help 10000 items / automatic translation
Thread poster: edobarz (X)
edobarz (X)
edobarz (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 18:46
Arabic to Italian
+ ...
Jul 11, 2017

Hi,

I'm looking for some advice to find a quick way of finishing a translation of around 10000 items.
each entry can have several words in it.
Me and my colleagues have been doing item by item manual translation in excel but we need to finish still around 5000 items.
Do you know how we could use TMs to speed up the job?
The items that are ready could easily go inside a TM, but all the items are different, so even if some words return quite often, Wordfast can
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Hi,

I'm looking for some advice to find a quick way of finishing a translation of around 10000 items.
each entry can have several words in it.
Me and my colleagues have been doing item by item manual translation in excel but we need to finish still around 5000 items.
Do you know how we could use TMs to speed up the job?
The items that are ready could easily go inside a TM, but all the items are different, so even if some words return quite often, Wordfast can't leverage much for each entry.
e.g.
black shoes model "beach" patches white
red shoes model "streetart" cotton

So as you can see some words come back but you don't have two lines that look the same.
I'd like to know if there is a way of automatising this demanding and extremely boring translation.

Thank you very much to whoever can suggest some help.

P.S. we translate from french to Arabic so some programs might not work with Arabic
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Erik Freitag
Erik Freitag  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 18:46
Member (2006)
Dutch to German
+ ...
Fragment matching Jul 11, 2017

This sounds like an ideal scenario for the fragment matching function that Trados Studio 2017 offers. I don't know whether Wordfast has anything similar.

[Edited at 2017-07-11 13:40 GMT]


 
Lianne van de Ven
Lianne van de Ven  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 13:46
Member (2008)
English to Dutch
+ ...
SDL Trados Studio Jul 11, 2017

I am only familiar with SDL Trados Studio and Wordfast. WF Pro (3) can't do this. I once did a fashion catalogue with tons of small variations in descriptions in Wordfast and it was a LOT of work.

SDL Trados Studio can easily do this with autosuggest and using machine translation in addition to your TM. Using a TM for Fragment Matching requires a TM of at least 5000 entries, but autosuggest alone should work if you enable machine translation as a source as well. It will sugg
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I am only familiar with SDL Trados Studio and Wordfast. WF Pro (3) can't do this. I once did a fashion catalogue with tons of small variations in descriptions in Wordfast and it was a LOT of work.

SDL Trados Studio can easily do this with autosuggest and using machine translation in addition to your TM. Using a TM for Fragment Matching requires a TM of at least 5000 entries, but autosuggest alone should work if you enable machine translation as a source as well. It will suggest words as you type. I am not sure if a trial version limits the TM size, and of course it takes some time getting used to SDL Studio.
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Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 17:46
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
MT or TM? Jul 12, 2017

Lianne van de Ven wrote:
SDL Trados Studio can easily do this with autosuggest and using machine translation in addition to your TM.

I think all CAT tools have something equivalent to autosuggest. I know my dear old, and rather "light", Wordfast Classic can leverage MT in addition to my TM. But surely the poster was wanting to leverage their own TMs, weren't they? If they've already used terms other than the often-suspect ones that MT would suggest, then all they're going to achieve is something to delete before translating.

I used to translate a fashion catalogue that was very repetitive as they clearly used a copywriter with no flair for the job at all. However, every entry had too many differences to make TUs useful. In fact, it looked very much like what you're translating, edobarz. I found the only useful thing - and it can be very useful - was to create glossary/termbase entries for absolutely everything, both as single words (black, red, shoes) and as common combinations, so maybe I'd also have entries for black shoes, leather shoes, etc. That way, the CAT tool would always have something relevant to propose. It got to the point where there were very few words that it didn't prompt me for at all. Mind you, it wasn't the same as an almost-one-click operation that an 85% fuzzy would have given, but you have to go with what you're given.

Unfortunately, a glossary/termbase is something that either evolves over time, or it takes a fair amount of time to set it up at the start. So whether it would save you time on this job that's already half completed, I'm not so sure.


 
Michael Wetzel
Michael Wetzel  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 18:46
German to English
Excel's find and replace function? Jul 12, 2017

I don't know how well Excel's find-and-replace function works, because I've never used it, but I often use find and replace in Word for similar situations. Like any automated process, you have to be able to "empathize" with your computer to avoid ending up with a lot of nonsense and you have to be very careful checking the results, but it works well for me.

 
edobarz (X)
edobarz (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 18:46
Arabic to Italian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
thanks Jul 12, 2017

Thank you for all your replies

I think that the glossary could have been a good solution to speed -up manual translation if we did that from the start, but at the point where we are now, I'm not sure it'll be useful.
The ideal thing would be to automatise the process by using Machine translation on everything that we have, using our Translation memory as base.

Is there any possibility of creating a glossary and having the program do the translation from the glossa
... See more
Thank you for all your replies

I think that the glossary could have been a good solution to speed -up manual translation if we did that from the start, but at the point where we are now, I'm not sure it'll be useful.
The ideal thing would be to automatise the process by using Machine translation on everything that we have, using our Translation memory as base.

Is there any possibility of creating a glossary and having the program do the translation from the glossary items? (but I'm already afraid the answer is no)
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Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT
Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 18:46
Member (2005)
English to Spanish
+ ...
MT not a good idea at all! Jul 12, 2017

We in my office here translate similar lines on a daily basis for a garment manufacturer and all I can say is that using MT with items such as the one you propose would be a severe mistake. Short, multi-noun, multi-adjective items demand careful attention from a professional translator. MT would make such a mess of it!!

Do whatever you wish, but never MT on such short, condensed items.


 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 17:46
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
You can't "train" MT Jul 12, 2017

Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT wrote:
Short, multi-noun, multi-adjective items demand careful attention from a professional translator. MT would make such a mess of it!!

Whenever it comes up with a daft suggestion - as it will, often - it's going to repeat that same drivel time and time again. It's not going to learn. Unless you inform GT of the better translation (in your context - it might not be better in another context) but why on earth would we, professional translators, want to go out of our way to improve a free "competitor", however lousy it is at the moment?

edobarz wrote:
Is there any possibility of creating a glossary and having the program do the translation from the glossary items? (but I'm already afraid the answer is no)

Is that perhaps what gets done in a pre-translate stage of processing if/when you use a CAT tool? I'm not sure as I've never used mine, but I thought it was probably something like that.


 
Lianne van de Ven
Lianne van de Ven  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 13:46
Member (2008)
English to Dutch
+ ...
Clarification Jul 12, 2017

Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT wrote:

We in my office here translate similar lines on a daily basis for a garment manufacturer and all I can say is that using MT with items such as the one you propose would be a severe mistake. Short, multi-noun, multi-adjective items demand careful attention from a professional translator. MT would make such a mess of it!!

Do whatever you wish, but never MT on such short, condensed items.


I am not sure if this is partially in response to my comment about using MT and autosuggest, but what I mean is that MT can be used as a "dictionary" where for example "blue" in the source is recognized so that when you type "b", autosuggest suggests "blauw" (in Dutch). This is not a mindless machine translation. It does speed up manual typing.
Editing a MT is a completely different thing and rather time-consuming imho. And of course you need to be aware of wrong suggestions. MT used in this way can be very useful.


 
Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT
Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 18:46
Member (2005)
English to Spanish
+ ...
The ideal approach on memoQ Jul 12, 2017

Using memoQ, I reckon that the ideal approach would be to begin work on the long list of strings and keep adding termbase entries with the individual pieces of meaning (be it nouns, compound nouns, adjectives...). Not only memoQ will help in proposing reusable strings and will show very clearly what to do no them to produce a new string, but its Match Patch feature will replace items automatically to reduce the workload of translating the items.

Such approach has worked beautifully
... See more
Using memoQ, I reckon that the ideal approach would be to begin work on the long list of strings and keep adding termbase entries with the individual pieces of meaning (be it nouns, compound nouns, adjectives...). Not only memoQ will help in proposing reusable strings and will show very clearly what to do no them to produce a new string, but its Match Patch feature will replace items automatically to reduce the workload of translating the items.

Such approach has worked beautifully for me in similar situations (e.g. a list of 10,000 different tools), although it takes a lot of adding to the termbase at the beginning. In any case, whatever you add to the termbase you can keep for the long run too, so it is work that pays in the long run.
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