Whether it is medicine, electrical engineering or even gastronomy, the expertise provided by CAT tools is very important for the final output and the satisfaction of all those involved – the customer, the vendor and, ultimately, the user who will read the document. Of course, CAT tools will not “judge” input data sent for translation (more on the topic of input data is included in the GIGO PDF article). Their function is to save time and costs and preserve the high quality of translations, as CAT tools use translation memory technology . In short, this means that repeated text that has already been translated once into the target language in the document does not need to be translated again – the translator is offered the option to use the already translated segment. This applies even when a completely different document is being translated. This feature is particularly suitable for technical documents, but is not suitable for artistic texts, which should be original by nature.
In addition to translation memory, CAT tools have a terminology database . This database, unlike translation memory, is not created in the translation process, data must be written into it instead. So, we could have the English terminology from the field of information technology, and then when localizing software using CAT tools, there is no danger that, for example, the term “user-friendly” will be translated as “user-cuddly” 🙂
Klára Malinová, Marketing Specialist