Managing time in translation is one of the most important qualities a translator can possess. Translation appears to be really time-consuming when you don’t know how to organize your work or which tool can help you efficiently manage your time. You should know that managing your time well, especially saving time during translation, is one of the requirements of a good translator.
Don’t be afraid! Recent technologies have been bringing answers to such worries in order to make life easier for translators. Let me talk about CAT tools as a way of working faster. Have you ever heard about them? In fact, CAT Tools (Computer-Assisted Translation Tools) are software that help a human translator in transferring meaning from one source language to the target language. So, CAT Tools play an important role in gaining time while translating. There are several types of CAT Tools (MemoQ, SDL Trados, Wordfast ), and whichever one you choose, they have the same functions . In concrete terms, these tools make it possible to have the source text and the target text on the same interface called “Editor”, which really makes life easier.
Using CAT Tools is the best way to work faster. In this regard, you have to master the one you prefer. With CAT Tools, the translator can input text into the CAT software in the source language and use the interface to divide it into segments, a phrase, sentence, or paragraph. Meanwhile, the software saves each source segment and its corresponding translation as an entry in a database called translation memory. Certain online blogs like phrase.com explain that “the more content you translate, the more translation matches the software will be able to reuse. This kind of automation significantly speeds up the translation process and ensures consistency with past translations.” Mastering all these functionalities can really speed up your work.
Another way of working faster is to use shortcuts on your keyboard. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that if you have to run a search on a huge word document, you will not finish before sunrise. But by using the shortcut “ctrl+f”, you will rapidly find your information, and it will make your life easier as well as save you more time in your work. So it’s very useful for you to know those shortcuts.
Researching Topics efficiently
Another aspect to take into account when you want to gain time while translating is to perform sound terminology research using faster research formulas. A good translation is synonymous with performing efficient terminology research, it’s in your interest as a translator to develop easy and efficient research strategies to facilitate your work. So, let’s go straight to the point! Below, you will find a few faster research formulas that will help you speed up your work. You should keep in mind that this is not a comprehensive list you can develop or discover other research methods in due time. Here are a few research techniques:
- The famous search engine google page: as you already know, you can use it for general research on common topics.
- Google scholar: used to perform research in specialized documents.
- And or +: all the words typed will be taken into account and all documents or publications containing those words will appear.
- Or: you will obtain results where at least one of the typed words will appear.
- Or and Not: this helps add or exclude words that should appear or not in your results.
- Quote (“ .”): is to search a group of words or an expression.
- Word order: the research is performed starting with the first word.
- Joker (*): identifies the main term within an expression.
- Parenthesis [()]: used for complex expressions.
I think some of these techniques will be very helpful to you.
Resorting to translation memories and terminological databases
When you are translating, it is always useful to resort to previous translations. Those translations can be found in Translation memories or in terminological databases. In short, a translation memory is a kind of database where the translation can save the source and target segments of the work it is doing. It acts as a “dictionary” you can use when you translate a text in the same field as the previous translations. A terminological database is also a database where main terms are saved with their translations, and can still be helpful when you’re working in a field that you already know. These databases are very useful to gain time during translation. They are the first databases to resort to before going on with other search engines. You can also resort to glossaries (unilingual, multilingual) as well as websites to easily find your terms and, more importantly, they are reliable.
Using Machine Translation
Machine translation is increasingly seen as an activity in its own right in the world of translation.it is more time-saving when you have a lot of files to translate. Clients are running their translations through machine translation systems and then pass them on to the translator for post-editing. The aim here is to correct syntactic, terminological or other errors that the automatic translator could not handle. Take note that when you pass your text into the automatic translator, you must absolutely proofread and check it, because the machine does not yet have the capacity to reason like a human being. The human translator can still differentiate contexts, ensure the consistency of terms throughout the text and is able to use terms appropriately.
I hope this article will be useful to you if you want to become a translator.
La Traduction de A à Z 