I’m working on a large translation project. Legal documents, scanned pdf files, not really suitable for OCR (too many stamps, signatures and handwritten text). The documents are repetitive, but without major blocks of identical text, although a few occasional sentences appear almost unchanged on different parts of different files.

This is exactly the kind of project (minus the “scanned pdf, not really suitable for OCR” part) that CAT tools were invented for. I’m translating these documents with the pdf open on the left of the screen, and MS Word on the right. My fingers itch for the concordance and filter shortcuts, but that is not possible here: I cannot really search the source (although there is a way to do it… more about that later), and while I can search the files I have already translated, I cannot perform a real concordance search.

This is the way we all translated up to a little over twenty years ago, when CAT tools were first introduced. More.

See: About Translation

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