My CAT Tools portfolio by

Exercise 1: HOW TO REGISTER IDENTICAL TRANSLATION

aleksandrastawiarz — 2023-04-25 15:06:26 UTC

25.04.2023

In class, we learned how to translate segments from English to Polish. What about when a word or phrase is the same in Polish and English? I encountered such a problem in class and on the final test of the OmegaT programme, when some segments (e.g. a page number, a telephone number or an e-mail address) in the source and target texts remained the same. I then left these segments untranslated. However, now that I have been exploring the new options in the programme on my own and trying to get to know OmegaT better, I have discovered a useful function that allows me to deal with such situations. In the screen recording attached at the top of this post, I show step-by-step how to proceed when we do not want such segments to be displayed as untranslated.

Before recording the screen, I performed the following steps (ACTIONS TAKEN):

1. I created a new project in OmegaT.

2. I chose EN_GB as the source language and PL as the target language.

3. I added ST called "The cat is black.dox" to the project.

4. I translated all the segments that were different in English and Polish (i.e. they didn't have identical translations), keeping all the tags from the source text in the right places.

As can be seen at the beginning of the screen recording, the statistics show that 5 segments still remain untranslated (these are the first five segments of the project). These represent the name of the CAT Tool used, the name of the text editor, the date, the time and the e-mail address. As we will see in the next step, translating the segments yourself, 'manually', does not result in the segments being saved by the programme as translated. The only option in this case is to use the "Register Identical Translation" function in OmegaT.

CONCLUSION:

After applying this function to all 5 segments, we can see that in the statistics these segments are already translated and no more untranslated fragments remain in the project. This feature is useful if we are perfectionists and do not want to have untranslated segments in the programme, but to see that each source term has its equivalent in the target segment.

Exercise 2: ADDING BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES (FROM OTHER LANGUAGES)

aleksandrastawiarz — 2023-04-25 15:12:08 UTC

26.04.2023
In the attached screen recording I am demonstrating the operation of the PL-DE dictionary I added previously in a project in OmegaT. Then I am also presenting the use of the "Check Issues" function, which monitors the number of translation errors, and which only works if a suitable spelling dictionary is installed.

As we were only working in the EN-PL language pair in class, I decided to install the PL-DE dictionary and Spelling Dictionary for German, as I also do translations in this language pair.

ACTIONS TAKEN:

Installing PL-DE dictionary:

1. I went to the http://download.huzheng.org/ website.

2. I then opened the http://download.huzheng.org/misc2/ tab.

3. I downloaded the DE-PL and PL-DE dictionary download.huzheng.org/misc2/stardict-Neolingus_DE-PL_PL-DE-2.4.2.tar.bz2
(This should be an archive with a tar.bz or tar.bz2 extension)

4. I extracted the file, then extracted proper dictionaries from it (with extensions: dict.dz, idx and ifo).

5. I created a new project in OmegaT.

6. I used a file called "Kot jest czarny" as the ST in the newly created project (this is a TT created from a project I worked on in a previous assignment in the portfolio called HOW TO REGISTER IDENTICAL TRANSLATION)

7. I added the dictionary (3 files with extensions dict.dz, idx and ifo) to the "dictionary" folder in my new project.

8. I translated the text from Polish into German based on hints from the dictionary, the machine translation MyMemory(Human) and my own knowledge.

Installing German Spelling Dictionary:

1. I download the zip file: https://downloads.languagetechnology.org/fieldworks/Dictionaries/German.zip
and unzipped it.

2. Then Saved the extracted *aff and *dic files in the hunspell folder (the location of this folder (I use Windows 10) is: C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming\hunspell )

3. I opened the project I was working on in OmegaT (the one mentioned above, with the ST named "Kot jest czarny") and pressed F5 to reload/refresh the project.

4. I opened Tools->Check Issues
5. Spelling Dictionary is working and showing translation errors or suggests alternative translation options.

CONCLUSION:

Knowing this function in OmegaT is useful if you are working with text in a new language for which you do not yet have a bilingual dictionary installed.

Future educational needs – OmegaT:

- More practical exercises with the programme (I know how the programme works from the theoretical side, but I still need to practice working on text documents in the programme)
- I haven't worked on multi-file projects in the programme, so that's another thing I could learn from working with OmegaT.

Exercise 3: USEFUL PHRASE FUNCTION – TERM MORPHOLOGY

aleksandrastawiarz — 2023-05-29 14:14:49 UTC

29.05.2023

In Phrase TB (term base), a term can be added 4 ways:

• as a fuzzy match

• as an exact match

• with word stem separation

• with synonym use

In this exercise, I would like to focus on the third one, which seems to be the most useful when using this CAT tool. Screen recording showing examples of the use of this function is attached above.

1. WORD STEM SEPARATION

To match terms with rich morphology, a pipe character (|) can be added. It divides the word stem (the part that does not change) from the suffix (the part that does change).

Note: Fuzzy terms are recognized up to a maximum of 5 characters after the pipe character.

ACTIONS TAKEN:
1. I created a project in Phrase, added ST in Polish to it and created TB for the project.
2. I opened a project with a short ST in Polish in which I highlighted 2 terms and added them to TB (keyboard shortcut Alt+T)
3. When adding the term 'ludzi' I did not add the pipe character, whereas when adding the term 'przyjaciel' I added this character in both the source term and the target term.
4. In the screen recording, I have shown how these 2 terms highlighted in yellow look added to the TB.

RESULTS:
• In the case of the term 'ludzi', only the word in its not inflected form is presented in TB (although the word 'ludzie' appears in the 1. segment)
• In the case of the term 'przyjaciel', which was added with the pipe character (|), it is displayed in the nominative but also conjugated ('przyjacielem', 'przyjaciela')

CONCLUSION:
This functions is useful when you want the terms with various suffixes, tricky plural forms, inflected terms or synonyms to match.

Future educational needs – Phrase:

- The function I would still like to work on in Phrase is the one mentioned above for adding a term to a TB, more precisely Synonym use function
- This function is useful when, at times, fuzzy match or | will not work, e.g. wolf and wolves would not match.

- In this function we should create one term,
add second term as its synonym and set them both to exact match.

Using this function in practice (working on real text) could be the next task I perform in Phrase

Exercise 4: USING THE AutoPick FUNCTION

aleksandrastawiarz — 2023-05-29 15:54:16 UTC

5.06.2023

The AutoPick function in MemoQ is particularly useful if we have a text with a large amount of numerical data to translate. All translators, editors and proofreaders know very well how easy it is to make a mistake when transferring (rewriting) numerical data from the source text to the target text. Thanks to this feature, working in MemoQ and translating texts full of tags, numerical values, URLs, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and dates is much easier and more efficient.

The AutoPick function selects the items that can be inserted into the target cell. Once enabled, it will be possible to select tags, numerical values, URLs, e-mail addresses and dates from the source cell and insert them into the target cell.

How to enable the function in the project? (instructions)

To enable AutoPick, go to the Translation menu, then select Translation Settings and select Predictive typing and AutoPick. Click the second tab (called AutoPick), and then select the Enable AutoPick checkbox. From now on, when translating, you can press the Ctrl key to enable or to disable AutoPick.

NOTE: You can navigate through the contents of the list using the Up/Down arrows on the keyboard. The selected item is inserted by pressing the Enter key.

ACTIONS TAKEN:

1. I created a project in MemoQ where I added a file called katedra.docx as a ST.
(SL – Polish, TL – British English)
2. I translated the segments from Polish into English.
3. Then I enabled the AutoPick function according to the instructions described above.
4. With the help of AutoPick, I added the necessary tags for formatting and entered the numerical data (phone number) and email address.

CONCLUSION:

The AutoPick function is very useful and makes using MemoQ much easier. Not only does it make adding tags for formatting easier (using the Ctrl key is faster than using the Tag Insertion function) but also the transfer of data from ST to TT is much more secure and there is less risk of typos or mistakes. The function also prompts items that can be inserted into the target cell, so it is much quicker when manually completing segments in TT.

Future educational needs – MemoQ:

- MemoQ is the most recent programme we have worked with in class. That is why I have not yet been able to discover all the functions and have not worked on many of the texts in the programme.
- To get a better idea of how MemoQ works, I plan to watch a webinar I found on the programme's official website, from which I'll certainly learn about its hidden functions.

https://www.memoq.com/resources/webinars/hidden-treasures-in-memoq-cloud

Introduction

aleksandrastawiarz — 2023-06-15 10:48:06 UTC

This is my CAT Tools portfolio, in which I have presented 4 exercises containing useful functions from OmegaT (2 exercises), Phrase (1 exercise) and MemoQ (1 exercise).

These are functions that I discovered while working with the programmes outside of these performed in my university CAT Tools classes.

aleksandrastawiarz — 2023-10-28 10:33:52 UTC

I am starting my CAT Tools adventure by learning about the programmes:

aleksandrastawiarz — 2023-10-28 10:36:45 UTC

✔ OmegaT

✔ Phrase (Memsource)

✔ memoq