useful. It's far from "useless and time-consuming". In fact, that is exactly how I use TMLookup: if I can't think of a translation for a word when translating, I selected and press my TMLookup shortcut. The program immediately springs into action and shows me if the relevant term is present in my extremely large database consisting of TMXs. 895 hits is great, and just what I want in such a case.
However, sometimes, it would be useful to be able to filter on individual TMXs, and thus narrow down the results.
[/quote]
I'm also happy to get hundreds of hits from a db search. I look at the first dozen, and if there is a mix of two or three translations that all look acceptable for my context, I can do a quick numbers comparison: do dual-language searches with each of the possible translations and see which is more frequent. If translation A co-occurs with my source term 6 times, translation B 24 times and translation C 657 times, then C is the most likely candidate. If I got 5 hits in total with a distribution of 1-1-2 I wouldn't have much to go on.
It's pretty easy to restrict searches by adding search terms as needed, and TMLookup even supports boolean seaches, so you can do things like:
train NOT rail NOT trasport NOT passenger
or
"carry out" OR "implement" strategies
You can also add terms in both languages at the same time AND you can do regex searches. Honestly, I'm not sure what other possible options exist for refining searches. Fuzzy searches would improve the overall performance, but that would come at the cost of speed and precision, as well as increased complexity and probably DB size.
Topic: TMLookup
Poster: FarkasAndras
Post title: Yes it is
[quote]Michael Beijer wrote:
Strange. I actually find those 895 hits in my screenshot very useful. It's far from "useless and time-consuming". In fact, that is exactly how I use TMLookup: if I can't think of a translation for a word when translating, I selected and press my TMLookup shortcut. The program immediately springs into action and shows me if the relevant term is present in my extremely large database consisting of TMXs. 895 hits is great, and just what I want in such a case.
However, sometimes, it would be useful to be able to filter on individual TMXs, and thus narrow down the results.
[/quote]
I'm also happy to get hundreds of hits from a db search. I look at the first dozen, and if there is a mix of two or three translations that all look acceptable for my context, I can do a quick numbers comparison: do dual-language searches with each of the possible translations and see which is more frequent. If translation A co-occurs with my source term 6 times, translation B 24 times and translation C 657 times, then C is the most likely candidate. If I got 5 hits in total with a distribution of 1-1-2 I wouldn't have much to go on.
It's pretty easy to restrict searches by adding search terms as needed, and TMLookup even supports boolean seaches, so you can do things like:
train NOT rail NOT trasport NOT passenger
or
"carry out" OR "implement" strategies
You can also add terms in both languages at the same time AND you can do regex searches. Honestly, I'm not sure what other possible options exist for refining searches. Fuzzy searches would improve the overall performance, but that would come at the cost of speed and precision, as well as increased complexity and probably DB size.