CAT stands for "Computer Aided Translation". It would even be strange that in the 21st century, when electronics is at such a high level and help from machines accompanies us in everything, a translator cannot get similar help in his work. CATs are computer programs, created just to improve the whole translation process. Of course, it is not about any automaton - they make the man's work easier, but they won't do it for him, because so far it hasn't been possible to create any mechanism that would be able to catch even the nuances in the texts as perfectly as an educated man can. How does CAT help the translator? Among other things, it divides the text into segments, creates and uses translation memories, being able to find a reference to what the translator used to do, and also provides linguistic assistance in the form of uploaded glossaries.
CAT and translation agency
If a CAT is useful for one translator, it also improves the work of the whole office! Thanks to the possibility of dividing orders, he is able to divide the work so that several people can work on one thing. This significantly reduces the time needed to complete the translation, and also enables the use of external support - the CAT is able to send the translation memory to an external translator, which enables constant control over the resulting text. This is important because all translators of a given office working on the same assignment use the same phrases and words, creating a coherent, easily understandable text.
However, because of this, it is worth adding a piece of advice for customers - all of your materials, forming a coherent whole, are worth giving away to one office, because thanks to this you can be sure that they will be correlated with each other. This is particularly important in the case of companies that require the translation of highly specialised documents - in order for all of them to be uniform, it is necessary to use the services of a single office, which simply uses the help of a CAT tool.
