Do CAT tools worsen translator's memory and understanding?
John Fossey Canada Local time: 22:19 Member (2008) French to English
GIGO
Jan 26
CAT tools will help you do whatever you do, faster. If you translate well, they will help you translate well, faster. Likewise if you translate poorly.
The old programmer's acronym applies here - GIGO: Garbage In Garbage Out.
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Frank van Thienen Canada Local time: 19:19 Member (2010) Dutch to English + ...
it's helping me...
Jan 27
As a VW-type of translator, using a Cadillac-CAT (memoQ), I find that all the tools are really helping me, and that I'm constantly learning, not forgetting.
Kirsten Bodart wrote:
Also, if the text is badly written, you end up having to merge sentences, but that means typing one thing in one segment and typing something else in the next. Annoying. If you are doing German you are probably going to have to split sentences, having the same trouble.
I run into similar issues with Dutch to English, but with memoQ it's easy to join or split segments (i.e. sentences) when this linguistic problem occurs. I cannot change the sequence of segments, but when two (or more) sentences are joined into a single segment, juggling the phrases is easy as pie.
Kirsten Bodart wrote:
We for two (:D) produce bad texts if we work in CAT and we are not careful.
Yeah! I suspect she'll grow up to be a great translator!!
Frank
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Nicole Schnell United States Local time: 19:19 Member English to German + ...
I agree with Alex
Jan 27
Alex Lago wrote:
This is a collateral effect of a lot of tools.
Take for example mobile telephones, those of us who worked in the days before mobile telephones remember the days when you knew everybody's telephone number (anyone you called on a regular basis), now with the phone numbers stored in my mobile there are very few numbers I know by heart, I just look for someone's name and dial but if I had to tell you their number I wouldn't have a clue, even for people who I call on a daily basis.
According to studies the same phenomenon also occurs after mere two weeks of vacation and among - now get this: Internet users. The brain doesn't memorize information that can be looked up anew easily and as needed.
Here is an excerpt from one of the numerous articles that can be found online:
"Well according to experiments carried out by Dr. Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, our brains are getting less self-reliant when it comes to storing information.
Dr. Sparrow and her team asked volunteers to take part in a series of different memory tests. In the first, participants read 40 pieces of trivia from a computer screen. Half of the subjects believed that the information would be saved, the other half believed it would be lost.
The authors found that people were significantly more likely to remember the information if they didn’t think it had been saved, claiming they “did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read”." http://bodygeeks.com/2011/07/the-internet-is-making-your-brain-lazy/
I can confirm that from my own experience. Right now I am working on the third technical manual for machines within the same series in a row, and after months of repetitive texts I feel that my IQ as well as my memory have suffered serious damage.
One more important (negative) aspect when working with CAT tools: I am deprived of one of my best fortes: My photographic memory.
Instead of being able to remember how I translated a particular term because it was used previously in the lower left corner right next to the illustration on page 15, I am dealing with an unstructured sauce of endless segments.
Which is very nice in terms of training the TMs for my client but devastating for my personal gray matter.
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Giles Watson Italy Local time: 04:19 Member Italian to English
Elixir of reminding
Jan 27
Two and a half thousand years ago, Socrates pointed out that even the invention of writing was a threat to the exercise of memory. He called writing an "elixir not of memory but of reminding" (Plato, Phaedrus, 275a), which is quite a nice way of putting it.
[Edited at 2012-01-27 07:24 GMT]
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