CafeTran

I received this question and since I don't have any experience with the topic, I want to publish the question here:

"I have been undertaking a Masters TCLoc over the last couple of years and I'm working on the thesis at the moment. The topic is related to Text to Speech technologies in a CAT.  A thought occurred to me this afternoon that perhaps CafeTran's users already make good use of this kind of technology when working on a MAC since TTS is available out of the box and supports a decent number of languages.

(I'll make sure that the poser of this question gets a link to this posting.)

Thank you in advance for your kind answers!

Text-to-speech is my second favorite technology after speech-to-text :)

I use it a lot, but not in CafeTran and, most of the time, not in macOS but in a Windows virtual machine. 

I almost never deliver my translations without listening to them. This way, I spot any typos and unnatural phrasing. Such a proofreading is also much easier on the eyes.

I prefer Windows voices for two reasons:

1. Mac does not have a Ukrainian voice. (Windows does neither, but there is a very good third party program.)
2. Russian voices do not handle well the text surrounded with formatting tags, and [b]текст[/b] will be read in some incomprehensible manner. The computer might think it's in English.

The advantage of Mac Speech is that you can select text in almost any program. AFAIK, Windows voices work in Office 365 only. So for other languages macOS TTS could be a good option.

My preferred program for TTS is MS Excel in Windows. I select the whole column and the voice reads it to me, navigating automatically from row to row. While listening to it, I look at either the source or the target text. (Ideally, these are two separate sessions.)

To get the text in Excel, I export/download the file as a bilingual rtf from a CAT-tool and then copy all the columns into Excel. It's better if the file for translation is in Excel, which happens quite often.

I believe CafeTran has a great potential in this area if it could incorporate TTS into its Autopilot function in Windows and/or macOS. This would allow checking and correcting the file before exporting it — with a similar hands-free workflow I now use in Excel.

I believe CafeTran has a great potential in this area if it could incorporate TTS into its Autopilot function...

For me, CTE's Autopilot without TTS is pretty useless when proofreading my work. In fact, I never used it except when it was first introduced to see how it worked. It's an excellent idea, but alas incomplete (in my opinion) for its intended purpose. 

 

I agree with you that Autopilot is an excellent idea, but incomplete.

I've checked the last couple of large projects with Autopilot, since it's easier to read the fonts in CafeTran than in memoQ or Excel. And its hands-free mode is quite relaxing. I thought of TTS the very first time I saw this feature.

Just to bring it up again, I'd like to point to this thread with all my suggestions: https://cafetran.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/6000061227

It would be a great advantage to correct everything without leaving the program/exporting the file. So I really hope Igor can look into it! It would save us TTS users many hours of time.