About the author: Jost Zetzsche is an ATA-certified English-to-German translator and a localization and translation consultant. He co-founded International Writers' Group on the Oregon coast and sends out a free, biweekly technical newsletter for translators (see www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit).
Here's
something that I feel strongly about even though some of you might
think this is silly. The first part of my argument you will agree with:
Words are important. The way we name things has a tremendous impact on
how we and the rest of the world think about it.
I happen to think that we have done extremely poorly with naming a
number of things in the translation industry. One of my pet peeves is
"localization" (or, worse, "l10n"). While I've given up on
changing that, I would like to change the way we use "CAT" and
"translation memory."
CAT, or computer-assisted translation tools, is a great term for
describing the numerous families of software tools that translators use
for their work. This includes machine translation tools, project
management tools for translation, glossary tools, software localization
tools, dictionary tools, and numerous utilities for word counts,
invoicing, and many other practical translation tasks (and it really is
what this newsletter is about).
Often, the way we use "CAT" (myself included) is synonymous with
so-called "translation memory tools," when the latter really is only a
sub-category of the former.
So far so good. But now I would like to get rid of the term
"translation memory tool." I think that this term is not serving us
well. "Translation memory" is just one feature that tools like TRADOS, Heartsome, Déjà Vu, Transit,
etc. have—albeit an important one. Terminology management, analysis,
code protection, project management, batch processing, spell checking,
code page conversion, and many others are also features that these
tools have. In fact, some of these features, in particular terminology
management, are or should be very central to the way we work with these
tools. But by naming this category of tools "translation memory tools,"
we focus almost exclusively on this one feature and in turn overuse it
disproportionally. At the ATA 2005 I gave a presentation to about 250
people. Only nine were power users of a terminology component! (And I
would guess that more than half used a "translation memory tool").
Here is what I propose (and I'm following Caitilin Walsh's wonderful
suggestion): Let us from now on use the term "translation environment
tools." Though this may sound a little stilted at first, as Caitilin
said, it describes what these tools do or—even better—what they
could do.
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