While “Press A to continue” is fairly straightforward, other segments might not be. Skipping 100% matches can be very convenient, but as any translator knows, context is important.
You’ll fill the translation memory automatically by confirming a segment (CTRL+Enter in memoQ).Īs you can see above, once the text is confirmed, the two other mentions are automatically entered, as the text is exactly the same. Translation memoriesĪs you’ve seen, translation memory systems are great because they remember what you’ve translated before and then remind you if anything similar comes up.
OMEGAT TRANSLATION WINDOWS
Mind you, this was with 15″ screens and before Windows let you conveniently place things next to each other with the Windows and arrow keys! It was all too easy to accidentally skip a sentence, so let’s just say I’m a big proponent of CAT tools even for this feature alone. When I was still at university working towards my translation degree, we often solved translation assignments by placing two Microsoft Word windows on the same screen, scrolling between both as we advanced in the text. While the layout may vary depending on which CAT tool you use, the idea in each is the same: to provide you with a layout that will make it easy for you to see both the source segment and the target segment at all times. So let’s look at these elements in detail to point out the advantages of CAT tools. In other words, we can tell at a glance that “avatar” should be translated as “Avatar” and we must not translate it with “Bild”. Blue indicates a match in the term base (so essentially a glossary term), whereas black indicates a forbidden term. You can also see two mentions of “avatar” in the translation results in the screenshot. Let me show you what was different then.” So what memoQ is doing here is, it’s telling you: “Hey, you translated almost the same sentence before. I’ll explain more about translation memories below, but as you can probably see, the TM match in this case stems from the segment above the one we’re translating. You can see lower down that the change between the TM match and the current cell is that the number 1 in the TM match is replaced by a 2 in the current segment. In this example, there’s a 99% match in the translation memory already. Translation results shows you results found in the translation memory (TM) or term base (TB). (You can adjust the segmentation rules in the memoQ settings.) You can also see that the source segment on the left is followed by an empty space for the target segment. If you create a translation project of a Word document or website in memoQ, it will split the text up into individual segments, usually sentences. In particular, usable machine translation seems to be getting better, so this may change the playing field for translators in the future.In this screenshot you can see that the text is split up into individual cells. So OmegaT is my tool now but the field is rapidly changing (sigh), as are so many other things, so we have to stay on the ball and keep a lookout for new developments. OmegaT works closely with a number of other open-source tools that allow file format conversion, alignment, quality control, segmentation and more. Training sessions are unfortunately not available in all countries I am lucky in that the program development coordinator for OmegaT lives in Lyon where I attended the workshop. I was able to work efficiently almost immediately afterwards and found that I knew the answers to most of the questions asked on the user forum and therefore had a lot less problems.
a scripting engine, allowing you to write small programs for automationīefore using this tool on real projects, in order to get off on the right foot, I attended a one-day training session, which was well worth it.
OmegaT also includes the following less-commonly-found functions: