I  would  like  to  know what the  translators  experiance with  Trados is.  Is  it  as ridiculous as  Babylon? Babylon  can  sometimes  replace  the  theatre  of  the  absurd. I  do  not  believe  in  electronic  translations  at  all. I  just  thought,  or  rather  hoped , that  there  might  be  some  programs  that  help  a  little  bit  to  collect  the  data. The company  does  not  let  it  to  be downloaded for  a  trial  period , and  it  looks  like  it  is  a  very  bad  program  that  they  just want  you  to  buy without  the  chance  of  returning  it. Nobody sells beautiful  tigres  in  a  potato sac:  it  is  only  the  grey yard  battle veteran  with a  torn  tail that gets put  in  a  bag  before  the  sale.

Hi Liliana,

Just wanted to add that since this has been one of the most discussed topics over the years, several threads already exist which you may want to check out for loads of related information.

While it is true that by using 'CAT' as your key word for searching our headings only (from Discussion Forums page>Main>Search, no date limit) you will only be able to go back half a year (and less than a year with 'Trados' as a key word) because the topic is so popular, you can further narrow down your search by typing the name of one of the moderators who are likely posters in those threads, i.e., moderators of fora such as CAT and other Software for Translators, Machine Translation or Translator Resources and Web Links. That kind of search is likely to turn up scores of previous discussions that you may find useful and where you may want to follow up on specific points of interest to you.

With best wishes,

Jacek

Originally written by Liliana Boladz-Nekipelov on September 27, 2008 4:04 PM I  would  like  to  know what the  translators  experiance with  Trados is.  Is  it  as ridiculous as  Babylon? Babylon  can  sometimes  replace  the  theatre  of  the  absurd. I  do  not  believe  in  electronic  translations  at  all. I  just  thought,  or  rather  hoped , that  there  might  be  some  programs  that  help  a  little  bit  to  collect  the  data. The company  does  not  let  it  to  be downloaded for  a  trial  period , and  it  looks  like  it  is  a  very  bad  program  that  they  just want  you  to  buy without  the  chance  of  returning  it. Nobody sells beautiful  tigres  in  a  potato sac:  it  is  only  the  grey yard  battle veteran  with a  torn  tail that gets put  in  a  bag  before  the  sale.

Originally written by Jacek Krankowski on September 27, 2008 6:28 PM While it is true that by using 'CAT' as your key word for searching our headings only (from Discussion Forums page>Main>Search, no date limit) you will only be able to go back half a year (and less than a year with 'Trados' as a key word) because the topic is so popular, you can further narrow down your search by typing the name of one of the moderators who are likely posters in those threads, i.e., moderators of fora such as CAT and other Software for Translators, Machine Translation or Translator Resources and Web Links. That kind of search is likely to turn up scores of previous discussions that you may find useful and where you may want to follow up on specific points of interest to you.

Liliana,

You are mixing the different types of potatoes in the same bag. As suggested by Jacek, see some of those forums above.

Also do a search on Babylon in the Translatorscafe forums (many less hits to such as search, as compared with Trados. As Jacek mentioned, the word Trados has so many hits, that it will only display the last 6 months of entries, so you need to be more specific in your searches with such a term), and you will see that Babylon is an online interface for access to bilingual and multilingual glossaries/dictionaries.

For example: http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.asp?threadid=10108&messageid=137267#137267

Bi/multilingual glossary tools are not the same as machine translation nor translation memory. On the other hand, some machine translation and translation memory systems do provide access to online glossaries, either sublicensed as the original glossary/dictionary format, or sometimes the glossaries are integrated into translation tool environment.

Let me provide an analogy to your post and questions. It is like saying that that using Microsoft Office to do one's personal finances is a waste of time because Microsoft Office is too difficult to configure for formulas.  Well, first it is important to see that Microsoft Office is composed of several different software programs (for example: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, etc, depending on the version, year, and level -- home, professional, business, corporate-- that you bought). Then you can see that Excel is the program with spreadsheets that would be the most appropriate for even trying to do finances. Well, you could try and do it with the tablemaker in Word, but it would be such a manual process that it would be a total waste of time (yet still entirely possible to do the finances with the tables in Word just as people have used paper ledgers with calculators to do finances in the past).  It would also be possible to use Excel and then paste the tables into Word, but then again you lose all the native calculation capabilities of Excel once they are "pasted" in Word, and would again be a waste of time, yet still possible.  The different components of MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Visio, etc ) should each be used based on their strong points and what they are best at having features for accomplishing the necessary task.  Using one of them to do the task that another one is much better at doing, can be a waste of time.  In the case of this analogy, it requires a lot of practice and even some advanced training to create the multidimensional macros and links between charts to turn the Excel spreadsheet into a tool for automatically checking status in each spending category and seeing how it aligns with forecasted budget against actual cashflow.  All of this can be a lot of work (and training), and it would probably be a better investment to buy another program like Microsoft Money to do those finances. 

(Note: I am not promoting Microsoft products in any way, but just trying to show that different software programs from the same publisher have their strong points and sometimes the cost of getting trained and trying to adapt a different program to do the same for you can be costly, or using a different program and doing it all manually can be a waste compared to using an existing tool that is specifically designed for that task). As we can see, saying that Microsoft Office is not good for personal finances means looking at the specific components and if they correspond to the task, and if there is an alternative program that is more adapted to the need.

Babylon and Trados are 2 completely different tools which can be used for different parts of the translation process, just like Excel and Word are different tools that can be used for different parts of text editing cycles.

What do you want to do with Trados?

What do you want to do with Babylon?

Are they well adapted to the formats you work with?  What typs of content do you process?  What language pairs?  Do you need general terminology or are you looking for very specific terminology databanks?  What is your expected frequency of repetitions and levels of matches across the different types of content that you translate?  And there are many more questions.

1) first you want to list out what your needs are, what you pain points are, and what you want to automate.

2) then you want to see what are the different types of tools (dictionaries/glossaries, Translation Memories, Machine translation, Project Management, etc ) and see how they correspond to you need.

3) each of these different types of tools have different brands that have similar or different features that will correspond to your different needs.  No single tool can cover the entire range of all possible needs. If you have a short list of simple needs, then maybe one tool will help.  I have worked on workflows where it can involve different types of dictionaries based on the required specialized domaines, several different types of machine translation tools depending on the availabilty of language pairs, and multiple Translation Memory types based on existing translated legacy data, + terminology tools and speech recognition systems, and 2 more different types of workflow systems with connectors to different data repositories (content management systems, databases, web content folders, etc).

It is often sad to hear when a freelancer buys a tool and then months later says that it doesn't work for them because it cannot do X, or Y or Z.  Well, sometimes it is the case the given tools does not support the formats they work with, or sometimes it is not the type of tool that is adapted to their needs with regard to content leveraging expectations.  As in the analogy above, it is better to not complain about Microsoft Office (and its Microsoft Excel program) for doing personal finances because Microsoft Money might be a better investment for that purpose.

I encourage you to define your needs, and do some careful searching (as Jacek suggests) on very specific topics to access a lot of advice and information in the this database of posts.

Jeff

Dear  Jeff:

Thank  you  for  your  suggestions.  I  am  not  sure  what  I  want to  do  with  Trados. I  am  just  trying  to  find  out  first  if  it  is  a  good  and  useful program.  Babylon  is  good  as  a  glossary  source,  a  dictionary  or  a  Thesaurus, but  it  is  totally  ridiculous  as  a  tekst translator.

Please  try  to  translate  some  even  very  simple  sentences  into  another language using  Babylon  and  you  will  see  the  absurdity of it.

Try  to  translate  " to  prove  a  case  beyond a reasonable doubt " into  another  language  and  you  will  see  the  total absurdity  of it.  Try translating:  I  am  going  home, a  simple  sentence  which  becomes  absurd  while  translated into  Polish.

I  did  not  want  to  translate  any texts  into  another language  using  Babylon  for  professional  purposes. I  just  like  languages  and  wanted  to  maybe  learn  another  language using Babylon,  not  only  Babylon  but  maybe  just  translate  some  phrases  into another  language ,just out  of  interest  and  memorize  them.

I   just  wanted  to  find  out why  I  would  need  Trados  in  the  first  place.  What  is  the function  of  the  program.  I  am  not  familiar  with  translator's  software.  I  mostly use  Microsoft WOrd, dictionaries and  Thesaurus.

Thank  you  again.

Liliana

Thank  you  Sofijana. Does  it  do  any  translations  from  your  database  or does  it  just  organize  things?

Anyhow,  I  will read  the  articles  about it.   I  am  not  sure  if  I  can  download  a  free  version  somwhere even  if  just  for  a  few  days.