Why are CAT tools so relevant for the future of the business? Why should you consider CAT tools as one major key for your translation business to be successful?

Controlled Language (CL) technologies aim at standardizing the way technical documentation is written so it is easy to create, maintain, retrieve or translate. This approach is being reported as highly cost-effective, particularly for companies and institutions that need to handle large amounts of information. CAT tool users benefit from this technology because CL increases the level of internal repetition on the source language side and CL helps maintain the consistency on the target language side.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques are steadily improving their performance, to the point that recovering large amounts of paper data for digital use is becoming cost-effective. Certainly, combining OCR and CAT tools would drastically increase the value of past translations available only on paper (until now).

Different experiences with translators explain how this combination of tools is proving effective as a way of increasing productivity.

TMX, OSCAR, MARTIF, SALT, XML: standards for data exchange and reuse that change the way business is done.

CEC, DIN, ISO: standards that define what quality means and set thresholds.

Research into Machine Translation (MT) dates back to 1933. Developments in the field have been multiple since then and the latest work proves that interaction with CAT tools opens new paths for the translation industry and the professional translator. These articles provide an introduction to MT -past and future, working systems, sites for research and companies using this technology- and some interesting thoughts on how it will affect translators' future.