CAT tools are increasingly used in the world of translation, to the point of becoming essential for specialized professional translators. In 2013, a survey of 3,000 professional translators showed that SDL Trados was the most widely used CAT tool in the translation market, representing a 72% market share, which is even higher than the market share of other CAT tools reunited. The survey also revealed that SDL Trados was ironically the most disliked tool, even though it was used by 43.2% of translators surveyed. At that time, Wordfast and MemoQ were in second and third place, representing a market share of about 36% and 25% respectively.
So, the question is whether these trends will change in the future of CAT. Will SDL Trados remain the most used CAT tool for translators, with some CAT tools like MemoQ, Wordfast or SDLX far behind? Will CAT be able to be used in all fields of expertise one day? And will it become even more successful or will it be overtaken by other tools, such as MT?
Current Use of CAT Tools: Can They Go Further?
Professional translators know this pretty well; the more repetitive the text, the more useful CAT is. For instance, textual genres such as technical manuals, websites, financial reports or statements, press releases, certain standard contracts, legislative procedures or documents related to the operation of a business can be quickly translated using CAT tools. Thus, it allows professional translators to improve the quality of their work and their productivity. Nevertheless, the advantage of CAT can also be its drawback, as some consider it useless when faced with a text with a very low repetition rate.
Therefore, several factors influence the suitability of CAT tools. However, remember that CAT remains helpful for other types of texts thanks to the terminology databases, the possibility of preserving the text format or the integrated quality control options. CAT will therefore surely continue to play a key role in the translation of repetitive documents, and prove to be an asset in other areas.
On the other hand, there are still a few fields of expertise for which CAT isn’t well developed yet. This is the case for audiovisual translation, including subtitling, and video game localization, despite being fast-growing markets. Indeed, most CAT tools aren’t yet able to overcome and deal with common problems in audiovisual translation, such as video formats, certain language-specific characters, or dialogue splitting in the CAT tools views, as their interfaces aren’t yet adapted to audiovisual translation.
In 2019, an experiment was conducted with 8 participants, including younger and older professional translators, who experienced the effectiveness of Memsource and MemoQ in video game localization. It revealed that CAT isn’t ideal for audiovisual translation, but it’s also not completely useless. To begin with, CAT can improve the productivity of at least one type of video game: simulation games. These games are likely to contain repetition and technical terms, and CAT features such as area-specific terminology databases are perfectly designed for this purpose. Besides, as the study showed, Memsource offers the ability to add a character limit, which is an important characteristic of audiovisual translation. In addition, the XLIFF format of CAT tools makes it easier to pass some texts through the interface, which is very helpful when localizing video games. Last but not least, some CAT features such as the spellchecker or the Quality Assurance checker shouldn’t be overlooked when it comes to saving time.
So, in any case, CAT helps to eliminate errors and get organized, and it can make up for certain contextual difficulties that video games present. Some CAT tools are incorporating more features to help with audiovisual translation, so I think this will add value to CAT and its use in this area won’t be pointless in the future.
What CAT Can Do to Improve in the Future
Although CAT is an increasingly comprehensive tool, it obviously has room for improvement. For example, the process of matching and retrieval of source and target segments isn’t always easy in translation memories, while being the main functionality of CAT. Based on my limited experience, it’s true that SDL Trados may not recognize matches between the source and the target language when the translation memory segmentation is done by paragraph or sentence, as illustrated below.
In this regard, the CATaLog Online tool has proposed a feature using a new intra-segment color coding scheme that highlights matching and irrelevant fragments in the suggested translation memory segments.
Every CAT tool is different, but some are more complicated to use, and the features may be hard to find because of the interface or the display that can be small. The presentation of the CAT tools interface could therefore be improved, and the use of its functionality could be facilitated. In any case, it’s necessary to have professional training on CAT to be able to use it efficiently.
Can CAT Be Overtaken by Machine Translation?
Nowadays, Machine Translation can easily be considered one of the most powerful translation tools along with CAT. Nonetheless, while almost everyone outside the translation community knows about MT, some translators tend to despise it and consider CAT to be a much more effective tool for improving the quality of translations. I wondered if MT could end up being used more than CAT in the future of the translation market, as MT is much more efficient today.
I asked my teammates about this. This is only a small sample of all junior translators, but they responded that they preferred CAT generally. They think that CAT is a more complete and useful tool, which also helps to organize for each project. I believe that MT is very helpful and saves a lot of time, but it’s true that CAT is currently the best professional tool based on all the aspects mentioned above.
In conclusion, SDL Trados is currently far ahead among CAT tools, so we can assume that it will remain in first position even if this is only an assumption. On the other hand, I’m almost 100% sure that CAT will play an even more important role in the future of professional translators, and that it will become much better in a growing number of fields of expertise. I’m convinced that despite its shortcomings, CAT will remain the most faithful tool for professional translators.
Tournier Ophélie – M1 TSM (2021-2022)
La Traduction de A à Z 