CafeTran

@Jean Dimitriadis  

I'm interested in learning more about your experience of using Sketch Engine and CafeTran. I see that they have plug-ins with other CAT tools, and so it must be efficient to be able to use them together. Have you used them built-in with other tools? How do you make the most of it from outside CafeTran? Thanks so much!

Hello Jessica,

I have used the The Sketch Engine for three months, then decided against renewing my subscription for now, although I might reconsider in the future.

I recommend that you take the one month free trial to see for yourself!

It has several features of interest for translators, but I've found:

- they work better on paper, not so much in real-time (more time consuming than expected, some usability/efficiency issues there)

- you can find alternatives to some of these features

- querying the Sketch Engine outside of the CAT's interface was suboptimal (I could not login into my account using the CT's internal browser). I have not tried the plug-in in other tools, but should be more efficient for sure.

Some of these features are:

- term extraction (which by the way can also be accessed for free here: https://terms.sketchengine.co.uk/,  although you can do more with a subscription, and you can upload documents or TMs and run various actions to extract terms and phraseology (among various actions).

- thesaurus and collocations (Word Sketch) based on huge web (and other) corpora.

- concordance searches in the available corpora, with the ability of quickly building a specialized monolingual web corpus (WebBootCaT) for running concordance searches on source or target language.

- The Translation lookup for parallel corpora, which is not so useful as it seems (unless you work on EU or similar texts, in which case you can use Total Recall to import the entire EU TMs and use CafeTran for instant database concordance searches), other bilingual context searches are quicker and probably more interesting (linguee, reverso context, tradooit, etc.).

In case you find the WebBootCaT feature useful, please note there is also a free/libre software cross-platform Java application called BootCaT, which you can use for the same purpose, to create specialized monolingual corpora on the fly. You can then use AntConc or other concordancers for such searches. This is probably useful only on big projects, when you  can afford the time of building such corpora in the first place.

Jean