By R.Kavithaa Definition: Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation, or CAT is a form of language translation in which a human translator uses computer software to support and facilitate the translation process.
Concepts
Project Management • Project Management allows linguists to structure complex translation projects, assign the various tasks to different people, and track the progress of each of these tasks.
Translation Memory • A translation memory, or TM, is a database that stores so-called "segments", which can be sentences or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated. A translation memory system stores the words, phrases and paragraphs that have already been translated, in order to aid human translators. Language Search Engine • Language search engine searches a large repository of Translation Memories to find previously translated sentence fragments, phrases, whole sentences, even complete paragraphs that match source document segments.
Terminology Management • Terminology management software provides the translator a means of automatically searching a given terminology database for terms appearing in a document Alignment • Alignment programs take completed translations, divide both source and target texts into segments, and attempt to determine which segments belong together in order to build a translation memory database with the content
Tools
Spell Checker: is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Grammar Checker: in computing terms, is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Full-text search tools (or indexers): which allow the user to query already translated texts or reference documents of various kinds. Concordancers: which are programs that retrieve instances of a word or an expression and their respective context