This happens all too often to freelance translators who start their journey. You buy your first Computer Aided Translation software (CAT tool), learn the basics, set up a project, and finish a job or two.
There comes another job; and another; and another one. You feed your CAT with anything and everything that comes by, piling in projects. However, you don’t use the CAT to its full potential or misuse some of its features.
Before long, newbie habits turn into bad habits, and the CAT runs wild and becomes difficult to tame. Instead of the CAT serving you, you serve the CAT.
USE YOUR CAT TOOL IN A SMART AND EFFICIENT WAY
I’d like to share five tips — and there could be many more — with beginner freelancers on how to use a CAT in a smart and efficient way. When I started my freelancing career and used Wordfast (which is one of many CATs available), I had a vague idea of how to use it effectively and I wish I had known how to organise my work better. So, grab a drink and learn from my mistakes!
1. Don’t forget about the source and target
This may sound weird as the first tip for a smart use of a CAT tool, but here it comes.
Don’t forget about the source file.
It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of a CAT and translate the whole text segment by segment in the editor. Then, you check your text, generate the output file, and send it to your client. But this is not something you should do.
It’s always worth looking at the source file. If you translate a text that has illustrations, diagrams, user interface elements, or other features that affect user experience, look at the source. Check if the text accompanying visual components really makes sense in its context. This may influence your choice of words or even change the whole meaning of a translated segment.
Once you export the text, look at the translated file for issues like wrong formatting or missing elements. Also, if you use typing assistants like Grammarly or even the proofing features in Word, you may spot a mistake or two this way.
So, remember, don’t give in to the CAT tunnel vision and refer to the file in its original format.
2. It’s called a translation memory, not a translation dump
Learning how to use translation memory (TM) to your advantage is crucial and the sooner you master it, the better. It may be tempting to create ONE BIG TRANSLATION MEMORY that keeps literally everything. A short instruction manual for an electric toothbrush? There it goes into the TM. Terms and conditions for an e-store? Why not. A catalogue with new fridge models? Sure, the TM will hold like a nuclear reactor.
This is not advisable, though. Once a TM contains too many segments, which may include just numbers, product codes, or other data that is not likely to re-appear in the future, it will slow down your CAT. Every time you open a new segment, the CAT will have to scan thousands, tens of thousands of segments to find a match. A delay of one or two seconds does not sound scary at first, but multiply it by 500 segments in one file out of ten in your job and the delays will add up to minutes and hours. You just don’t need a TM with a GDPR clause when you translate an instruction manual of a fridge, do you?
To solve this, create multiple projects with multiple TMs. Here it’s up to you how you approach this. Going “one job — one CAT project — one TM” may be a bit too much, but you can create projects and TMs by subjects, like “automotive”, “marketing-clothes”, “marketing-tourism”, “household appliances”, etc. If you have many TMs, you can always plug them in or out depending on your current job. For example, if you translate a website for a tourist agency that has also a GDPR and cookie policy, you can always add your TM which covers legal texts to use it to your advantage.
Similarly, if you have regular clients, you can create a separate project and TM for their jobs. This is especially useful if you sign a non-disclosure agreement, which requires you to remove any materials provided by the client once you stop your partnership. Then you just delete the TM and you don’t have to worry that there are some segments to be deleted in your 100,000+ segment big TM.
Of course, this may look different if you work with translation agencies. Some agencies share a cloud-based project, which has its own TMs and glossaries, so you can’t really add your own TMs or use their resources in your other projects. Then you just follow their guidelines.
As you can see, there are many ways of handling TMs, so pick the tips that suit your work style best.
3. Don’t trust 90%+ matches!
This one is really tricky. Usually, a 90%+ match contains a slight change, which CATs highlight for you. However, you must be extra cautious, as one change can alter the whole segment dramatically (or grammatically!) or it’s easy to miss that one small change somewhere down a lengthy segment.
I’ll refer to my native Polish here. For example, if the only difference is that negation has been added, this changes the whole syntax in Polish. Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns will need a different grammatical case. So, when translating Polish, you must pay attention to the whole sentence to check if that one small change in a 90% match doesn’t entail additional modifications in the target segment.
It’s best to read the source segment carefully and compare the changes. Then, having adjusted the target segment, read it slowly as a whole, not just the edited part. I know it may seem long and tedious for a segment that has changed just a little. Trust me, the silliest of mistakes are often made by overlooking the tiniest of details.
4. Glossaries for what you need and blocklists for what you don’t need
Glossaries come to your aid when you want to have a kind of dictionary with terms. When you have difficulties with remembering certain terms (I sure do!) or you just want to relieve memory load glossaries are invaluable. Also, if you’re tired of typing long words like “discombobulation”, they can also land there. Finally, they’re a perfect tool when you have a client who demands specific terminology.
On the other hand, we have blocklists. Blocklists work like an anti-glossary — you add terms that you do NOT want to have in your translation. For example, the client prefers one term over another and the other one mustn’t be used to avoid inconsistent terminology. Another example would be a company with a strict policy regarding gender-neutral terms.
Just like TMs, glossaries and blocklists also require a sensible approach. One big glossary with every term for different fields may be troublesome because it will be slow to load or outright useless because some projects will require different target terminology. Such all-encompassing glossaries will become especially disadvantageous when used as part of quality assurance. That’s why it’s better to approach glossaries the way you’d approach a TM – group them according to fields or clients.
5. Use Quality Assurance tools
Once you’ve finished translating your project and you’ve checked it thoroughly, the last thing you should do is to use the quality assurance (QA) tools of your CAT. In some CATs, certain QA features are active throughout the whole translation process, so you’re notified about any issues the moment you try to move on to another segment. However, most CATs have a QA tool that also checks the whole translated file and generates a report, which lists all quality issues that need to be addressed.
This is where good glossaries and blocklists come in handy. If your glossary or blocklist is adequately prepared for a translation project, you’ll see all terminological discrepancies, and all the terms that should or should not be used. If you have a glossary that collects everything or anything, you’ll have a lot of false issues and that would make it easier to overlook a real error.
Apart from a glossary or blocklist check, a QA tool can also take care of number discrepancies, punctuation mistakes, inadequate date or number format, formatting issues, missing tags… Many of those checks are configurable in your CAT, so you can tailor this tool to fit your needs.
Summary
I’d say that any CAT tool can be intimidating at first because even if you gulp its whole technical documentation, you can still misuse it. You may quickly become frustrated and think that it’s not that helpful or that it runs so slowly you’d translate equally fast without it. The problem, however, may often lie in the way it is used and not the tool itself. That’s why I hope these five tips will help you use a CAT tool to your advantage and, down the line, become a better freelance translator!
Paweł