USING A CAT TOOL WITHOUT SPENDING A PENNY OR A CENT 

So, here I am again after four months. And I wouldn't be writing this, if one of my clients wasn't doing maintenance of their online translation system, preventing me from downloading files for offline work at the weekend.

Nowadays, translators working with translation agencies are often asked what CAT tool they use and/or are even expected to use a CAT tool.

A CAT tool, regardless of the vendor, is your translation environment. It converts the original to its internal format (more often than not it is a flavor of the xliff format), it helps you re-use your translations by saving them to a translation memory, and helps you be consistent with terminology, by offering the glossary or termbase functionality). When you are done translating, it converts your translation back to the original format. These are the most basic functions of a CAT tool.

But what if you're just starting out as a freelancer and cannot afford to spend several hundred euros or dollars on a CAT tool like Trados Studio or MemoQ? In the starting years of the freelancer part of my translation career I found out about Wordfast, which back then was a Word template with a set of macros  which created the translation environment within Microsoft Word. It continued to be freely available for several years.

But what are the free CAT tool options in 2018? I would mention two, and I worked with both of them, though I have an SDL Studio license. If your client wants you to translate Studio or MemoQ files, the following CAT tools are good candidates with some caveats.
The caveat with OmegaT is that when you want to translate sldlxiff files (from Studio) or mqxliff files (from MemoQ), you must ask your client to perform a “copy source to target" on the file, and provide you with a TMX file (translation memory) with the matches that are expected to be in the translated file, or at least a translation memory that can help you with your translation. The reason for this is that OmegaT can only read the target part of a unit in a xliff file ( and the files from Studio and MemoQ are flavors of the xliff format with some fancy extensions). When you send the Studio or MemoQ file back to your client, they will most likely have to approve/confirm all translated segments in the respective software, because OmegaT can't do it. On the upside, OmegaT can make use of quite large translation memories and glossaries, and you won't  ever have to pay a cent for it, because it is open source software. Besides, it has a dozen or so filters to convert source formats, and if these are not enough, you can use the filters in Okapi Rainbow to create an OmegaT project for you.

 Neither do you have to pay for Cafetran, but here's the catch. You can only use a translation memory and a glossary up to 1000 units in the free version. To remove this limitation you can buy a license which – last time I checked – was about 80 euros for a three year license. Not much compared with the big CATs. If you're unwilling to shell out the money for a license, chances are that your client can send you a project memory which will fit within this limit. On the upside, Cafetran can handle pretranslated xliff file just fine, so you do not have to ask your client for a copy source to target operation, and reportedly, though I have not tried it, it can confirm translation units in sdlxliff files. I think it has fewer filters for source formats in comparison with OmegaT, but then again, you can translate the generic xliff files from Okapi Rainbow in it.

 Both CAT tools can be connected to online machine translation engines, including Google, Bing and Mymemory and a few others. Cafetran can also make use of the Deepl translator. And both CAT tools have vibrant communities where you can get/ask for support, should you run into problems.

And on a side note, both CAT tools (and Okapi Rainbow too) are Java based, which means that they are system-independent, and if you're a Linux person, chances are they will run perfectly well on your distro.

 So why don't you check for yourself and discover all the features of  these CAT tools that are impossible to describe in one short blog post.



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