«Aardvark Enterprises» company (www.aardvark.ru)
«Our company «Aardvark Enterprises» is a Transit TM-system user starting from version 2.7. The decision to buy a specialised tool for facilitating the work of the translator and improving the quality of translations was made after our CEO visited a seminar on modern computer translation technologies. This seminar featured, in particular, Transit system by STAR.
However, this product was not the only solution we considered. TRADOS and Deja Vu also took our attention. As to the former, we did not like that it was incorporated into MS Word (though the developers claimed it to be a benefit) and that the translations were saved in the Word documents. Also the product showed no great stability - the demo-version was falling down far too often, what gave us an uncanny feeling. Deja Vu is very limited concerning the formatting possibilities — changing the order of differently formatted words in translations needs much effort, and some of the changes can be introduced only into the exported version.
Transit proved to be the most convenient, reliable and fast of all the products in question. It saves the translation databases in so-called "language pairs" - plain text files with XML-tags, which take little disk space and allow to select which documents are to be used for searching matching and similar segments during translation. Program interface meets all the demands of the translator: the windows with original text and translation are always there and all the segment is visible, so one always has the context for the translation.
I cannot help but mention a special tool for terminology management integrated in Transit, namely TermStar. All the dictionary entries are highlighted in the translation window and the translations are shown in a special window. It helps to maintain the consistency of terms, especially when several translators are working on the project at the same time. Also Transit allows to comment on the original and translated segments so that the translator could mark questionable points to draw editor's attention to them.
The product is constantly being improved: version 2.7 was superseded by version 3.0, much easier in using and mastering and subsequently Transit XV, which featured the long-expected concordance function. Now the translation memory can be sought not only for whole segments, but also for separate words and expressions, which makes the job even more convenient and efficient.
Another Transit advantage from translation agency's point of view is the free client version Transit Satellite PE. One needs not buy separate licenses for every workstation or translator. Having a full Transit version, the manager can send to the translators documents (possibly partially pretranslated) with dictionaries and materials, translated before. This product, like all professional software, is rather expensive, but the money spent on it quickly pays back by the increase in efficiency that this product provides for technical translations.
Now we can take orders for translating 1000–1500 pages a month, because we can manage such volumes with ease and provide the desired result. The only thing I still want to see in Transit is an automated tool for creating dictionaries that would analyse new and translated materials and create lists of "terminology candidates" taking into account the frequency of words and phrases. I hope that this idea will be realised in the next versions of the product».
With best regards, Alexander Elizarov, editor.
