more than a entry level TM: WordFast
Last week I asked a few translation students how they would actually “do” a translation of a text in a word document. One standard answer is to create a copy of the original file (to make sure you don’t loose the source text) and then to over type the original text. Another student said that he would open an empty target document in a new window and then arrange the two windows next to each other. Office 2003 actually has a very clever way of automatically arranging the windows on mouse-click (select Window -> Compare side by side with…,).
While we were talking about the options, I tried to think how I did it, when I started. I soon realised, that I’ve never had to face this problem. My very first translations were all from hard copy and I didn’t have an electronic source document. The first time I had an electronic source document, I had already heard about WordFast - which, back then, was still under development and free. Basically ever since I did translations in some kind of CAT tool - first using WordFast and then Deja Vu and Trados and a little bit of SDL, Star Transit and Across too.
WordFast always struck me as an enormously sophisticated tool (at least for translations of MS Office applications) and I still think it is worth the money. It is going to be interesting to see what happens with the next version of MS Office - maybe WordFast is going XML tool and it might become extremely versatile (I am sure you can actually do XML files with it if you do some clever tagging).
Anyway - during the discussion I realised, that not only I didn’t really have to add any solutions but to use TM software, I also couldn’t even imagine the challenge not to use it. What do you do? Do you over type and loose the reference text? Do you type below a paragraph and then at the end have to delete all the source text manually? I think the way I’d had liked most was to do it in a side-by-side view. Sounds like a good solution for Word documents. Although at the end I don’t think that anything beats the range of functions that a Translation Environment tool can provide.