Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 1807 Joined: February 1, 2008 Location: United States
Mac + CAT
Hi translators, I have a question for you, if I may. I use a MacBook with Apple I-Work and Pages (I mostly write my translations in Pages and then just Export to .doc format when customers need Word documents.
I am getting interested in a CAT program such as WordFast. I do see that WordFast is compatible with Apple Macs, but I just wanted to open this as a more general question: What CAT product would you recommend with Macs ?
Mother tongue: English Posts: 7 Joined: February 12, 2008 Location: United Kingdom
RE: Mac + CAT
John, I'm a Mac person too. I've tried WordFast a couple of times, and hate it.
We Mac users are accustomed to a level of user-friendliness that we would also expect to find in a Mac CAT tool.
So far, none exists. There's a whole market niche just waiting for someone to exploit it!
So I don't use a CAT tool. I suspect CAT tools would be nearly useless for the type of translation I do, where style and vocabulary are very important. I'm guessing CAT tools are useful for standardised, repetitive documents of a technical nature.
My biggest problems with Wordfast were:
- the messiness of its GUI (something I believe Windows users are happy to accept) - its arrogant interference every time I open MS Word (there's no option to turn it on and off, and the various "hide toolbar" thingies don't work) - its completely incomprehensible "learning tools" - its requirement that you have to start your life as a translator all over again by typing your way from beginning to end through documents, until you've built up your own TM - but basically, it's just horrible to use - if you're a Mac person and you expect everything to be based on nice clearly organised drop-down menus and keyboard shortcuts.
On the other hand, my ideal Mac-based CAT tool would work like this:
Specify the source and target languages. Paste in a source text and a translation you've previously done. The CAT tool immediately parses both and creates its own memory. Repeat this with as many documents as you want to. In 5 minutes you have your own TM ready. Then you can start translating new documents. To translate a new document, open it in Word, AppleWorks, iWork, plain text, whatever. Run the CAT tool on it. This first pass will use the TM you created 5 minutes ago to do a rough translation. You correct the rough parts. When you've finished, tell the CAT tool to add all the new stuff to its memory.
Those would be the basics. Then there would be TMs for particular situations.
[Edited by Tom inLondon on October 18, 2008 3:02 PM]
Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 1679 Joined: December 23, 2004 Location: France
RE: Mac + CAT
Originally written by John Bunch on February 5, 2008 2:56 AM I use a MacBook with Apple I-Work and Pages (I mostly write my translations in Pages and then just Export to .doc format when customers need Word documents. I am getting interested in a CAT program such as WordFast. I do see that WordFast is compatible with Apple Macs, but I just wanted to open this as a more general question: What CAT product would you recommend with Macs ?
John,
Contact the folks at Alchemy about the support of their Alchemy product line on Macs. I heard something on it recently, but they can provide a more definite description.
Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 1679 Joined: December 23, 2004 Location: France
Mac community not big enough to justify dedicated Mac CAT tool
Originally written by Tom inLondon on October 18, 2008 8:55 PM John, I'm a Mac person too. .... We Mac users are accustomed to a level of user-friendliness that we would also expect to find in a Mac CAT tool.
So far, none exists. There's a whole market niche just waiting for someone to exploit it!
Tom,
Having worked for several translation tools providers (and attended Mac tradeshows for that purpose), I have analyzed the market segments for PC and Mac based translation tools over the past decade. All of the survey results showed that the Mac-based professional translator community was actually quite limited, and did not justify creating and maintaining Mac-specific products.
I just did another check on membership sizes of existing Yahoo groups concerning macs and translation (a few related keywords). The community size has increased on a few groups from approx 100 to just under 200 for one groups and just over 300 in 4 years. 200 and 300 end-users worldwide is nowhere the user base necessary for a dedicated Mac product. The OmegaT group (multi-platform) has a large community of 850+ users, yet based on the size of the other 2 specific Mac groups, even combining mac and linux users (and still needing to subtract the potential number of Windows users on that list), such a number hardly justifies creating a Mac-designed product, and maintaining a regular product life cycle of builds, testing, support, patches, etc for Mac users.
So, that is why Mac users have to put up with a non-Mac-specific version which simply can be run on multiple OS platforms.
Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 1679 Joined: December 23, 2004 Location: France
RE: Mac + CAT
Originally written by Tom inLondon on October 19, 2008 10:07 PM Thanks Jeff, I've emailed them
Tom,
It is not a dedicated Mac product as you were hoping to find. They are able to support Mac users, but in the usual way for a product that can support different platforms.
Mother tongue: English Posts: 7 Joined: February 12, 2008 Location: United Kingdom
RE: Mac community not big enough to justify dedicated Mac CAT tool
Jeff, there's tons of specialised software for Macs and new things come out every day. See here, for instance:
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/leopard/
Many computer applications are both PC and Mac-compatible, so a new product could still find a large market.
I do think there's a market for a much simpler CAT tool than the ones currently available, which I find unapproachable, opaque, and demanding to use, instead of what I'm accustomed to as a Mac user (nice to look at, fun to get involved with, logical and intuitive, something you can get started with straight away without interrupting your workflow).
If I knew all about Unix and writing code, I'd do it myself, because I know what I want it to do !
Expert Mother tongue: English Posts: 1679 Joined: December 23, 2004 Location: France
RE: Mac community not big enough to justify dedicated Mac CAT tool
Originally written by Tom inLondon on October 19, 2008 10:30 PM Jeff, there's tons of specialised software for Macs and new things come out every day. See here, for instance:
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/leopard/
Many computer applications are both PC and Mac-compatible, so a new product could still find a large market.
I do think there's a market for a much simpler CAT tool than the ones currently available, which I find unapproachable, opaque, and demanding to use, instead of what I'm accustomed to as a Mac user (nice to look at, fun to get involved with, logical and intuitive, something you can get started with straight away without interrupting your workflow).
If I knew all about Unix and writing code, I'd do it myself, because I know what I want it to do !
Tom, sorry I should have clarified by saying that the professional translator community using Macs is not large enough. I gave some stats on it a couple of years ago at: Post #135951
My post above gives updates on a few of those stats.
Wordfast was a basic Translation Memory tool based on MS Word to hit a very large community of professional translators, and it did that. Yet, also in reaching the target group, providing the documentation is 20+ languages, and having user groups for several languages, the expressed needs became more complex over time.
I'm not sure that a non-professional translator public would be so interested in a more basic tool. It has likely already been created (and listed among all TM tools that I drafted, and which received feedback, a while back in a post: maintaining updated lists of CAT tools) yet could have disappeared from the market if it was too simple for the professional translator market to adopt.
Nearly all of the Translation Memory tools on the market today have gone through years of use, support issues, evolutions, etc based on a considerable amount of feedback from the professional translator user community, and several of them started as internal tools used by translation depts before being brought to the market as a commercial tool.
Maintaining a very simple tool and then also more complex tools in the same product line requires a lot of work. There are three ways that this can be justified: 1) very large user base which will bring in volume revenue, 2) few users but who will put out a lot of money for the tool, 3) volunteer developers who want to create it as free OpenSource software, but then the lack of guaranteed support is an issue.
Hi, Tom,
your discontent, acc. to me, grows from an assumption that Mac users do have a friendly approach of their OS.
On the other side, due to this over-friendly approach, too many a Mac user is elegantly searching to do nothing on his machine, besides typing or DTP. That is because a Mac user is ready to pay a high price, in order not to put fingers into any application.
That is called mythology.
In the case of a translator, it is possible, but a price is of doing just the very pages, like 30 years ago on a typewriter, no more.
There is an elegant CAT for Mac user, of course there is, it is equally elegant as a Mac is, and costs nothing, just your or my concentration to use it in an intelligent manner: Jeff wrote about it: OmegaT.
And there is the one, you mention, Wf, which is not bad on Mac.
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