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Contents

• Who should use Translation Environment Applications?

• Categories of Translation Environment Tools

• Tools that use Microsoft Word as their main interface

• Tools that use an independent translation interface

• Tools that use an online interface

• The Similarities

• A word of caution about alignment

• The Differences

• The translation memories

• The work environment

• Code handling

• Terminology handling

• Making the move...

• Getting to know the different tools

• How to purchase a Translation Environment Tool


Translation Environment Tools (TEnTs)

Here’s why I use the phrase "translation environment tool" (TEnT):

Ironically, the language industry has created very poor names for a number of things in the translation industry. One of my pet peeves is "localization" (or, worse, "l10n"). Though I've given up on changing that, I would like to change the way we use "CAT" and "translation memory tool."

CAT, or computer-assisted translation tools, is a great term for describing the numerous families of software tools that translators use for their work (see above). Unfortunately, we often use "CAT" as a synonym with so-called "translation memory tools," when the latter is really only a sub-category of the former.

I also think that the term "translation memory tool" is not serving us well. "Translation memory" is just one feature included in tools like Trados, Heartsome, Déjà Vu, Transit, etc.—albeit an important one. Terminology management, analysis, code protection, project management, batch processing, spell checking, code page conversion, and many more features are also part of these tools. In fact, some of these features, especially terminology management, are or should be central to how we work with these tools. But by naming this category of tools "translation memory tools," we focus almost exclusively on this one feature, and in turn overuse it disproportionally.

The phrase "translation environment tool" describes much more accurately the various ways that we should use these tools in our translation work.

TEnTs are old enough to actually have articles written on the history of this technology and the tools that support it. A slightly outdated and academic article can be found at www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/MTJ-1998.pdf.

Trados, today’s market-leading tool, was developed by the Trados translation company. In 1990 it released its first commercial product MultiTerm (Trados' terminology management component), and in 1992 Workbench (Trados' translation memory application) for DOS was released. In 1994, Trados released a Windows version with a Word interface (see www.lim.nl/monitor/trados-2.html).

In that same era, several other translation environment tools also entered the public arena.

The translation agency Star released a product that was originally designed for in-house use: Star Transit, with its terminology component TermStar. IBM released its Translation Manager (TM/2) product in 1992 (and buried it in 2002). And, as the first Windows-based commercial product, Atril's Déjà Vu was released in 1993. Atril provides an interesting historical sketch of its product development at www.atril.com/aboutus.asp.

The last few years have seen a number of new translation environment tools enter the market. The most recent trends are mergers and acquistions of translation environment tool vendors as demonstrated in the acquisition of Trados by SDL in June of 2005, or the acquisition of the German Logoport by Lionbridge in early 2005, or the various partnerships between TEnT vendors with machine translation, workflow tool, and quality assurance tool vendors.

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Old tools are discontinued at nearly the same pace, such as IBM’s Translation Manager (see above), Alpnet’s (now SDL) TSS/Joust, SDL’s Amptran, or Cypresoft’s Trans Suite 2000.

Who Should Use Translation Environment Applications?

The most obvious users would be translators with repetitive texts. In my opinion, translators who work in technical, medical, or legal fields waste a lot of time (and money!) if they do not make an initial investment in a translation environment tool. But it doesn’t stop there. Because most of the available packages include decent or good terminology management tools, any translator who has to control terminology can greatly benefit from these applications.

Categories of Translation Environment Tools

For organizational purposes, the available tools can be classified into work interface categories.

These are the main categories:

• tools that perform all or most of their work through macros in Microsoft Word that allow an association with translation memory(s) and terminology database(s)

• tools that let the translator work in an independent, mostly tabular environment

• tools that strictly use an online interface

These categories are admittedly random and could just as well be divided by completely criteria, such as supported platforms, type of user, supported file formats, code handling, structure of TM. (You can find some of those at the TEnT Comparison Chart on TranslatorsTraining.com.) The reason why I chose the work interface to form the main categories is that it is the most obvious criterion and still carries great importance as a decision factor for choosing one tool over another.

In the following sections, I will introduce the different tools within their categories, briefly describe the one or two outstanding features of the different tools, and eventually spend more time with three veterans—Trados, Transit, and Déjà Vu—to describe the typical features of a TEnT in more detail.

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© 2008 International Writers' Group. This article is an excerpt from 
The Translator's Tool Box — A Computer Primer for Translators
available at www.internationalwriters.com/toolbox.