By Garvita Gahlot

Someone rightly said, "If you chase perfection, you often catch excellence”, as a translator or an interpreter, or even as a linguist, one always tries to achieve this perfection to the maximum possible extent. It takes days, months, and even years to translate texts to achieve that level of recognition. Also, one needs to be updated at all times with the ever-changing vocabulary and the new words that find their way to a language daily. This sometimes serves as a factor to slow down the translation process and hence deteriorates the business of a professional translator or an interpreter.

Modern times have brought in phenomenal changes in the field of translation with IT and CAT tools easing the process. However, before getting into the depth of these tools we need to break down the terminology.

CAT tools are Computer-aided/assisted translation tools. They are a type of software that helps the translator in the process of translation. It is important to understand the difference between machine translation and the use of these translation tools. Machine translation performs translation without a human translator’s presence. It does so by using artificial intelligence. On the other hand, CAT tools serve as a support system for a translator, but the requirement of a human translator is not eliminated. These tools will simply assist them in dealing with a huge amount of content and will manage, edit, and store translations that can be used by them in the future. They include a wide range of different features as they can work with different types of documents and provide access to online terminology databases or even help the translators to better manage translation memories.

The benefits of using CAT tools are:
1. They help in saving time of a translator so that he or she can work on a huge amount of content with potent ease since he/she can easily use the earlier translated terminologies from the databases readily available and saved by the software.
2. They are economical to use as some, and -by all means- not all the well-known CAT tools, which offer huge benefits are free of cost.
3. They help in providing extra stratum of quality assurance as we can instantly capture the formatting errors, term inconsistencies, missing numbers, and spelling mistakes. Hence, helping us conform to the predetermined quality standards.
4. No wonder, they are very useful in increasing the productivity and efficiency of the translators or linguists.

Though it is believed the initial aim of creating these tools was to replace human translators as against machine translations, it was soon realized that machine translations were costlier, slower, and even less accurate than human translations.

There are different types of CAT tools like
1. Translation memory software like SDL Trados Studio, Déjà Vu, Star Transit, Similis, etc which tend to divide the entire text into segments and then the segments are translated by the translator while these tools keep on saving the data in the termbase and by creating glossary dictionaries to be used in the future. Also, they allow the user to open a lot of different files through desktop publishing that is DTP. They save a lot of time by adjusting texts, realigning, and converting them back to the same file formats, so that, the translator can focus on the core activities.
2. Language search engine software like Linguee which is a multilingual dictionary seeks to provide a large database of translation memory, the translator can refer to the earlier translated text fragments to translate the text in hand.
3. There is also Terminology management software like Logiterm and Alignment software like YouAlign, Bitext2, etc which further ease out the process of translation.
4. Connected freelancer market CAT tools like SmartCAT allows the translators to find the clients easily and vice versa. Hence, they are huge time savers and productivity boosters.

CAT tools: Need of the hour
As a translator one needs to understand that in today's world which is full of technological advancements, being average is not an option anymore! One needs to thrive for excellence by bringing in quality content that possesses the ability to grab eyeballs and achieving recognition in the marketplace. This drives in huge profits as quality serves as the primary premise for a higher return on investments.
Additionally, CAT tools are one such opportunity which will no doubt help us as translators to bring in this change and be able to create a place for ourselves in today's market as these tools still seem to be a pristine opportunity by many language enthusiasts, translators, and even enterprises.

The motive as a translator should be, to ensure quality content, faster deal cracking, and faster overall results, and bringing in, efficiency in one's goals and to make them achievable and attainable.