CafeTran

The latest build is 2019010501, announced 10 days ago. Just download the zip file from the original announcement, each previous build is replaced with every new build.

There hasn't been any new update since 4 months ago, right? Latest version is 2018092401?

Thanks Igor – only just saw your message. Replace document colours was selected, so perhaps this was the problem.

So I've just upgraded to CT 2019 and I notice that the "Segments with font colour" and "Segments with highlight colour" options in the Filter menu appear to no longer work.

Is this a known issue?

(Important caveats: I've hardly ever used these options, so I don't know how good they were previously; the document I'm translating is a table [in a docx], which could conceivably have an effect.)

tre: From my rudimentary knowledge, this might be difficult to implement

Mine is perhaps more rudimentary. I thing there are solutions around that can be API-implemented (Amazon should be one of these, I think). Hopefully Igor may jump in and tell us what he thinks.

Did you ever test this again in the last months?

Well, the Word voice is not very sexy nor melodious, but serviceable. Last time I used TTS was last Friday and I didn't notice anything different than usual. But this is not the point: the main benefit of TTS is that it doesn't skeep anything, while human eyes may, and when you "hear" errors they appear more conspicuous than when you just read them, if your are able to catch them all.

> I had no intention to discredit LT at all. 

No problem. I stumbled upon the numbers below only by curiosity, and indeed, Italian seems to be one of the worst cases (besides Swedish - 46 rules only - while Portuguese and Catalan have > 2000 rules) 

> a final text-to-speech check, are faster and a way more effective, at least in my experience.

From my rudimentary knowledge, this might be difficult to implement, if there is no Java solution (I think we discussed this before). The TTS function in Word (newest version, 365, on Mac) gives - let's say - for German nearly satisfying results. Did you ever test this again in the last months?

Make no mistake, I had no intention to discredit LT at all. I just tried it and gave my opinion for Italian only. Italian has a very complex grammar and a huge number of exceptions, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to create a reliable and effective proofing tool. 

The fact is, adding another layer of time-consuming check and receiving in turn a considerable number of false positives is not going to be of much help, on the contrary. My own brain, the spell checker and, again—sorry if this might appear a fixation, but it is—a final text-to-speech check, are faster and a way more effective, at least in my experience.

I will reiterate. It all depends on the rule set for your target language and obviously on the skill level on the rule maintainer. I mentioned LT in a FB forum for Polish proofreaders, and they had only words of praise for LT. Too bad it does not work so well for Italian.

>but I never heard an enthusiastic feedback from Tilburg.

Yeah, I'm still totally puzzled by LT. We have a lingo that looks simple but actually is as complicated as the Chinese dialect of Kolobrzeg.

I see. Look at the number of rules (grammar, not spelling):

Spanish: 136

Italian: 149

Polish: 1497

English: 2184

German: 2743

Catalan: 3109

Dutch: 3229

Maybe this gives a rough estimate for the state of the art, though this number of rules might depend on the complexity of a language (and maybe the capacity of the developers to combine them and make them easier). Catalonia might have a number of people hired for this (they do so, I am very sure). Dutch surprises me a bit (Hans, is this you?), as the language is so easy (only one minute to learn how to order a beer and to hitch a girl), but seriously, this input is really tremendous compared to EN. So it should be great in NL, but I never heard an enthusiastic feedback from Tilburg.

I tried again and can only confirm that for Italian LT is almost useless (almost on par with the Word proofing tool). Sometimes it just gives vague (and false) indications on verb tense incompatibilities or article redundancy, areas where LT cannot be trained for obvious reasons, showing that it's not very intelligent and it's of no serious use for professional tasks. 

Therefore, certainly I wouldn't want to use it in an automated QA routine within CTE because of the substantial number of false alarms it would output. Maybe for other languages it's more useful, and I wonder if there are other Italian translators on this forum who can confirm or question my opinion.

As a final proofing stage I prefer to export to a bilingual file and let a TTS software read the text aloud. This is very effective to spot problems that one might otherwise end up skipping when only reading. I wish one day CTE had this capability!

Just to get an impression. This is a typical CheckMate output with LT enabled:

> I didn't know that there are several ways to implement it

Just to avoid misunderstandings.

• OpenOffice Plug in (local)
  
• Chrome Plug in (online)
  
• OS plug in (online)
  
• API with local server running (local)
  

If I am not mistaken, these things behave differently. And there is not much sense in using the LT spellcheck if Hunspell + user dic is already being used.

LT is pretty good for Polish. It all depends what rules are entered for your target language. At least for now, and for a number of years before now, Polish rules have had a pretty good maintainer (not me :-) )