The world of translation is an ever-evolving environment, where new technologies are changing the way professionals approach the industry. While Machine Translation is getting better every day, perfect translation programs still belong to the realm of science-fiction.
The best language service providers know the importance of harnessing the power of new translation technologies in order to offer faster turnaround at a reduced cost and improve the quality of translations. Unfortunately, customers often do not have a clear idea of the technologies available.
Continue reading to discover two of the most popular translation technologies, in order to make an educated choice the next time you are on the market for language services: Machine Translation and CAT Tools.
Machine Translation: a (Virtual) Helping Hand
Machine translation (MT) software allows for a quick translation of a word, phrase, or text, by matching it with a bilingual database and instantly providing a correspondent in the target language. General tools like Google Translate and Bing are certainly more accurate than they used to be, and they can prove very useful for quick translation of web pages or social media posts, providing an approximate idea of the original content.
While these tools are of great help for the general user, they become useless when confronted with more metaphorical texts such as in marketing and advertising (robots don’t like puns), and they are still far from accurate, especially when translating specialized texts.
Machine translation becomes a great tool for specialized translation when using customized software that rely on specific databases for every type of text. This specificity, combined with the post-editing of a human translator, can generate technical translations more quickly at a lower cost, even if a completely human translation remains unmatched in terms of accuracy and style.
We offer post-editing as our Economy translation option. This is the perfect choice for documents to be used internally or for very large volumes of text that need to be translated quickly.
Cat Tools: Weird Name, Cool Features
Computer-aided translation tools are one of the best examples of the benefits of new technologies for translators. CAT tools are software that assist human translators when working with technical texts, analyzing the documents to be translated and retrieving sentences that are identical or similar which the translator already worked on in the past. CAT tools also include terminology databases and bilingual dictionaries.
Although the translation remains 100% human-made, CAT tools help linguist achieves higher consistency throughout the text, while also saving time and thus reducing costs.
At Langpros we use the best CAT tool technology to guarantee premium-quality technical translations. Contact our language experts to discuss your project and get a free quote.
