I know is an old thread, but thanks! I'm curious to know what you think of MateCat in general - I hadn't come across it until yesterday (thanks to another of your posts), but (assuming you're on a fast, reliable internet connection) it looks pretty interesting as a CAT tool in its own right.
Hello Jeremy,
You’re very welcome!
I was initially drawn to MateCat because it has open source at its core, and have done a number of projets with a company that uses it, along with some personal ones. Later on, when I saw the announcement about the open sourced MateCat Filters (which build upon the Okapi Framework ones), I tried to make use of them, but could not figure out how to go about. But the idea stayed in the back of my head. While working on the reference documents, I revisited MateCat on purpose and discovered there IS now a way to easily export the XLIFF files after performing the translation in a third party tool, making this an excellent solution for a round-trip with CafeTran.
I find it an excellent online CAT tool, it sports many nice features. Because it is so easy to learn and use, this is what I actually may recommend to those starting out.
As for me, I prefer to use CafeTran all the way though and only revert to MateCat occasionally.
Some not so good points:
- By default, the TM is public (your segments go to MyMemory), you need an additional step to create a private TM. This is a big turn off, I expect many clueless users to fall for this and even put their clients content at risk. Easily avoidable, but this is not the way to go.
- MateCat has some nice export features, and being able to export a native XLIFF, translate it in another tool (CafeTran) and be able to export the document in the original file format is excellent per se. But I would also like to be able to reimport the XLIFF in MateCat itself. This is quite limiting.
- While managing TMs in MateCat is quite good, uploading Huge TM resources can be a pain (and I don’t know about the file size limit).
- Of course, in many ways, it is less configurable that CafeTran.
- Being able to access various web resources from within CafeTran is priceless, as you keep your text in front of you at all times. This can be minimized with the use of a configurable online resource such as magicsearch.com, which allows you to launch terminology/bilingual concordance searches in different language pairs (and even perform monolingual searches) in one place, in just one browser tab or window. This is what I use when I absolutely need to perform a translation online and not in CafeTran, and it makes the process less painless.
Jean
Hello Jeremy,
Thank you for these details!
Inline QA: MateCat uses lexiQA and it is good indeed. I like CafeTran’s QA and filtering, and it works fine along with a step including Antidote (for English and French). MateCat does not support bilingual file export/import (although it has a nifty Revision feature with Changes comparison and error typology).
MateCat’s MT results use machine translation from Google Translate, DeepL and Microsoft Translator, plus offer suggestions from MyMemory. All these MT providers can be queried from within CTE, so I don’t think there is a real advantage there (and in CTE you can compare the MT results, plus toy with DeepL’s suggestions before inserting them).
The internal browser works very well now on my GNU/Linux machine, no crashes. Almost all resources can be queried from there, which offers the added benefit of keeping your text visible at all times. Very practical. If you have enough RAM (8 GB or more), you should try it!
I’m interested to know more about your AutoKey workflow as an alternative to the internal browser. Would you like to add a separate post for this in Linux Topics and Questions or External Tools (macros, scripts, regular expressions, etc.)? I use AutoKey myself and find it excellent, but have not set it up for querying resources.
Cheers,
Jean
Jean Dimitriadis
I'm copying this from the document CafeTran Espresso - File formats for reference here in the forum as well.
MateCat is a free online CAT tool which handles no less than 70 different formats and offers an excellent and easy way to translate file types for which CafeTran does not yet offer native support, acting as an additional file filter.
MateCat builds upon Okapi Framework file filters and represents probably the easiest way to use these filters.
Here is the MateCat round trip procedure (preparation in MateCat, translation in CafeTran, final conversion in MateCat):
Additional notes:
- Create a private TM resource:In the Project creation page, click on Settings (Alternatively, in the TM and glossary field, expand the drop-down menu and select Create resource).
- Click on + New resource button in the opened dialog. Give the TM an optional name. Hit Confirm. You will see that “MyMemory: Collaborative translation memory” resource is Enabled for Lookup, but not set to be Updated anymore. That way, translated segments will only be stored in your private resources.
Related links:
MateCat - Supported file formats and languages
MateCat - online support documentation
MateCat - Translating offline
MateCat - Philosophy and Terms of service (includes Privacy policy)