| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] | CAT software for start-up - advice needed Thread poster: Luke Mersh
|
|---|
maybe Tom's macros are also storing his old translations, so that he can find with one click how he translated specialized vocabulary or advertisement slogans years ago, preferably with some kind of time stamp.
Would like to hear about that.
As for the original poster's question, I started without of course, because I am a translator in the first place, but I heard about software engineers who translated with POEdit before receiving paid work as a translator.
| | | |
For all Tom's anti-CAT tool stance he's gone ahead and built his own!
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:17
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Olly Pekelharing wrote:
For all Tom's anti-CAT tool stance he's gone ahead and built his own!
 and it cost me nothing. I'm not a Luddite but I am suspicious of shiny things that look new
I do think Micro$oft should do some work on its Macro function - give it a friendly interface, make it a little easier to file macros as groups and give them longer, more meaningful names, and be able to edit them in a more accessible way. I imagine so many people don't know about the incredible potential of macros because at the moment they're hidden away in one of those sub-sub menu items you never go to. If Micro$oft had any idea of what translators do all day, they'd be throwing money at this and putting people on it to design a CAT-like GUI that makes it more fun to use - make it look shiny, new, and fun (which is not what it looks like at the moment, no matter how well it works technologically).
Give it a try, folks, when you're in a dead work period. If the kind of translating work you do involves re-translating the same terminology very frequently, over the long term, and isn't so much creative or literary as requiring precision and consistency, then I think you'll find that macros are a tool you should know about. I don't do an awful lot of that kind of work, but a while ago I had a contract for about two years translating the website content of a major (this is wordplay, for those in the know) Italian car rental company that was always bringing out special offers and new packages. I was receiving little jobs like this every day, always with quick turnaround times. So I took a while and created a whole series of macros to find and replace all the car-rental-related terminology and sales talk that was always the same in these documents. Every time I got a file from the car rental company I would just run all these macros before I started. Instantaneously, all the repeating terminology would just be … done!
(I eventually stopped doing these jobs because the agency always somehow forgot to pay me, after 3 months every time, and always had to be reminded.)
[Edited at 2015-03-05 11:37 GMT]
| | | | Luke Mersh 
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:17
Spanish to English
TOPIC STARTER | CAT software for start-up - advice needed | Mar 5, 2015 |
Wow thats incredibly -
how do you go about building your own.?
| | |
|
|
|
| That's what Champollion did back in 1999 (and others too) | Mar 5, 2015 |
Tom in London wrote: Olly Pekelharing wrote:
For all Tom's anti-CAT tool stance he's gone ahead and built his own! and it cost me nothing. I'm not a Luddite but I am suspicious of shiny things that look new I do think Micro$oft should do some work on its Macro function - give it a friendly inferface, make it a little easier to file macros as groups and give them longer, more meaningful names, and be able to edit them in a more accessible way. I imagine so many people don't know about the incredible potential of macros because at the moment they're hidden away in one of those sub-sub menu items you never go to. If Micro$oft had any idea of what translators do all day, they'd be throwing money at this and putting people on it to design a CAT-like GUI that makes it more fun to use - make it look shiny, new, and fun (which is not what it looks like at the moment, no matter how well it works technologically). Give it a try, folks, when you're in a dead work period. If the kind of translating work you do involves re-translating the same terminology very frequently, over the long term, and isn't so much creative or literary as requiring precision and consistency, then I think you'll find that macros are a tool you should know about.<
Exactly that: a friendly interface, macros as a group, more meaningful names, editing in a more accessible way. A versatile solution. By a translator and for translators.
[Edited at 2015-03-05 11:13 GMT]
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:17
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Luke Mersh wrote:
Wow thats incredibly -
how do you go about building your own.?
Incredibly - what?
Just scroll down to tools ---> start recording a macro (at least that's how it works in Word for Mac. For Windoze it may be in a different location).
And play with it for a while, when you've got time on your hands. What it does is, it watches what you're doing and records it in Visual Basic as a miniature computer application, which you save and name. Then you run it when you need it.
A word of warning: you may get so enthusiastic that you go on making a macro bigger and bigger, recording more and more things, until it finally crashes and you lose your work. I'd recommend not having more than 20 find/replace terms in any one macro. So you just create a whole bunch of macros and run 'em all each time. Naming them is a PITA though - you can't have spaces and the names have to be short, so you need to adopt a coding system that makes a macro recognisable 6 months down the line.
[Edited at 2015-03-05 11:41 GMT]
| | | |
Tom in London wrote:
A word of warning: you may get so enthusiastic that you go on making a macro bigger and bigger, recording more and more things, until it finally crashes and you lose your work. I'd recommend not having more than 20 find/replace terms in any one macro.
glossaries with 50 or 100 terms, or more?
Kind of CopySourceWhenNoMatch +Glossary1 +Glossary2 +Glossary3?
Enthusiastic I was, yes. And about the concordance search of course, thanks John, one often forgets the most evident.
| | | | | TRADOS STUDIO 2014 | Mar 5, 2015 |
Hi,
I've worked in a translation agency before starting as a freelance and I've learned that CAT TOOLS are ESSENTIAL. You have the possibility to work with glossaries, to store and share information and have smooth communication with agencies and clients.
I've started using Trados more than 1 year ago and I have to say it's pretty easy to use and it's requested by lots of agencies.
| | |
|
|
|
| Macros? Action! | Mar 26, 2015 |
Tom in London wrote:
I do think Micro$oft should do some work on its Macro function - give it a friendly interface, make it a little easier to file macros as groups and give them longer, more meaningful names, and be able to edit them in a more accessible way.
A word of warning: you may get so enthusiastic that you go on making a macro bigger and bigger, recording more and more things, until it finally crashes and you lose your work.
Using MS Word on a Mac is a deadly sin (I'm also guilty of, occasionally), but if you insist on using it for work, why don't you use AppleScript and Automator Actions rather than recorded macros?
In Word:mac 2008, Microsoft left macro users out in the cold. You simply couldn't use macros anymore. To make up for that, they published a large number of Automator Actions (you can download more than 80 of them here).
This is probably the most important one for you:
You can add Actions, add delays in case you're dealing with large files, or turn the Action into a Folder action to run them on all files in a folder (like for chapters in a book). And in an Action with a number of individual actions, you can "ignore" some if you don't want them to be executed.
A lot better than recorded VBA macros (and virus-free at that), so thank you, Redmondian friends.
Cheers,
Hans
[Edited at 2015-03-26 03:38 GMT]
| | | | | Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] | To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator: You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request » CAT software for start-up - advice needed | Protemos translation business management system | Create your account in minutes, and start working! 3-month trial for agencies, and free for freelancers!
The system lets you keep client/vendor database, with contacts and rates, manage projects and assign jobs to vendors, issue invoices, track payments, store and manage project files, generate business reports on turnover profit per client/manager etc.
More info » |
| | CafeTran Espresso | You've never met a CAT tool this clever!
Translate faster & easier, using a sophisticated CAT tool built by a translator / developer.
Accept jobs from clients who use Trados, MemoQ, Wordfast & major CAT tools.
Download and start using CafeTran Espresso -- for free
Buy now! » |
|
| | | | X Sign in to your ProZ.com account... | | | | | |
Login to reply/comment 
Translation news
