Even though machine translation and computer-assisted translation are often used interchangeably, they differ significantly. While machine translation is mainly performed by a computer, computer-assisted translation is performed by a translator with the help of a computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool.
In the process of translating a text from one language to another, CAT tools are immensely helpful. Moreover, they are used to manage, edit, submit, and store translations. This accelerates the entire translation process, giving a competitive advantage to the companies that use these tools.
This article lists the most important benefits of CAT tools. It’s advisable to consider them if you’re thinking about translating a large amount of text to localize your website for different markets.
Cost reduction
One of the main goals of every business is to increase revenue while reducing costs. If you’re localizing your website, CAT tools will prove to be extremely cost-efficient over time, especially if you regularly translate vast amounts of content.
Since these tools become more efficient and accurate as you use them to produce similar content repeatedly, this benefit becomes even more obvious. Moreover, your translators can translate the texts much more quickly, so you’re saving money here as well.
As a result of this cost reduction, you can offer your clients discounts from time to time, which will make you more competitive in the market.
Improved consistency
If you’re looking for more consistency in your translations, then CAT tools are the way to go. You want things like abbreviations, terminology, and product names to be accurate and consistent throughout all of your content, including website, manuals, and brochures, etc. across languages.
What enables computer-assisted translation software to achieve better consistency are translation memories and term bases or glossaries. Both features allow users to keep on top of terms and phrases they have already translated in previous documents and use them more efficiently and consistently moving forward.
During the translation review process, this can be very useful, too, since it allows other translators to remain consistent with the previous translations. Moreover, in case your regular translator isn’t available, the glossary is there for reference to whoever is translating instead.
Higher quality
Another benefit CAT tools provide is the high quality of translation. With built-in quality assurance features, CAT tools can be incredibly helpful for translating various types of documents or other translation file formats.. QA checks usually include features like highlighting grammatical and formatting errors, missing translations, inconsistent numbers, etc. This helps both the translator with their daily tasks and the project manager when cleaning up the translation, saving time and money for the company.
More efficient project management
Project managers are always looking for tools to speed up the entire project management process. In the case of translation projects, CAT tools are highly beneficial since they ensure quality assurance and increase productivity.
Their features enable project managers to manage multilingual projects with different language pairs. This
condenses different tasks into one dashboard and reduces the time needed to create various projects saved in different locations.
Moreover, international businesses often need quality translations with tight deadlines. Referring back to the consistency and previous translations we have already mentioned, a CAT tool allows the translator to work on a new document while using the existing translation memory to look for similar translations done in the past.
And in the case of updates, CAT software can automatically identify where new content sent by the client appears. As a result, instead of working through new files piece by piece to update the content, this saves time for both the client and the project manager.
CAT tools are here to stay
For professional translators, CAT tools have opened the door to a whole new world of fascinating possibilities. This software can help international businesses thrive by saving them time and money while ensuring a high quality and consistency of translations.
As more and more CAT tools are being made, you should take your time to decide which one can work best for your business. Consider your business’s needs, size, industry, and goals. This way, you’ll save yourself even more time and money down the road by choosing the most effective solution for your needs.