TranslateCAD

a software tool that enables CAT translation with CAD drawings

ranslating an AutoCAD drawing is a time-consuming and awkward job. And this is especially true if you work with Unicode-based languages. First, you have to enjoy a certain degree of AutoCAD proficiency, so that you can explode (ungroup) objects that have text entities within them, then use the MTEDIT command, and manually change the text and/or change the font to the target-language compatible Unicode font, and sometimes re-join the objects into the original group.

And worst of all, you'll find yourself missing your computer-assisted tool (Trados, Wordfast, etc.) very badly when the first repeated or similar phrase shows up.

A typical drawing could take 10 times as much to be translated than the same volume of plain text (i.e. MS Word). But normally you are not able to charge the customer 10 times the standard rate for a CAD drawing.

The Importance of Making Good Comparisons

eeding Machine Translation (MT) dictionaries with uncontrolled terminology is never a good thing. When this is done, MT engines consistently produce translations containing the same unwanted or wrong terminology over and over again. Post-editing these terminology errors tends to be time-consuming and expensive, which defeats the purpose of using MT.

This article briefly explains why terminology for MT dictionaries needs to be controlled, and suggests necessary comparison criteria as well as why Excel spreadsheets can help in filling in the gaps in current terminology tools to automate and customize terminology comparisons. Although the emphasis of this article is on terminology tasks affecting rule-based machine translation, they can be applicable to terminology management in general.

There's no better time than now to take a look at the competing TEnT (Translation Environment Tool) products and ask two questions: 1. How do they measure up? 2. Perhaps just as important, how compatible are they with Trados input and output formats that we receive from clients? To answer the first question, a partner and I have recently created a website at www.translatorstraining.com where we compare all the available tools in the form of short video tutorials. This article attempts to answer the second question.

Tool Kit