I hope you can help me with the following dilemma. I have been testing Wordfast Pro and MetaTexis, in order to see which of these tools better suits my needs as a freelance translator. I gained the insight that MetaTexis has difficulty translating diagrams, but seems to cope effortlessly with a lot of file types, breaking footnotes and comments into separate sections. I haven’t attempted some file types with this tool yet though, so reserving judgement.
I successfully translated Word documents with and without diagrams, footnotes etc, and I also managed to translate a PDF without any difficulty in Wordfast Pro. I’m confused, however, by how Wordfast Pro translates Excel spreadsheets, because my attempts did successfully add an Excel spreadsheet to Wordfast Pro, but it seemed to take every line as a new segment rather than seeing each text box as a whole. Therefore, text strings which belonged together for comprehension purposes were separated by other data, making the translation and comprehension of terms complicated or prone to error. This set of errors will be down to my inexperience with the tools, as I’m sure far more experienced users will know how to set up the preferences to cope with this. When you’re as computer-illiterate as I am, written instructions can easily be muddled, which is where I think most of my problems lie.
I’d like to ask which file formats are better supported by which of the two given CAT tools, and also ask your opinions as to which is better and why.
Thank you so much in advance for the slightest bit of information you can give me, I appreciate it very much.
Michaela Suzanna Gallo
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msgallo wrote:
I’m confused, however, by how Wordfast Pro translates Excel spreadsheets, because my attempts did successfully add an Excel spreadsheet to Wordfast Pro, but it seemed to take every line as a new segment rather than seeing each text box as a whole.
Wordfast Pro has two wizards (simple and advanced) that can be used when opening an Excel file. They offer quite a lot of flexibility to specify what to translate and what not to translate, and where to put translations. Can you provide a concrete description of a spreadsheet you couldn't open properly in Wordfast? How many columns did it have? What were the columns to be translated?
msgallo wrote:
I’d like to ask which file formats are better supported by which of the two given CAT tools, and also ask your opinions as to which is better and why.
I'm not very familiar with MetaTexis, but since it's a Word-based tool (like Wordfast Classic), I would expect it's best suited for translating Word documents (like Wordfast Classic). Why would you consider MetaTexis and Wordfast Pro, rather than Wordfast Classic and Wordfast Pro? A Wordfast solution would let you use the same TM's without requiring a conversion.
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Yasmin Moslem Egypt Local time: 09:15 Member (2011) English to Arabic
Segmentaition Settings
Jan 9
msgallo wrote:
Wordfast Pro, but it seemed to take every line as a new segment rather than seeing each text box as a whole.
Dear Michaela Suzanna,
If you mean that you need to have every Excel cell as a whole instead of each sentence separately, you can change your segmentation settings. Go to "Edit" menu > "Preferences" > "Segmentation Settings" and select "Break".
HTH,
Yasmin
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With reference to the second point, it's because this is a masters degree assignment which asks us to compare two tools. There was a choice of tools, but most of us not knowing any of the tools in advance made quite specific choices to try a variety of styles. We have only had a few short months to test these products and I am still struggling with all of their functions. Then, qualified with the MA, we will go on to work as freelance translators, and we will be looking invest in one tool or another for the long term.
Excel wizards in WFP. Yes, I noticed there were two, but I'm confused how to set them up correctly. I don't think I can disclose the real file I am testing, as I signed a confidentiality clause for the client.
Hmm, are there any good links to WFP video training to setting up the wizards anywhere?
Thank you for your answer though, I'm taking this all one step at a time.
Best wishes,
M Gallo
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