CafeTran

 Hello All,

I have a plan to introduce CT to certain of my translation agencies, sending them a summary of features that will boost their productivity.

But, as a freelancer, I don't know much about the way they work and what they need.

I want to hear your opinions about which features will be helpful for them.

Cheers,

Masato

Hello Masato,

I don't think that CafeTran is or should be very suited for LSPs, PMs or translation agencies.

Cheers,

Hans

Seconded.

The task of a CAT is to fit perfectly into your processes and systems, so that you may concentrate on your tasks - translate & create good texts - this is what CT does for me on OSX.

Agencies - especially the big agencies - have other priorities. And my end clients do not care about the CAT question, as long as everything works fine. 

Yes, it's good that CT's development focuses on us freelancers, not agencies.

One good point of CT that I keep mentioning to my clients is the wide range of file formats (including CAT tool formats) it supports.

Cheers,

Martin

... and, of course, I mention that it uses the standard exchange formats XLIFF and TMX.

Cheers,
Martin

 

That (my restriction) being said, some further comments: CT's features that are relevant to agencies, are (therefore) not its unique ones. External review, source term extraction, analysis (statistics), CTP creation for easy delegation including TM and glossary, possibly this new feature from update 8 (that ruined!) which Michael requested AND THEREFORE IS OBLIGATED TO EXPLAIN!!!!, the Total Recall database might be attractive for agencies, generating a hans.list@gmail.com with unknown spellings IS unique, others will bubble up in my mind during the long train trip to Burlean today.

Duh this is autocorrect teasing me: (that ruined!) please ignore that

(That feature which...

Aaaarrrggghhh second one: generating a list

Bubble one and not even in the train: the TM Town integration might be appealing to agencies. Am I righty Kev?

An integrated TMX editor with spell checker, impressive feature set and scalability. TM maintenance tasks in the Task menu. A clean TMX format without RTF style internal formatting garbage--and here it becomes clear how our interests can differ from those of agencies: I guess that they prefer Garbage Style TMs. Hoppa! To max out the %%%%% of pretrans segments. Including formatting. No please let ct not go that way. Tears in my eyes, I'm getting all sad suddenly. I must find a beer garden today. What's the weather like in Berlin? Must stop talking to myself. Voices in my head. Steek jezelf in brand Hans!

Hi, All

Thanks for all these discussions and feedback.

So, what we, freelancers, want agencies to do is to keep away from our own garden where we can play with CAT tools of our own choice, while providing resources in industry-standard formats, where possible, to facilitate our translation work.

M,

When I started this topic, I though of "co-prosperity," a win-win relationship between the agency and the translator. This word may sound like a fantasy, but there are many many Japanese companies who are pursuing it seriously. I believe there are some of this kind in the translation industry, too.

I sometimes feel "burden shifting" to the translator is irritating. Clients do their jobs in their own way, translation agencies do their jobs in their own way, and translators ... have no other choice but to adapt themselves to survive. Of course, you may say it's all about professionalism...

I hope there is some point where benefits to agencies can at the same time be benefits to translators.

M,

 

Agencies need good and productive translators, and CT should be able to make translators good and productive. But many agencies won't be able to see any rational argument in this, they rely on the things the CAT vendors (and in many cases only one of them) tell them.

Indeed, there are some really good agencies who care about this.

Yes Torsten, but even these good agencies can have PMs that define dumb verification settings that make you waste 10 minutes per project. Until you find out how to deactivate them. These settings I mean. Not to speak of agencies that want you to use Across, since that's another discussion. So I won't mention the A word here.