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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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  • Former Member
    0 Former Member

    Absolutely. A CAT tool, and SDL Trados Studio for that matter, is the best friend and assistant for a literary translator. And no, "it does not limit the creativity" of the literary translator in any way, shape, or form. That reminds me of some writers who refused to use a "word processor" (that's how the software and the system were called back in the day) because of... (many whimsical reasons, I would guess). Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann wrote their monumental literary works using a typewriter, but that was many decades before the birth of the modern PC. García Márquez, at some point, started using a Mac computer to write his novels... But I'm digressing.

    Just a reminder, a translation memory (TM) does not translate for you, it just suggests for you and above all, it helps you remember how you translated a particular sentence, idiom, or whatever quirkiness of the source language. Just try to reuse your translations by aligning SL and TL texts. Best of all, take advantage of SDL MultiTerm to manage terminology. SDL MultiTerm is the best terminology management system of all CAT tools in the market, in my view.
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  • Former Member
    0 Former Member

    Absolutely. A CAT tool, and SDL Trados Studio for that matter, is the best friend and assistant for a literary translator. And no, "it does not limit the creativity" of the literary translator in any way, shape, or form. That reminds me of some writers who refused to use a "word processor" (that's how the software and the system were called back in the day) because of... (many whimsical reasons, I would guess). Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann wrote their monumental literary works using a typewriter, but that was many decades before the birth of the modern PC. García Márquez, at some point, started using a Mac computer to write his novels... But I'm digressing.

    Just a reminder, a translation memory (TM) does not translate for you, it just suggests for you and above all, it helps you remember how you translated a particular sentence, idiom, or whatever quirkiness of the source language. Just try to reuse your translations by aligning SL and TL texts. Best of all, take advantage of SDL MultiTerm to manage terminology. SDL MultiTerm is the best terminology management system of all CAT tools in the market, in my view.
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