After the installation of CafeTran Espresso, prepare your source language document for the translation and follow these steps:
- Run CafeTran. The Dashboard window is displayed.
- In the Dashboard, select your language pair for the translation.
- Select your favorite Internet resources for translation in the "Free web resources and images" panel of the Dashboard. For example, you can choose Google Translate, Microsoft Bing Translator and DeepL machine translation there.
- Click the "New" button and choose the source language document in the File Chooser. Alternatively, you can drag and drop the source language document to the Dashboard window instead of selecting it via the File Chooser.
- In the "Project Configuration" panel, accept the default settings and click the "Finish" button. The Translation board opens showing the segmented source language text and the selected resources in the tabs. For non-Latin based languages, you may need to change the default font to display all the characters correctly. It can be done via the menu View > Font.
- The first sentence to translate appears in the source segment editor. The translation for this segment is given in the target segment editor below.
- The Matchboard panel displays the machine translation (MT) results and the matches from the translation memories used in the previous projects. Since this is your first project, you can see only the machine translation from the default online MyMemory MT service connected via CafeTran if the MT service supports your language pair. Click (or select with the mouse) at the best result in the Matchboard to transfer it to the target segment editor.
- Additionally, you can use the machine translation services opened as Web resources in the tabs (e.g Google Translate, DeepL or Microsoft Bing Translator). First select a tab showing the given MT resource and set the language pair on its website. Next, click at the source language text area on the MT website to tell CafeTran where to paste the source text. Finally, click the Translate button in the source segment editor's toolbar. To transfer the translation from the MT website to the target segment editor, click the Transfer MT button next to the Translate button.
- Of course, you can type your translation in the target segment editor directly instead of using any machine translations.
- Formatting such as bold, underline and italics, if present, can be transferred from the source language segment via the numbered red tags. Just type the tag's number and press the Esc key. The number will convert to the formatting tag.
- Click the Next button in the target segment editor's toolbar. This action adds your translation to the translation memory (TM) called ProjectTM and takes the next sentence to the source segment editor.
- Anytime during the translation process, you can export the project back to the original format (e.g. Ms Word) clicking the Export button in the segments grid toolbar. Alternatively, you can export your project via the menu Project > Export and exchange > Export current document.
- To preview currently-translated segment in the original document, please connect CafeTran to LibreOffice suite as described here. This is an optional feature.
Congratulations! You've just learned the main CafeTran workflow using the resources such as Machine Translation web services.