Which of the CAT progs allows one to colour-code sentence-components?

On 2003-01-27 01:22, F. v. Savigny wrote:

If you use GNU emacs for editing plain text, you can highlight text in as many colours as you wish (you have to write the functions yourself, but that\'s very easy; I can even provide you with a template).



I\'d be most interested...

Quote:

The whole approach can be made more systematic by coding your text using XML. That\'s also a quite intuitive thing, and Emacs could be tweaked to automatically display different elements in different coulours (in can be tweaked to do just about anything). Using XML, coding sentence components can also be combined with a synoptic approach, i.e. having the source sentences (or whatever fragment size you choose to be appropriate) alongside the target sentences, quite similar to CAT.

...

If this sounds interesting to you (if only in part), feel free to contact me.





best,



Frederik van Gelder
[addsig] ▲ Collapse

On 2003-01-27 21:19, fvg wrote:



Thank you all for the welcoming words of advice. For this newbee to the forum it\'s an interesting experience to in contact with other translators.



The way I\'ve worked until now was simply to open up two MS word windows and highlight the relative clauses etc before getting down to the translating. That\'s quite time-consuming, and it struck me that with the various grammar-checking modules around, perhaps there\'s some way of automating these things. (I visualise a prog in which the user can determine: \"the relative clauses highlighted yellow, the verbs blue\".) If that program also has a module to create my own - large - databank based on a scanned dictionary, I\'ll buy it right away.



Regards, and thank you for your time.



Dr. Frederik van Gelder









I would recommend Wordfast because :



1. All the stuff you normally do in Word can still be done with Wordfast (Wordfast works fully inside Word and does not impede Word\'s usual functions)



2. Wordfast can be set to run macros before and after segmentation. Since you need highly customized settings to do what you want, macros are the way to go. Good news is that once again, it is Word, so everything you already know about Word and Word macros is 200% valid.



3. For what you do, the TM is worth nothing in terms of matches, no matter which CAT you choose - as explained by my collegues. But CATs possesses terminology functions that will be of great interest to you: Context search, Glossary handling, Quality check based on the glossary, and, with Wordfast, even a concordancer.



4. You need to keep your documents in a format as open as possible to fiddle with them, and once again, Wordfast is the one for that.



Now, when you talk about highlighting grammatical parts of sentences, you are stepping beyond the scope of CATs, and into machine translation. That\'s not the same branch of programming at all.



There might be some pgms doing that, as you said, grammar modules, ... What you describe seems possible, even relatively easy.



It may exist - I don\'t know of any - but since it is not really in large demand, I think that if you want it, you will have to do it yourself. (ie: Find a list of verbs, prepositions, etc. and using a macro, pre-process your word file to highlight any word or preposition that is contained in each of your lists -with a different color of course)



All and all, CATs can do much less for you then they can for us -technical bunnies- but still they can help. In you case, better stick inside Word, so that you can use all the things you already know, and as Trados interferes with some functions and formating, the way to go is to use Wordfast.



As a last note, I don\'t sell Wordfast. I just use it. ▲ Collapse