However, instead of sinking their software into oblivion they took a rather bold decision and open sourced the code, allowing it to be copied, modified and used freely by everyone. This led the company into a financial turmoil that forced them to close shop. Despite its features and multi-platform capabilities it struggled along, trailing behind the competition. That’s no coincidence since this CAT Tool was once proprietary too! Developed by a Hong Kong based company (now defunct) named Heartsome Technologies Ltd., this application was pitched against the big guys in an attempt to win a part of the translation tools market. On the other hand, Heartsome Translation Studio proved a perfect fit, covering all requirements and offering a familiar user interface and feature-set that matched those provided by other major proprietary CAT Tools like SDL Trados Studio, memoQ and Wordfast. It should be stated here that the eliminated tools are quite capable software (and have the backing of the Open Source community), but for the niche purposes of my strictly defined test they didn’t cover all 5 of the set requirements. After a quick research on Google, I shortlisted the following 3 free tools:īy applying an in-depth analysis to each of the above tools’ capabilities, I eliminated the first two and nominated Heartsome Translation Studio as the suitable free CAT Tool for our experiment. The first step in this endeavor was to locate the right free CAT Tool that would comply with all 5 requirements set in the previous section. Thanks to my translation project management experience and earlier freelance translation career, I was in a position to cover both sides effectively, allowing a clear, transparent approach to the process. This allowed me to assess the situation better and push the free CAT Tool scenario to its limits. And when dealing with actual, paid translation jobs, the last thing you want is for your tools to get in the way, or worse, not allow you to deliver in the way the client expects you to.įor this case, I conducted the experiment under a controlled environment: I acted as the client and the translator. The resulting translated bilingual files must be identical to the ones a proprietary tool would produce and adhere to the client’s delivery specifications.Īt first sight, the above points seem quite challenging but anything less would hamper a professional translator’s workflow.The translation process must be as seamless as using a proprietary tool, or close enough.It must accept directly, or with minimum tinkering, bilingual files from major proprietary CAT Tools.It must be able to run on all three major Operating Systems (Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, GNU/Linux).Thus, after some serious thinking, the bare minimum requirements that I came up with and believe a free CAT Tool must successfully meet were: Being the perfectionist I am, I set forth some very demanding prerequisites that would either prove or bust this whole free proposition thing. Obviously, this is a quite nonspecific question and to be able to research the topic, and present the facts in a reasonable way, I needed to define some criteria that would narrow down the scope of this inquiry. But since I was going rogue here, I was willing to explore this possibility and ask the million- word question: Can a professional freelance translator do the job using only free tools? The Objective In most developed nations, where capitalism is a reigning economic reality, such a reference can be considered blasphemy. install, uninstall or update them), go to Options → Apertium settings.While typing the title of this post, the word “professionally” shortly followed by the word “free” made me feel a bit awkward. If you want to configure the plug-in or manage language pairs (i.e. You will now have a new option at Options → Machine Translate called Apertium (offline), which has to be checked to activate the plug-in. The next time that you run OmegaT, it will ask you where to save language pair packages, and offer the possibility to install the ones you want. the /Applications/OmegaT_3/OmegaT.app/Contents/MacOS/Java/ directory. The folder in question is the folder that contains the OmegaT.jar file, for the Mac version this is e.g. Sample project translating from English to SpanishĪpertium-OmegaT is a plug-in for OmegaT built on top of lttoolbox-java that offers offline machine translation from Apertium.Īnd that's all! Apertium-OmegaT can work on any platform (Linux, OS X or Windows), and it does NOT require installing apertium, lttoolbox or lttoolbox-java.ĭownload apertium-omegat.jar from and copy it to the plugins/ directory of your OmegaT installation.
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