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Poll: I've been using a CAT tool for:
Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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Apr 22, 2019

This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "I've been using a CAT tool for:".

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neilmac
neilmac
Spain
Local time: 20:17
Spanish to English
+ ...
5-10 Apr 22, 2019

Or it may be more. I was using WFC when the "economic crisis" happened in 2008, so it must be be longer. I don't tend to keep note of things like that. I've never been keen on or good with figures or admin.

 
Morano El-Kholy
Morano El-Kholy  Identity Verified
Egypt
Local time: 21:17
Member (2011)
English to Arabic
+ ...
I don't! Apr 22, 2019

I do not use any CAT tools yet!

I do not know if I will ever work with any one of them


writeaway
Rachel Fell
 
Yetta Jensen Bogarde
Yetta Jensen Bogarde  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 20:17
Member (2012)
English to Danish
+ ...
5-10 years Apr 22, 2019

and it's been great.
Unfortunately, more and more clients provide the CAT; If you are lucky, it's MemoQ, but mostly it is something inferior.
I much prefer to use my own CAT tool, Wordfast PRO, and build my own TMs.


 
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 19:17
Member (2007)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
I don't use a CAT tool! Apr 22, 2019

I used my first and only CAT tool some 15-20 years ago (can’t remember exactly). I used it for 2/3 years and hated it. Fortunately, most of the texts I’ve been translating don’t require CAT tools…

writeaway
Rachel Fell
 
Michael Harris
Michael Harris  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 20:17
Member (2006)
German to English
A long time Apr 22, 2019

Wow, I must be getting old.....

 
DZiW (X)
DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
I stated with WF 3.35x (circa 2002) Apr 22, 2019

Grasping the general idea, one can work almost with any CAT, but (even for a translator) it's not my everyday tool, because of its segmentation (cutting out/separating) "choppy" nature, which often requires additional cleaning up and paraphrasing--especially for non-techy jobs.

Of course, by-paragraph segmentation makes more sense, giving more brainpower, yet still at the expense of the fuzzy matches.


 
Philippe Etienne
Philippe Etienne  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 20:17
Member
English to French
Shortly after I started Apr 22, 2019

Without any translation education and before Google existed, I learned about CAT tools through agency clients. A bit like informing your gardener that wheelbarrows exist.

One of my first "international" agency clients worked with Trados 3. After a few months receiving colourful bilingual tagged Word files, I bought this dongle-protected piece of software to leverage TMs. I seem to remember it was close 1000 euros at the time.
This client folded end 2001 with 3700 of my euros,
... See more
Without any translation education and before Google existed, I learned about CAT tools through agency clients. A bit like informing your gardener that wheelbarrows exist.

One of my first "international" agency clients worked with Trados 3. After a few months receiving colourful bilingual tagged Word files, I bought this dongle-protected piece of software to leverage TMs. I seem to remember it was close 1000 euros at the time.
This client folded end 2001 with 3700 of my euros, but by then I was proficient with Trados troubleshooting and I was hardly translating anything digital "manually".

I switched to MemoQ in 2008 because of another agency client, and because I couldn't handle the steep change from Workbench to the grid-based, ill-designed, counter-intuitive thing that SDL Trados 2009 was.

I recently bought Trados 2019 to dump my 2009 version and try to get up to speed with it one day. But I'm still a daily user of my MQ 2013.

Philippe
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Thayenga
Thayenga  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 20:17
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
5 - 10 years Apr 22, 2019

I've been using it for a little more than 6 years now. Most of my translations don't require a CAT tool, so I don't know yet if I will renew my license this summer.

 
Maxi Schwarz
Maxi Schwarz  Identity Verified
Local time: 14:17
German to English
+ ...
I don't Apr 23, 2019

It would slow me down in the work I do.

Rachel Fell
 
Mario Freitas
Mario Freitas  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 16:17
Member (2014)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
5 years Apr 24, 2019

Because I was too stubborn for a long time, had a bad experiente with Trados, and was reluctant for a few years before I actually adopted one (2014). Big mistake I made.

 
Nikolay Novitskiy
Nikolay Novitskiy  Identity Verified
Russian Federation
Local time: 00:17
Member (2018)
English to Russian
Many of them May 27, 2019

I use several CAT tools, and I plan to master more. Varuious clients have their own requirements regarding CAT tools, and to meet them all you have to master as many CATs, as possible.

 
Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 20:17
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
About 17 years May 27, 2019

When I worked in-house, I translated a cookery book with Deja Vu in about 2002. It was quite interesting, until it seized up and I could not get the target file out after the final proofreading, just hours before the deadline.
I think the DTP-specialist was going to work on it at the head office, but most of the time went on extracting the file...
The firm went over to Trados Workbench, version 3.1 or thereabouts, and I did not like it much. We only used the bare bones, no Multiterm
... See more
When I worked in-house, I translated a cookery book with Deja Vu in about 2002. It was quite interesting, until it seized up and I could not get the target file out after the final proofreading, just hours before the deadline.
I think the DTP-specialist was going to work on it at the head office, but most of the time went on extracting the file...
The firm went over to Trados Workbench, version 3.1 or thereabouts, and I did not like it much. We only used the bare bones, no Multiterm, and had not accumulated much in the way of TMs.

My former employer was my biggest client when I started freelancing, and I had a bad start with a faulty dongle - suddenly the whole thing would go into demo-mode. Meanwhile, another client used a horrible program called TStream.

I had to persevere, because I could not afford to drop either client, but I hated TStream and gave up on it some time later. I paid for a workshop with Trados, and discovered I was not stupid, the dongle was faulty… and once I had it replaced, I have almost never looked back.

The benefits are cumulative, and it is important to keep your TMs error-free and updated. The latest Studio makes that far easier than it used to be in the old days!

I advocate fine-tuning one or two CATs to suit your own work routine, and telling clients you will not work with inferior CATs. Otherwise they reap all the benefits, and you sit there struggling with the technology. I find it distracting and bad for quality...
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Kay Denney
 
Kevin Fulton
Kevin Fulton  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 15:17
German to English
Over 20 years May 27, 2019

I bought my first CAT tool in 1998 when faced with a highly repetitive and lengthy text. It brought me face-to-face with the implications of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). There's nothing like having the same set of terminology errors repeated dozens of times in a long document. These were readily fixed by a find/replace operation, but it was a time-consuming process to make sure the replacements were warranted.

 
Kay Denney
Kay Denney  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 20:17
French to English
since some time this century May 28, 2019

I had to learn to use Trados to translate tech manuals. I had no training and it was very painful. I remember looking out the window and deciding that the office wasn't high up enough for me to be sure of succeeding in a suicide attempt, so I made a cup of tea instead and emailed the client to say sorry I'll hand it in next week.

Since I've been freelancing one client has had me use MemoQ, they supply the licence. I'm not going to pay for one though because I much prefer the kind o
... See more
I had to learn to use Trados to translate tech manuals. I had no training and it was very painful. I remember looking out the window and deciding that the office wasn't high up enough for me to be sure of succeeding in a suicide attempt, so I made a cup of tea instead and emailed the client to say sorry I'll hand it in next week.

Since I've been freelancing one client has had me use MemoQ, they supply the licence. I'm not going to pay for one though because I much prefer the kind of translation for which it is useless, and I'm getting more and more of those translations, to my delight.
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Poll: I've been using a CAT tool for:






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