Workshop: Translators and free software, a practical introduction to OmegaT

Brief description

Professional translators are more than often taught to use proprietary tools in universities or in professional groups. OmegaT has existed for 20 years as a professional Computer Aided Translation tool (CAT) and is used all around the world. This workshop will introduce participants to the concepts behind CATs and especially how they are practically put into use in OmegaT: translation memories, segmentation, exchange formats, collaborative work, etc.

Abstract

OmegaT is a professional computer aided translation (CAT) tool for translators. It allows the translator to easily integrate ressources related to the translation at hand and use the computer to automatically refer to them.

• Possible ressources include
• - glossary files
• - legacy translations
• - machine translation
• - dictionaries

Although it is possible to work as a translator with a word processor and manual lookup for terms, computers can automatically do the searching and the referencing for us.

OmegaT allows a translator to easily handle important volumes including the 2 000 000 words found in the Emacs manuals (see the latest emacsconf presentation on the topic).

The workshop will focus on practical tasks and under the hood explanations.