What is a CAT tool? by GALA
What is a CAT tool?
Computer Aided Translation (CAT), is a broad term used to describe software that human translators use during the translation process to improve their productivity. Most professional translators use CAT tools.
With a CAT tool, translators can work faster, eliminate repetitive translations, automatically correct mistakes, and achieve higher consistency of translations. Typical CAT tools are text editors that support bilingual file formats, and have built-in translation memory.
Examples of CAT Tools
SDL Trados Studio | Kilgray memoQ |
Across | XTM |
| Memsource | Wordbee Translator |
| smartCAT | Wordfast Classic |
| Wordfast Anywhere | Star Transit NXT |
| Crowdin | Lilt |
| SDL Passolo | Alchemy Catalyst |
| RRD MultiTrans | Okapi Framework |
Atril DéjàVu X | Cafetran |
| Fluency | Heartsome Translation Studio |
| Metatexis | MultiTrans |
| OmegaT | Open Language Tools |
| Visual-Localize | Wordfisher |
CAT Tool Functionality
- Spell checkers, autocorrect—automatically highlight and fix spelling and grammar mistakes.
- In-context review—display multimedia documents with images, text box sizes and layout in real time in both source and target language.
- Integrated machine translation—suggest translations for segments from a connected MT engine.
- Adaptive machine translation—offer translations for segments from a connected MT engine as autosuggest pop-ups, learn from user input (examples: Lilt, YarakuZen, SDL Trados Studio 2017).
- Concordance—retrieve instances of a word or an expression and their respective context in a text corpus, such as a translation memory database, to check their usage.
- Electronic dictionaries—allow term search inside the tool, track usage statistics.
- Text search tools—find phrases or terms in the text for reference.
- Alignment—build translation memories texts from source text and its translation. When a translation company adopts a CAT-tool, they often use alignment to create their first TM databases.
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