English CAT: find a faster way to get your translation job done!

Computer-Aided Translation, or its another variant - Computer-Assisted Translation is the very possible way to make any kind of human language translation more comfortable and thus more professional (to my mind).

Everyone's from time to time looking for something special and perhaps unique in order to master a foreign language first, and then to show as a pro in the field of translation; but very few tried something in the field and attained something real...

9/12/08

What would one know and what’s needed for that?

CAT wasn’t born yesterday and that’s why there are very many terms related to or born with it; moreover, there’s a good deal of them one cannot grasp without some specific contexts.

Indeed, notions, techonologies and definitions one could recall in connection to CAT are more than enough. I must say it is not the subject of this publication, nothing like that, instead I’d like to highlight a few questions, which everyone is trying to solve by himself and quietly. A reader may ask: “why should I try a question that may never ever touch me on?”.

The questions are of level like Comparative Linguistcs and, sure, almost none of them draws attention of an ordinary translator or developer; but this is not true when it comes to CAT technologies. One of the most annoying bottlenecks starts slamming one’s brains in the event there’s a need to explain one language grammar feature with and by means of another. The most crucial point lies in the complete absence or partial inconsistency of the language pair phenomena.

For example, if there’s a pretty Chinese lass trying to hint at what a Chinese measure word is she has to dig up such English equivalents like ‘dozen’, ‘piece’, ‘pair’ and put them forward in the proper context.

The other way around, some native Russian speaking penpal is briefing his or her Chinese speaking company on what a Russian future participle is, he (or she) should be able to operate, ate least, Russian grammar Tense, Aspect, Mood, Person, etc.

Both of these examples have one thing in common: any case student is to understand at some basic level what is what in the grammar of the language he studies. It is also clear that learning a grammar is boring and it gets impossible with no active vocabulary at all. Here comes the answer put as the title to this article: the grammar as well as vocabulary.



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