The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2022 - 35

RR
screen, you may find that
splitting your screen is not an
option, as the user-friendly
bilingual review file becomes
not so friendly when it has to
share the screen.
No Segmentation:
Segmentation may break
down the text into easy to
manage chunks, but it also
encourages a bottom-up
approach to translation
by facilitating working at
the sentence level. This
can be quite a troublesome
approach. Even though you
might come up with some
excellent translations to
individual sentences, if they
don't form a coherent text
once they're put together,
then your translations are
useless and you'll need to
start over.
With a top-down
approach, you're able to
view the text in context
and then break it down into
appropriately sized chunks
based on your judgement,
rather than being at the
mercy of a CAT tool. With
tables, I usually find I'm
most productive at the
sentence level, but with the
main body of text I prefer to
work at the paragraph level.
That way I'm able to play
around with word order and
make the text more concise,
especially since my source
languages tend to be very
flexible when it comes to
sentence structure.
Self-Proofreading Stage
Finally, I'm a huge advocate
of doing one last selfcheck
before you submit
a file, whether revising
or translating. One of my
favorite tools for this is the
www.ata-chronicle.online
The idea behind
bilingual
review files
is to improve
productivity
and allow
corrections to
be implemented
within the CAT
tool working
environment.
" Read Aloud " function in
Microsoft Word. It rereads
the text back to you, albeit
in a rather robotic voice,
but it lets you rest your
eyes and use your listening
skills for a change. (Just
remember to look out for
homophones!) I find that if
I've been working with a text
for hours on end, my eyes
are liable to betray me and
let me see what I want to see
rather than what's there. My
ears, on the other hand, are
not as forgiving when they
hear something that sounds
wrong. This helps me pick up
on possible mistakes I may
have missed before.
It should be noted,
however, that bilingual
review files are not ideal
when it comes to the
Microsoft Read Aloud
tool, as it's unable to
distinguish between the
source and target columns
and will reread everything
to you. Working directly
in the target file avoids
this problem, as the file
is already monolingual.
The only disadvantage in
this case is that if you've
used track changes it will
reread everything, including
the original and the track
changes, but you can choose
when and where you use this
tool throughout the text so
you get the most out of it.
The Importance of
Switching It Up
Before I bring this to an end,
I feel like I should point out
that my experience is based
on working predominantly in
medical and pharmaceutical
translation in a limited
number of language pairs,
but hopefully it's given you
some food for thought to
switch up your working
habits every now and then,
because you never know
when you'll find a more
productive way of working.
And if you're interested in
revising directly in the target
file but you're worried about
updating the translation in
the CAT tool, don't worry.
Most tools allow you to
update the translation with
an edited target document.
You just might need to do a
bit of alignment in the
updating process.
NOTE
1
Bell, Andrew. " What Are CAT Tools? " BJT Language Services
(March 1, 2021).
Andrew Bell is a medical and pharmaceutical
translator and content writer. He works from
Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into English
and specializes in the translation of journal
articles and clinical trial documentation. You
can find his blog at www.belljohnsontranslations.com/blog.
andrew@belljt.com
If you have any ideas and/or suggestions regarding helpful
resources or tools you would like to see featured, please e-mail
Jost Zetzsche at jzetzsche@internationalwriters.com.
American Translators Association 35
https://www.belljohnsontranslations.com/post/what-are-cat-tools https://www.belljohnsontranslations.com/post/what-are-cat-tools http://www.belljohnsontranslations.com/blog http://www.ata-chronicle.online
The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - November/December 2022
