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Can Trados Studio be useful to a literary translator?

Marie Maude Polychuck

Hello everyone,

I am wondering wether or not to take the leap and buy Trados Studio and I'm hoping you can help me make the decision. I've been using an extended trial license for a few weeks and exploring the features, but I am still unsure if it's the right fit for the kind of work I do.

I've been translating contemporary romance from English into French for four years now and currently have over 80 books (from anywhere between 40,000 and 80,000 words each) under my belt. Contemporary romance is very much a defined genre, so the books are similar and can be repetitive even between authors. I was hoping to streamline my process by incorporating this growing corpus into Trados.

I've tried creating a TM, aligning a few books and importing them into the TM. I would do a cursory reading before Confirming All -- the alignment is mostly good, but there are mistakes. However it seems like aligning every segment manually would take me hours and hours per book (I tried!), and I don't see that being a viable option.

I'de like to be able to recycle segments and generate fuzzies when I pre-translate with Batch Task. Is that doable? And if so, should I set a specific alignment value when Advance Importing the alignment into the TM?

I tried pre-translating a chapter using my TM of about 10 books, and the results are quite absurd. Very few translations are generated (which is not that surprising considering my small TM), but single-word source segments (e.g. "Yes.") sometimes turn into full sentences from other books. So maybe a TM is not the way to go?

This is the extent of my Trados knowledge at this point, so if anyone could guide me in the right direction or give me tips, I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!
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    Hi Marie, 

    A TM can be very helpful if it's properly maintained and has all the right information, not only for providing TM matches, but to provide concordance and fragment matching as well.

    In addition to the usefulness of a TM, literary translators can benefit from other Trados Studio features, such as AutoSuggest Dictionaries (generated from TMs), termbases and AutoText. All of these are AutoSuggest providers and can both help save time and maintain consistency.

    To answer your question about recycling segments and generating fuzzy matches (look into fragment matches as well): yes, that's exactly what you can get from a good TM. If your alignment efforts are not paying off so far, or you don't want to invest the time needed to clean up the alignments, you can always try manually translating one of your novels to feed your TM, and then use the TM for future jobs. As the TM grows, it will become more and more useful.
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    Hi Marie, 

    A TM can be very helpful if it's properly maintained and has all the right information, not only for providing TM matches, but to provide concordance and fragment matching as well.

    In addition to the usefulness of a TM, literary translators can benefit from other Trados Studio features, such as AutoSuggest Dictionaries (generated from TMs), termbases and AutoText. All of these are AutoSuggest providers and can both help save time and maintain consistency.

    To answer your question about recycling segments and generating fuzzy matches (look into fragment matches as well): yes, that's exactly what you can get from a good TM. If your alignment efforts are not paying off so far, or you don't want to invest the time needed to clean up the alignments, you can always try manually translating one of your novels to feed your TM, and then use the TM for future jobs. As the TM grows, it will become more and more useful.
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