Dear All,
Perhaps not everyone who reads this email, but certainly some of you, will occasionally need to do a large translation task, and by large, let's say anything from 50 to 500 pages. 50 pages will already keep you busy for a few days. 500 will take months! But those requests do arrive.
Let me give you a sample of the kinds of ‘large’ requests I have had in the past year (there are more; this list is selective):
- Acts of the General Council (these can involve 50 pages or more all up).
- Some lengthy documents for the communication Sector, including one full-length book, 47 pages.
- Some lengthy documents for the YM Sector, including one full-length book, 72 pages.
- Lives of...., biographies in other words: e.g. Servant of God Nino Baglieri (50 pages), Life of St Leonard Murialdo (500 pages approx).
- Legacy texts e.g. Viganò, Apostolic Interiority (56 pages).
- Fonti 2, 265 pages and still going.
- GC29 pre-Chapter materials (haven't counted precisely, but around 40 pages)
- Salesian Family materials (100 pages and still counting)
- Retreat talks by one or more Salesians...
Now, the point of the above is not to say ‘look, there are a 1000 pages worth!’ but to point to an efficient way of dealing with big jobs like the above. And just as we spoke last week about Translation Memory (TM), it is now appropriate to talk about a program that integrates pretty much everything the translator needs, TM included, and which is also open to the possibility of a team working together if any of you are in such a situation.
Enter CafeTran Espresso (CTE), a rather odd name, and certainly a very different Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool from anything you might have taken a look at or used before. It is not free (well, it is, actually, because you can download it and use it for free, but the TM function will be limited), but if your province or the Congregation or Society, Salesian Family Group, whoever, have asked you to translate substantial materials, they can also find the necessary once-off funds to support you in that task! And if you do many large translation jobs, then CafeTran Espresso is not only the best tool out there (IMHO, from experience) but the end result is a cost of just a handful of cents a day once you calculate everything involved over a year or more of use, and if you buy it outright rather than subscribe yearly, then the cost is pretty much negligible over time.
I won't even try to explain it all (but in the Best Practice I offer a few screenshots so you can see what it does), since you could read all that for yourself at https://www.cafetran.com/ but let me say that all items in the above list were translated using CTE. It has its own integrated browser, so in addition to TM, you can access your favourite MT such as DeepL (and it has its own free access to another MT engine) as well as integrating with any (or all)of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini AI without leaving the program. And if you work as a team, it could even act as a server, enabling the team to work together.
I could confidently say that without CTE or a similar program, I don't think a translator, any translator, could manage the volume of work indicated above. So at the very least, take a look at it, maybe download it and play with it. The 'free' version won't let you deal with much TM, but enough to see what the value of the program could be for you. And if you ever do settle on it as a possibility, the brain behind it, Igor Kmitowski, responds immediately to requests for help if you need such, and there is a wealth of information anyway from other users available on the website. But I can also help.
Just to sum up the advantages of this translation tool:
- it will deal with any length of document... almost unlimited.
- it saves your project and TMs in standard exchangeable formats (XLIFF and TMX), enabling you to share the results with other translators.
- it will handle pretty much every file format you throw at it (but if you have .doc, first open them and save as docx. It doesn't like .doc!)
- there is a way to handle PDF files in this tool. You would need to read up how to do that. Very few translation tools let you translate PDF.
- you do not need to worry about format details... all you do is translate text in front of you, and whereas most tools of this kind have many annoying tags, CTE just gives you little red numbers, which you check to make sure you have included.
- with its own browser, you do not need to leave the program to use DeepL or other MT engines, and you can use AI engines as well.
- it is customisable to the nth degree. You set it up to work the way you want to work.
- it will work on any operating system: Windows, Macintosh, Linux....
best_practice_29-Using CTE.docx
