CAT? you might wonder…
Actually it’s not an animal, but a translation tool that would save you a lot of money while keeping the quality high.
Cost, speed, and quality. Three things that matter most to every client.
That’s why I’m sharing with you this amazing tool called CAT tool that will make you appreciate the behind the scenes collaboration and its benefits.
READ MORE >>> How to Manage Projects Towards Success
What is a CAT Tool?
CAT or computer-assisted translation tool is a software that facilitates easy and efficient translation process. It should not be confused with MT or the Machine Translation like Google Translate or translation apps on your iPhone.
As a standalone software, it has a TM (or Translation Memory) that collects bilingual texts in pairs and stores them in the database for future reference, in case we’ll be working on the same project
It’s useful for those of you who have contents that are regularly being updated or similar contents among an array of similar product lines. It is particularly helpful to the technical and specialized industries – medical, manufacturing, legal, health, accounting, and finance, etc. – that have high repetition. It also increases translation quality by checking the consistency of translation thoroughly.
How does a CAT Tool save your money?
- You will not pay for the same translation again. When CAT tool scans 100% or 101% matches of texts, that’s zero cost!
- You will only need to pay for the repetitions within the same batch of content at 10% while most translation agencies charge up to 30% as per industry standard rate. You save 90% of costs for these repetitions.
The Benifits of a CAT Tool
Here are top 3 reasons that our client appreciate the application of a CAT tool.
1. Save significant costs
The CAT tool can spot repetition and matches very easily by cutting long paragraphs into short sentences (segment) and then recognize each segment by sorting them as “repetition” and “x% matches.”
For repetitions, So, we only charge 10% of the standard translation costs (compared to industry standard of 30%).
According to our sales analysis, we have helped our customers reduce their translation costs by 18% to 64%, when compared to traditional way of translation without CAT tool.
In short, you’ll save significant costs for translation projects on brochures and manuals if your translation agency adopts CAT tool.
The TM allows us to re-use the words or phrases from our past projects with the same client.
2. Speed up translation process with shorter delivery time
On average a competent Chinese translator with 3 years work experience can translate about 2000 words per day.
But with CAT tool, it can go as high as 4000-5000 words per day. It boosts translation process for about 50% and shortens the turn-around time especially for time-sensitive projects.
3. Improve consistency thoroughly, thus better quality
The CAT tool has a built-in QA check module that compares the translation with the translated pairs and stored in the TM. If there is a slight discrepancy, the QA tool will catch it, report it and prompt the project manager to fix it.
Unless all errors were properly fixed, the translation could be checked out from the CAT tool.
Next, I’m going to share more in-depth technical insights of CAT Tool and how it works.
5 Key Features of CAT Tool to Help You Save Money on Chinese Translation
For more than a decade working in this industry, I have always been fascinated by its features, saving me a lot of time and energy when working on huge translation projects.
In this post, I’d like to share in-depth, technical features of this tool why it saves my clients translation costs for technical documents as my first point in my previous article. Second, I wrote that it boosts the translation process and third, improves the quality of texts.
Support all types of files
CAT Tool works by repetition, recognition, and matches. Unlike the ordinary translation software, that only supports MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files, this tool supports all types of file formats – from complicated web content to software property files.
Segmentation
Translators benefit from the segmentation feature of CAT Tool because it can cut paragraphs into short sentences, and ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. In this way, we can cut the long sentences into short ones.
Analysis Report
If you look at the dashboard of the CAT Tool, you can see the analysis report that helps you spot the texts that are being translated, texts that are spotted as repetition and matches. Matches are the segments that were already translated before – TM collects these and stores them in the database – from the previous batch of translation tasks.
If the numbers are higher or going to 100, this means that the repetition matches is very high. The TM can translate what we have in the working panel while the translator can just tweak the texts. It saves a lot of time and cost.
Terminology base
This saves a lot of time for the translator when they translate proper names, such as hotel’s name or company names or titles that shouldn’t be messed up by translating it to another one. Because the TM stores these data, they are easy to search them in the CAT Tool. With this feature, it recognizes the term or word easily and will not be messed up, and only one term for that translated word.
TM Recognition
This is found in the working panel that saves a lot of time for the translators when working on a document because it easily recognizes the term and also shows the 101% match – which is the exact match. This means that the original translation texts match, including the capitalization, which are absolutely identical.
How the quoting system works
In our quoting system, if there’s 100% match, then we only charge 10% of the standard rate. And in-between those, we have a list of rates from 50-99% of the match type, and if there’s no match, automatically, it’s 100%.
When quoting, we import the word count analysis from CAT tool into our quoting system, the word count information was automatically reduced according to the percentage. For instance, if there are 2,155 words that are of 101% match, the weighted word count will be 0; while the 5699 words that are of internal repetition, it will be counted as 569.9 words.
For this returning customer, the total word count has shrunk from 18206 to 9104.1 words, which is about 50% off saving for the customer.
Reducing costs for customers is one of our top-priority as a professional translation partner.
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