What is so great about translation tools?

WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT CAT TOOLS? (PART 1 OF 2)

Sometimes when translation agencies advertise a given translation project, the advert states that they will only hire someone who has / is skilled with a certain CAT tool (like Trados or MemoQ) for it. But I don’t see what’s so great about them. For a start, they cost hundreds of pounds – go the SDL Trados website and see how much the SDL Trados Studio 2017 packages cost. And the licences that are sometimes required are not even valid forever! It’s crazy! And, while the professional translation community discourages machine translation (as it should), I got this image* of MemoQ in operation from Google and it seems to have a machine translation function itself built into it: look in the top right hand corner!

*I just wanted to point out that this image may be subject to copyright, but if it is then I don’t see why I should be held culpable when it was publicly available when I found it. And you will just have to view this blog on George Trail Translator on Facebook to see this image.

WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT CAT TOOLS? (PART 2 OF 2)

It should be obvious from part 1 that I don’t believe in the value of CAT tools which today’s professional translation community is so fond of. To me, they are little more than machine translators with some sort of “advanced” features. This is the second part of my rant on CAT tools:
I don’t speak Italian, and so I got Google Translate to translate this short article which I found in some Italian newspaper into English. https://www.avvenire.it/mondo/pagine/arrestato-puigdemont-rabbia-in-catalogna-feriti

Now, I understand that this material wasn’t exactly that tough to translate; however, while the translation I got wasn’t perfect throughout, I wasn’t really confused or left guessing at all and it was easy to understand what was meant. But translate it into your own mother tongue and see if you disagree that Google Translate often comes up with phrases which, if you could speak Italian and if you were to translate this article yourself, you would eventually come up with these phrases or ones very similar to them if you didn’t use Google Translate to “think” for you. Like I said before, I can understand people wanting to discourage the use of machine translators in professional translation, but I personally think that Google Translate deserves more credit than professional translators give it all the same. So, let all the good aspects of machine translation tools be recognised!