Best Practices

The Must-Have Features of Modern CAT Tools

In today's fast-paced world of translation, efficiency and accuracy are paramount. This is where Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools come into play. These powerful software applications have revolutionized translation, enabling linguists to work faster and more effectively.

Lucky Eze

25 min

One of the key components of CAT tools is the Translation Memory (TM), a database that stores previously translated segments. Linguists can save time, manage translations, and maintain consistency across projects by leveraging this vast repository of previous translations. The TM automatically suggests or recalls similar translations, reducing the need for re-translation and ensuring high accuracy.

Moreover, modern CAT tools incorporate Machine Translation (MT) technology, further enhancing the translation process. Combining the human translator's expertise with automated computer-aided translation tools offers suggestions and alternatives, speeding up the workflow while maintaining the linguist's control over the final output.

CAT tools also provide project management features that allow efficient organization and coordination of translation projects. These tools streamline the entire translation workflow, from tracking progress to assigning tasks and managing deadlines.

In this blog post, we will explore the must-have features of modern CAT tools. We will delve into topics such as the integration of external language databases integrated with cat tool features, both translation memory and machine translation, the importance of project management capabilities, and the impact of these tools on the overall translation process. Join us as we uncover the tools that are revolutionizing the language industry.

The Importance of Modern CAT Tools

Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools have become increasingly indispensable to translation agencies. These sophisticated software applications offer a range of features and functionalities that significantly enhance the translation process. Let's explore the importance of modern CAT software tools and how they revolutionize translation projects.

One of the primary advantages of CAT tools is the incorporation of the Translation Memory feature (TM). This powerful feature allows translators to store and retrieve previously translated segments, ensuring project consistency and accuracy. By leveraging the TM, linguists can easily identify and reuse translations, saving time and effort. Accessing previous translations speeds up the translation process faster and guarantees consistency in terminology and style.

Modern CAT tools also integrate Machine Translation (MT) technology, further boosting efficiency. While human expertise remains crucial, machine and translation technology offers suggestions and alternatives, facilitating faster translation and reducing the workload. By combining the power of human linguists with automated computer-assisted translation software, CAT tools enable a more streamlined and productive workflow.

Also, CAT tools provide essential project management capabilities. These tools allow translators to organize and track the progress of translation projects efficiently. CAT tools ensure efficient collaboration and coordination among team members, from assigning tasks to managing deadlines. With a centralized platform for project management, translators can easily communicate and share resources, streamlining the overall workflow.

Modern CAT tools support various file formats, making them compatible with various content types. Whether it's documents, websites, or software localization, these tools can handle diverse translation projects seamlessly. They also offer features such as glossaries and terminology management, allowing translators to maintain consistency and accuracy throughout the translation process.

Key Features of Modern CAT Tools

A reliable CAT tool functions as the translator's trusted companion, providing invaluable assistance. An exceptional CAT tool serves as the human translator's most trusted ally and invaluable assistant. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools and functionalities, enhancing productivity, with language service providers ensuring accuracy and enabling seamless collaboration. The following are the must-have features of modern CAT tools.

User Friendly Interface

The importance of user-friendly interfaces in CAT and computer-assisted translation tools cannot be overstated. As professional translators rely heavily on these software applications, having an intuitive and efficient interface is essential to maximize productivity and ensure a seamless translation experience.

A user-friendly interface in CAT tools simplifies the translation process by providing clear navigation and easy-to-use features. Translators can quickly access the necessary functions and tools for translation jobs without wasting time on complex and convoluted menus. This allows them to focus on their core task of translating content rather than struggling with the tool.

Furthermore, a well-designed interface enhances the usability of translation memories (TMs) within CAT tools. TMs store previously translated segments, and a user-friendly interface makes it effortless for translators to search, retrieve, and apply these translations. This streamlines the workflow, increases consistency, and saves valuable time, as translators can leverage the knowledge captured in their TMs effortlessly.

Additionally, a user-friendly interface promotes the integration of machine translation (MT) within CAT tools. Translators can easily access MT suggestions and choose the most appropriate translations based on their expertise and target language. The interface allows for seamless collaboration between human translators and MT systems, improving translation quality and efficiency.

Moreover, a CAT tool with a user-friendly interface often includes quality assurance (QA) features. These features help identify potential errors, inconsistencies, and formatting issues in the translated content. The interface of an excellent cat tool makes it simple for translators to perform QA checks and ensure the final, computer-assisted translation tool's accuracy and quality.

Terminology Management

Terminology Management plays a vital role in ensuring accurate and consistent translations. CAT tools offer advanced features to manage terminology effectively, enhancing translation quality and productivity.

With CAT tools, translators can create and maintain comprehensive terminology databases that store industry-specific terms, phrases, and translations. These databases, known as translation memory management or memories, can be reused across projects, promoting consistency and saving time. Translators can quickly identify and apply previously translated segments to new texts by utilizing translation memories, reducing redundant work.

Additionally, CAT tools integrate with machine translation engines, offering suggestions based on pre-existing translations stored in the translation memories. Combining translation memories and machine translation results in more accurate and efficient translations.

Terminology Management also plays a crucial role in quality assurance. CAT tools can verify if the translated terms match the approved terminologies, flagging potential inconsistencies or errors. This ensures that translations adhere to specific client requirements and industry standards.

Integration with Machine Translation (MT)

CAT tools now come equipped with integrated MT engines, which provide instant translation suggestions based on pre-existing translations and vast linguistic data. This integration enables translators to leverage the power of MT to expedite their work while maintaining accuracy.

By combining the strengths of human expertise and machine efficiency, CAT tools with MT integration offer a powerful translation solution. Translators can quickly review and edit machine-generated suggestions, utilizing them as a starting point to ensure precise and contextually appropriate translations.

Integration with MT also aids in handling large volumes of text. Translators can process vast amounts of content more efficiently, resulting in increased productivity and shorter turnaround times.

However, it's important to note that while MT integration offers numerous benefits, it does not replace the role of professional translators. Human linguistic expertise is still critical for ensuring the final translation's nuances, cultural context, and quality.

Translation memory

Continuing our discussion on the essential features of modern CAT tools, another critical capability that professional translators highly value is integration with Translation Memory (TM). CAT tools are designed to work seamlessly with translation memories and databases storing previously translated segments. This integration allows translators to leverage existing translations, ensuring consistency and saving time.

Using translation memory, CAT tools can automatically identify and retrieve previously translated segments when encountering similar or identical content. This eliminates the need for translators to retranslate repetitive or recurring phrases, improving efficiency and maintaining consistency across projects.

Furthermore, the integration with TM enables translators to update and expand their databases as they work on new projects. This ensures that their translations are continuously captured and can be reused for future assignments.

CAT tools also offer advanced functionalities such as fuzzy matching, allowing partial matches in the translation memory. This feature is particularly useful when dealing with similar but not identical segments, providing suggestions that the translator can quickly adapt.

Glossary Management

Glossary Management refers to the ability of CAT tools to handle and maintain comprehensive glossaries, which are lists of specialized terms and their corresponding translations. This feature ensures accuracy, consistency, and adherence to specific terminology requirements.

Glossary Management allows translators to create and update customized glossaries tailored to their specific domains. These glossaries are a reference, providing translators with approved translations for industry-specific terms and phrases. CAT tools with Glossary Management capabilities offer real-time assistance to translators during the translation process. As they work, translators can rely on the glossary management system to access accurate and consistent translations for frequently used terms, reducing the risk of errors or inconsistencies.

Additionally, glossaries can be shared across translation teams, ensuring consistency in terminology and promoting collaboration. This is particularly valuable for large-scale translation projects involving multiple translators and subject matter experts. CAT tools with Glossary Management allow for term validation, ensuring that translations conform to the approved glossary. This feature helps maintain the quality and accuracy of translations, reducing the need for manual review and revisions.

Collaboration and Workflow Management

CAT tools now offer robust collaboration features to facilitate collaboration among translators, project managers, and other stakeholders involved in the translation process. These tools allow multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously, promoting efficient teamwork and streamlining the workflow.

With Collaboration and Workflow Management features, CAT tools enable translators to collaborate in real time. They can assign specific tasks, track progress, and share resources, ensuring seamless coordination and effective communication throughout the translation project.

CAT tools also provide centralized platforms where project managers can oversee and manage the translation process. They can assign tasks, monitor deadlines, and access real-time updates on the progress of individual translators or teams. This centralized approach enhances project management efficiency, reduces administrative overhead, and ensures the timely delivery of high-quality translations.

Furthermore, modern CAT tools often integrate with other collaboration tools and platforms, such as cloud-based storage or project management software, allowing for smooth data exchange and seamless integration into existing workflows. By incorporating Collaboration and Workflow Management features, CAT tools empower translators and project managers to work together efficiently, fostering collaboration, enhancing productivity, and ultimately delivering outstanding translation results.

Concordance Search

Concordance Search is a powerful tool that allows translators to search through their translation memories for specific words, phrases, or segments. This feature provides quick and easy access to previous translations containing the desired search term, facilitating consistency and improving accuracy.

With Concordance Search, translators can analyze how specific terms or phrases were previously translated in different contexts. This helps maintain consistency and ensures that translations align with established terminology and client preferences.

The feature also aids in quality control by allowing translators to review their previous translations and identify potential errors or inconsistencies. By leveraging Concordance Search, translators can avoid repeating past mistakes and deliver more accurate and reliable translations. Concordance Search enhances productivity by enabling translators to find relevant translations quickly. They can leverage pre-existing translations as a starting point, saving time and effort when working on similar content or subject matters.

Batch Processing

Batch Processing allows translators to efficiently handle large volumes of content by automating repetitive tasks. This feature allows translators to process multiple files simultaneously, saving significant time and effort. CAT tools with Batch Processing capabilities enable translators to import and export files in various formats, such as Word documents, Excel sheets, or PowerPoint presentations. They can apply the same translation process to multiple files at once, ensuring consistency and reducing the need for manual input.

By automating repetitive tasks like file formatting, segmenting, or pre-translation, Batch Processing streamlines the translation workflow and increases productivity. Translators can focus on the translation work while the CAT tool handles the technical aspects.

Reporting and Analytics

CAT tools equipped with Reporting and Analytics features provide valuable insights into translation projects. Translators can generate comprehensive reports and analyze key metrics for translation management systems, such as word count, translation progress, and project timelines.

These features enable project managers to monitor the status of ongoing projects, identify bottlenecks, and allocate resources effectively. Translators can evaluate their performance, track productivity, and make informed decisions to improve efficiency.

Reporting and Analytics functionalities also provide valuable data for cost estimation, project planning, and resource allocation. Project managers can make data-driven decisions and optimize translation workflows by analyzing trends and patterns. These features facilitate collaboration and communication within translation teams by providing clear visibility into project status and progress. Translators and project managers can share reports and discuss findings to ensure effective coordination and successful project completion.

Quality Assurance (QA)

QA tools integrated into CAT translation tools help identify and correct errors in real time, improving the overall quality of translations. They also check for inconsistencies in terminology usage, ensuring adherence to specific glossaries or client preferences. CAT tools with QA features allow translators to perform comprehensive quality checks on their translations before delivering the final product. This helps reduce the risk of errors, enhances translation accuracy, and maintains professional standards.

Additionally, the QA features in CAT tools can be customized to specific industry standards or client requirements. Translators can set up their preferred QA checks, creating a personalized quality assurance process that aligns with their needs.

Conclusion

Modern CAT tools have become essential for translators in today's fast-paced world of translation. Incorporating Translation Memory (TM) and Machine Translation (MT) technology ensures efficiency and accuracy, allowing linguists to work faster and more effectively. Project management features streamline the workflow and facilitate collaboration among team members. User-friendly interfaces, terminology management, glossary management, collaboration and workflow management, concordance search, batch processing, reporting and analytics, and quality assurance are must-have features that make modern CAT tools indispensable for translators. These tools have revolutionized the language industry, enhancing productivity and delivering high-quality translations.

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Collaborative translation is a powerful tool for your business if you’re looking to expand to new global markets. By coordinating a team of professionals who work together in real-time, you can quickly deliver high quality translations that resonate with local audiences.

But what if you don't know how to synchronize a large team's efforts? Or are you‌ struggling to find the right software for a well-coordinated translation process? Well, look no further! In this guide, you'll learn all the know-how's of collaborative translation to bring your brand to global audiences.

Overview

What is collaborative translation?
Why seamless translation collaboration is important
Best practices for collaborative translation and global market success

What is collaborative translation?

Collaborative translation is when multiple people simultaneously work together to translate content. A collaborative translation process often makes use of specialized tools and software to make sure the translation is quick, accurate, and consistent.

Example: Let's say you're a B2B SaaS company looking to translate your marketing materials into a new language to connect with potential clients abroad. Use collaborative translation to bring together translators, developers, and other specialists to translate content into many languages at once.

Your team can use a collaborative translation platform like Redokun to work on projects simultaneously. A coordinated workflow will make sure that your translations use the same terminology and style, improving the quality of the translated product for your target audiences.

Collaborative Translation vs. Crowdsourcing

People often confuse collaborative translation with crowdsourcing and think the two are the same. However, these approaches to translation are different.

Crowdsourcing is when a large group of people contributes translations, often through an open call or invitation by a company or author. Brands can turn to crowdsourcing, community translation, or volunteer translation when they are looking to reduce costs and accelerate the process, especially for large multi-language projects.

In crowdsourced translations, the contributors can be volunteer translators, subject matter experts, or just anonymous individuals online. In other words, you may not know who's worked on the translation and what their qualifications are. It makes crowdsourcing distinct from collaborative translation, where the team would be an established group of professionals you've selected

Why seamless translation collaboration is important

As a busy B2B/B2C marketing manager or project manager, you might ask yourself: Isn't the "divide and conquer" a better strategy when working on a translation or localization project? It seems logical that each project team member, including translators, designers, and editors, works on their tasks separately and step by step.

However, collaborative translation can help your team reap many benefits compared to a traditional approach to translation projects:

Reasons why seamless translation collaboration is important

Produce high-quality translations consistently. When your whole team works on a translation project simultaneously on one platform, it's easier to stay in context and keep track of the translation accuracy for every target language. On top of that, your team can conduct agile QA throughout the project cycle.
‍Faster turnaround times. By working together, your team can complete projects faster and more efficiently. Centralization saves a lot of time at every stage of translation. And since your team can work on more than one translation at a time, you can publish your translated content in several new markets at once.
‍Reduced costs. You get to improve efficiency while working with a smaller team of translators. The smaller and more coordinated the team, the less the risk of costly translation errors. It means reduced translation costs and better project budget compliance.
‍Increased flexibility. Collaborative translation allows your team to produce translations into many languages at once and easily make changes to any project document. You can conveniently engage in a feedback loop and guarantee a continuous localization process.
‍Better communication. Collaborative translation effectively brings all members of your localization team together on one platform. It helps you make sure that everyone is working toward the same goals ‌and simplifies overall localization management.

Six best practices for collaborative translation and global market success

To be great at collaborative translation, you need to approach it strategically. Even if you've never used this approach before, you can follow the six steps below to build an efficient collaborative translation workflow. And if you're already familiar with this method, these practices will help you improve the way you collaborate on any translation projects.

Six best practices for collaborative translation for your global business success

1. Work out a detailed project plan

Before you start working on translations together, you need a clear-cut project plan. You should first identify the following items.

Project timeline: Define crucial deadlines, project milestones, and the overall project duration.
Translation volume and key deliverables: Calculate the general word count, and determine the workload for every language pair if you translate into multiple languages.
Project budget: Keep in mind possible added and hidden translation costs.
Project team: Define what kind of specialists you need: translators, editors, proofreaders, etc. Will you need to find external translators? Consider all your HR needs in advance.
Your approach to the translation process: How much do you want to rely on machine translation? At what point will you edit translated strings? Answer all these questions before you go on.
Quality assurance protocol: Establish an efficient QA procedure for all the language pairs you're working on.

It may sound like a handful but the more detailed the plan, the more streamlined the translations will be down the road. Besides, you can already use Redokun to boost this stage of the localization process!

Redokun is a translation management system you can use to automate, coordinate, and optimize your translation processes from content creation to publication.

Redokun simplifies your project planning. In particular, you can use the tool to:

Monitor your ongoing translations easily. Keep track of all of your translation files and projects across multiple languages in one space, and check their progress at a glance.

Meet deadlines with digest emails. Redokun will send you daily or weekly email digests to update you on the progress of translations. From there, you can initiate one-click reminders to your translators who are potentially falling behind schedule.
Making budget planning easier. Redokun has a transparent, scalable pricing structure that will cover exactly the volume of work your project needs.

Redokun is an easy-to-use tool that requires no onboarding. Your team can start using all the system’s features right away. During your project planning stage, you won’t need to factor in a lengthy training period to introduce team members to the tool.

2. Divide tasks and assign responsibilities the smart way

Good collaboration is impossible without a well-planned distribution and organization of roles and tasks. Ensure that every team member is on the same page and understands their respective responsibilities.

For example, the project managers should divide ‌translation tasks among translation team members according to their language proficiency, area of expertise, or subject matter knowledge.

On Redokun, you can invite translators to work on different language pairs and content types depending on their skills. All you need to do is enter the translator's email. The software will send them an email invitation and let you know once they've started translating the file.
You can also invite several translators to work on one document.

To maximize the efficiency of project management and task division, establish a clear structure of your workflow. Make sure all your pages, files, and folders are well organized and team members know where to find necessary resources for their respective tasks. A centralized, cloud-based storage for all your documents is a must.

Redokun is a cloud-based software that makes file management easy. You can create folders and customize permission settings for multiple users for better organization. No more need to look for spreadsheets and lost documents scattered around different digital locations.
Don't forget to make the most of the Reporting Dashboard. It shows you the status of the translation project and helps you see how users distribute tasks (for example, what methods they use to translate different content segments).

Redokun Dashboard with translation statistics

3. Enhance the collaborative translation process with clear communication

It's important to have open communication channels among all team members in your translation project, including internal and external translators. For a successful collaboration effort, you need a shared communication space to:

Conduct regular check-ins.
Discuss translation options and other aspects of the working process.
Update and adjust requirements and guidelines.
Maintain feedback loops.

It's up to you to choose between email, messengers, or tools like Google Drive or Slack to keep your collboarative operations flowing. However, using multiple channels for different aspects of the project can get messy. It's harder to manage your team and make sure all collaborators are up to date on the ongoing translation tasks.

You can avoid these potential problems by centralizing all your communications and project management. With translation software like Redokun, you can manage, translate, communicate, and collaborate — all in one place.

Translate content in context. Your translators or editors can use page previews in Web Editor to understand the context of the text while working on it.
Work together in real-time. Use Redokun as a full-scale collaborative translation platform. It enables real-time cooperation among your team members, improving efficiency and reducing communication errors.
Use comments, mentions, and notifications to exchange feedback quickly. Redokun's Web Editor is a convenient place to stay in touch and discuss your translation progress every step of the way.

Create a hybrid workflow. Work with your in-house teams or external translators to suit different localization project formats and scalability needs.

4. Use machine translation and translation memory tools

Computer-assisted translation tools are a great addition to human translation. Machine translation (MT) helps your collaborators speed up the localization process by automating translation. Of course, it doesn't have the quality of a human professional translation — it’s more like a helping hand that's always there to facilitate the translation of complex phrases or new terms.

Redokun is integrated with two Machine Translation tools: Google Translate and DeepL. Translation suggestions by these two tools pop up right below where the translator should key in the translation, as shown here.

To enhance collaboration even further, consider using translation memory tools. They ensure consistency and save translation software users a lot of time.

Translation memory (TM) is a translation technology that stores previously translated sentences or phrases as segments and creates a unique database for your localization projects. You can reuse your translation to increase efficiency and consistency in ongoing and future translations.

With Redokun as your collaborative translation platform, you can leverage TM to:

Consistently translate any repeated word, phrase, or sentence across different language pairs and documents. It's especially important for translating technical terms, marketing slogans, CTAs, and other catchphrases. Translation memory helps you stay consistent in your marketing messaging.
Pre-translate your entire documents. Combine TM matches from your previous translations with Machine Translation to get a fully pre-translated document even before your team gets to work.
Manage your translation memory database. Import and customize your TM database to further improve translation quality and consistency.

”The speed of translation is quite impressive in that it doesn’t take [much time], maybe a couple of minutes when you translate from English to eight markets. I think that’s what I’m most impressed by.”

Read more about how Kenni and the marketing team at Rockfon increased their translation productivity by 70% using translation memories and other Redokun features here.

5. Use glossaries and style guides

Glossaries and style guides are valuable resources your team can use for reliable reference.

A glossary is a list of terms and their corresponding translations that are specific to a company or industry.

A style guide outlines the preferred tone, voice, and style for a company's marketing materials across markets and languages.

Your collaborators can refer to these resources when they’re not sure about a translation. For example is when they're deciding how to translate a company abbreviation, whether to the Oxford comma, or choosing the right tone to address customers, etc. No more ambiguity about linguistic, stylistic, and cultural aspects of your translations.

Use Redokun's glossary feature to create a glossary and style guide that outlines rules for spelling, grammar, punctuation, terminology, and tone specific to your project.

6. Continuously review and revise

A key benefit of a collaborative translation platform is the ability to review and revise translations in an agile and efficient manner. By involving multiple specialists in the process of editing and QA, you can guarantee accuracy and consistency in the translated content at every stage of the project.

To implement effective review and revision procedures in your collaborative translation projects, it is important to:

Plan for review and revision in advance. Identify who will be responsible, set the timeline, and use specific tools.
Consider involving in-country reviewers who are familiar with the local market and culture to ensure that the translations are accurate and appropriate for the target audience.
Perform regular QA checks. They should include consistency in terminology and formatting, and verify that the translations are free from grammatical errors and typos.

Pro-tip: Ever experienced the headache of having to update a translation that’s already 70% done when there is a last-minute change to the source document?

With Redokun’s revision feature, you don’t have to spend hours poring over Excel sheets and comparing files to spot the places where new words have been added or sentences have been changed. Just upload the latest document version and the system will identify new text that needs translating — saving your team’s time and effort while keeping previous translations intact.

Summary

Collaborative translation is an excellent approach if you want to improve the consistency of your translations, reduce costs, and establish a strong presence in global markets.

The key to seamless collaboration is a combination of careful planning, role distribution, agile QA, and smart use of translation software.

Make Redokun part of your collaborative translation efforts and enhance the pace of your global business growth‌. Start your 14-day free trial today and benefit from a quicker and more streamlined translation workflow.

Till next time,

Anastasia

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Lucky Eze

Lucky Ezeihuaku is an SEO expert and specialist Translation content writer with Bureau Works. He has a master’s degree in English and Literature, and has been writing professionally for at least 7 years. He has gone on to specialize in the Translation and Localization niche, churning out multiple quality, informative, and optimized articles for Bureau Works over the past year. He claims writing and developing SEO strategies keeps him going, and he’s also interested in Data Analytics.