About the author: Andrei Gerasimov is a Moscow-based English-Russian freelance translator,
PhD, ATA&ITI member. He has 56 literary works translated to his credit
and over 20 years of experience in translation. Currently he translates for
Ford Motor (Russia), Philips (France), and several translation agencies.
His website: erussiantranslations.com
It
is not a secret that many translators believe TRADOS is too complex and
unfriendly. This popular misconception is supported by the bulkiness of
TRADOS’s manuals: FL5.5 was supplied with five manuals totaling 936
pages, and FL6.5 has six manuals totaling 1252 pages—enough to scare
off the most computer-savvy translator! However, these manuals can't be
short and simple since they are comprehensive and cover all TRADOS
functions and settings, which are almost unlimited.
Objective of the Article
My five years of experience in using TRADOS FL 5.5 and 6.5 demonstrates
that knowledge of several basic functions of TRADOS FL is enough to use
this software for translation of 80% of your jobs, helping you to:
— double your translation productivity;
— find and win more clients/jobs;
— make work less tiring;
— double your earnings;
— improve quality by increasing consistency and avoiding omissions and eye mistakes.
Hopefully this article will help you get rid of all prejudices against
TRADOS and begin using basic TRADOS FL functions in two minutes. To do
so, you only need to focus on vitally important TRADOS features and
skip all the others.
Determining the Most Important TRADOS Features
Let's determine which TRADOS features are vitally important for the
translation process and which features can be ignored at the first
stage.
The analysis given below is based on nine months of my freelance work
(from January 1, 2005 to September 15, 2005). During this period, I
completed 220 translation jobs (some of them contained up to 200 source
files, with a total word count of more than 500,000 source words) for
40 customers (translation agencies and end customers) from 14
countries. My language direction was English to Russian.
According to my records, the distribution of types of source files was as follows:
Types of files
Number of jobs
Percent
.doc
165
75%
.xls
13
5.9%
.pdf
12
5.4%
.ppt
3
1.4%
.rtf, .html, .xml and other files translated in Tag Editor
27
12.3%
For several reasons, I converted all .pdf and .xls source files into
.doc files and translated them in MS Word. The following chart reflects
my usage of MS Word and Tag Editor:
The following table shows how often I used various TRADOS modules for translation (%):
TRADOS Workbench (TW)
100%
TW+Multiterm
17.7%
TW+T-Windows for .xls, .ppt and others
0%
TW+Tageditor
12.3%
Winalign
0.9%
The following chart shows how often I used MultiTerm (project glossary): This data shows
that you only need TRADOS Workbench and MS Word to enjoy the benefits
of TRADOS FL when translating 80% of your jobs. This means you don’t
need to learn to use MultiTerm, TagEditor and other TRADOS modules at
the first stage.
Installation of TRADOS FL 6.5
Download TRADOS 6.5 Freelance from http://www.translationzone.com/download.asp (110 MB).
Install TRADOS 6.5 Freelance:
Double-click Setup.exe.
When asked, accept License Agreement.
When asked, do not install MS .NET Framework Package.
When asked, accept the End-User License Agreement.
When asked to select a license type, select "None of the above" (demo version).
When asked, add source and target languages.
When asked to chose setup type, select Complete.
The whole installation process will be completed within one minute.
Getting Started With TRADOS FL
You are now all set to translate your first source file with TRADOS 6.5 FL.
Open your source .doc file and place it below the TW window (see screenshot 4).
Place mouse pointer on the first sentence and press Alt+Home.
This preparation process typically takes less than one minute.
Type in your translation in the lower text box with the yellow background (see the screenshot below).
Note: if you already have a TM (e.g., received from your client), you
do not need to create a new one—just open the existing TM (see
screenshot 2). From the TW menu select File > New > Select a TM
file > OK.
To go to the next sentence, press Alt+Numerical+ (on the right-hand side of the keyboard).
Repeat the above process until the end of the source file and press Alt+End.
Congratulations!
You just completed translation of your first source file with TRADOS 6.5 FL. Save the bilingual file and close it.
To delete source text from the bilingual file (this process is referred to as the "clean-up"):
From the TW menu select Tools > Clean-up.
Add the file to be cleaned-up.
Click the Clean-up button. Click the Close button.
Your file now contains only your translation.
You can study other useful TRADOS functions (buttons) by selecting TRADOS from the MS Word menu bar. From now on, you will never translate the same sentence, phrase or term more than once!
Conclusion
Hopefully this article will help you appreciate the obvious benefits of
TM software: segmentation of source text, preservation of original
formatting and re-use of your old translations. Having enjoyed these
benefits, undoubtedly you will want to expand your abilities and learn
the other TRADOS modules—first of all MultiTerm and Tageditor.
My other articles on the use and benefits of Translation Memory
software are available at my website—erussiantranslations.com.
Andrei Gerasimov, Ph.D., English to Russian translator gerasae@aha.ru
translation and documentation companies in Turkey with its business partners in the Netherlands, Thailand, England and Australia, with its branches in Istanbul and USA, with its yearly 20 million words translation capacity and a professional experience of about 15 years. Having served many large domestic and international companies since it’s foundation, Avrasya had a great success in satisfying it’s customers with it’s particular understanding of quality. It achieved an acknowledged and challenging position in the market with it’s great achievement in job quality, on timely deliveries, honesty and professional organization. Focused on the requirements and expectations of it’s customers, Avrasya is always in a process of renovation and development, regarding it’s quality system, organizational structure and technology.
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