Veronica

Did you take a look at the new Google Translate Toolkit?

It's like an online CAT tool, but it brings the translation automatically from Google translate, some simple sentences are correctly translated. Will this be the next generation of CAT tools?

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mariabelen

Wow! I haven't heard of it before. It sounds as a very useful tool. As I always point out when talking about Cat Tools, we, human translators are to decide which is the best translation in the end, even though we have this little help.

Saludiños,

Bel

Veronica

Well, sometimes it's not a help at all.
The machine translated segments from complex sentences can be so very mistranslated that it makes it even worse to edit the segment that to translate from scratch.

It's a great tool for those who are learning how to work with a CAT tool though. You don't need to buy anything, and you get the look and feel of the process. Overall, I like it.

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michelleba

The advantage that Google will have is that it's a collaborative effort. Google will search their translation memory for previous, human translations of the uploaded segment and show the translations in the Search Results tab. That means the TM will be absolutely HUGE and, although not perfect, the pool of collaborators will be so large that it will eventually be edited and greatly improved.

Also, Google is free. As many know, the CAT tools are exorbitantly expensive. Free will attract translators and even corporations. The downfall? Google will have the biggest ever data base of translations in the world. Eventually, Machine Translation will be close in quality to human translation, because humans will be contributing and editing so much of the translations.