Saturday, 18 October 2008

Translation memory and machine translation: MetaTexis

Translation memory and machine translation: MetaTexis

Now that an SDL-Trados version which supports MT (for limited file pairs) is due to be released anytime soon, I think it is worth remembering that there are applications which have had MT capabilities for years now.

One of them is MetaTexis. It gives you the option to choose between two online machine translation engines or you can use an application installed locally. The range of pairs is as big as those online engines (see the table below for an example).

So how does one use machine translation with MetaTexis?

❶ Click Alt+Shift+O to display the Document options dialog. Go to Machine Translation tab.
❷ Click on Google via internet. Click Set selected server active/inactive. Active should be displayed below the Status header.
❸ In Activity section select Translate every segment.
❹ In Results section, uncheck Show results in Scout and check Show in main translation box if empty.
❺ Click OK. Translate as you normally do.

Now you will see your translation units being automatically translated. You can edit them and commit them to the translation memory as you normally do with a translation memory match.

In the example below, you can see some text translated with MetaTexis and Google machine translation engine which I pasted from Jost Zetzsche's latest Tool Kit.

MetaTexis, Machine Translation and Translation Memory

MetaTexis, Machine Translation and Translation Memory

Originally published at translatum: Translation memory and machine translation: MetaTexis (a case study)

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