A CAT tool is a Computer-Assisted (or -Aided) Translation program. The software helps translators work more efficiently by remembering previous translation choices. It’s not Machine Translation (MT), which instead attempts to provide a translation for the text as a whole by converting (often unsuccessfully) the words from one language into another. A CAT tool will only offer a translation suggestion if there is a phrase or sentence that is exactly the same or highly similar in its translation memory (TM).

There are a number of CAT tools on the market. SDL Trados Studio, memoQ and Wordfast are probably the three best known programs. Their TMs should be compatible with each other.

Other CATs are OmegaT, which is free, and Déjà Vu. There are also cloud-based CATs, such as MateCat, Lilt and SmartCAT.

Please see the Software Comparison Tool on Proz.com for a more complete list of CATs with details of their features, ratings and reviews.

You might find it useful to read the following posts on CATs: Percy Balemans’ article ‘The usefulness of CAT tools’; Claire Cox’s comparison of ‘Wordfast Classic and Trados Studio 2014′; Emma Goldsmith’s comparisons of SDL Trados Studio and Déjà Vu, and SDL Trados Studio and memoQ. Emma regularly writes about CAT tools, so please check her blog for more articles of interest. Francesco Pugliano has also compared CAT tools in easy-to-understand tables. Lastly, Simon Akhrameev has reviewed the free online MateCat tool.

Rafa Lombardino has also produced some short videos that explain how CAT tools work.

For more posts of interest on CATs, please see the relevant section on the Interesting Articles for Translators & Interpreters page on this blog.

Image by Monoar Rahman Rony from Pixabay