Forum: SDL Trados support
Topic: Correcting alignment in Trados 2014
Poster: Andrew052
Post title: not worth aligning?
It's always been about "bad files", that would not be easy (or event possible) to align. And there hasn't been question -- to incorporate or to discard. If I wanted to discard them, I surely would. But, the question is that you want to incorporate the files, but you don't want to incoporate the files into your other TMs + you don't have tools to do this. If files are at least "not bad", I would quickly align them somewhere, like in memo, and incorporate them in one of the "real" TMs.
About the time concern you have:
So, in terms of time: you have to translate 100 pages and you get 50 pdfs (50 pages each). You spend two-three hours to prep them and then just click every 30 minutes to put in a new tmx into your TM. (You might expect high probability of large-scale hits, like 10 pages from a file in your TM, or 5 pages from file 1 and 5 pages from file 2.)
My baseline speed is 2 pages per hour.
the costs to create the TM: 4 hours
Costs/Benefits Analysis: you would spend 5 hours to translate 10 pages, but you spend ca 1 hour (15 minutes to copy-paste + 1 hour to proof-read), thus your savings is 4 hours. So, your costs to prep the TM is 0 hours. If you locate 2 more pages, you would get the profit of 1 hour.
So, in terms of locating the hits of sentences in your TM, you are not correct about c/b analysis. But, again, I am a translator and I translate 5,000 words per day, 365 days a year and I don't align gazzilions of pages per year or decades, bacause I don't get paid to do that + the majority of "grown-up" customers come in or, more correctly, I start up on projects for such customers, who have 1-gigabite TMs with lots of termsbases for various fields. If you can read and brush up on the terminology for your customer's particular projects by reading 10 pages that have already been translated, it's a great benefit, imho.
In terms of locating terms in TM: I can spend up to 10 minutes to decide on a translaton of a term with a frequency of 1 term per 3 pages. // You use concord and you find this term in the file. You open the source file, see the number of the clause, open the target file, ctrl+F the clause number, find you term and you're done. I am not a professional professional translator, so right now for me the best option is to use a legacy term versus making up my own translations.
Two months ago I got an order for 100 pages (gym equipment, manuals, etc.), I pre-translated the files in trados with no cross-file hits found. I received 50 previously translated docs. I made the "pseudo-TM" in no time and found heaps of cross-file hits. The point is that the legacy files contained the translations for some older models, while this pack of docs had the new models with low inter-file correlation. Anyway, the customer would naturally not know about leveraging their legacy files (however, they might be sure that there might have been a lot of hits in the translated files and the legacy files).
So, I spent about 4 hours to prep the tmx files and then was clicking for 2 days every 30 minutes. The amount of hits was about 50 pages. The selling price was 100 pages * 10 bucks = 1 000 bucks. It generally takes you 1 hour to copy-paste + proof read 10 pages, so 50 pages / 10 pages per hour = 5 hours - (50 pages / 2 pages per hour = 25 hours), so savings = 15 hours * 2 pages * 10 bucks = 300 bucks.
+ I quickly created a glossary of the terms for the other 50 pages and the translation would have reasonably been more difficult with no leveraging legacy files.
If I didn't know about this procedure, I would not do the alignment, because I would never be able to calculate the time costs you would need to work thru (50 legacy files * 20 pages each) / ca 20 pages per hour = 50 hours. And if I started up this process, I would want to come back with a fully functional TM to bring back to the customer, because the next time they send it over to the next translator, that translator would tell them that the TM is misaligned, which they would pass on to me. Consequently, I would need to align it 100%. In addition, aligning files is extremely boring. I usually ask somebody to align the files and set off the costs versus the translation performed...
(I've never aligned gazzilions of pages.) I aligned once 1,000 pages of your best possible words. It took me ages.
Topic: Correcting alignment in Trados 2014
Poster: Andrew052
Post title: not worth aligning?
It's always been about "bad files", that would not be easy (or event possible) to align. And there hasn't been question -- to incorporate or to discard. If I wanted to discard them, I surely would. But, the question is that you want to incorporate the files, but you don't want to incoporate the files into your other TMs + you don't have tools to do this. If files are at least "not bad", I would quickly align them somewhere, like in memo, and incorporate them in one of the "real" TMs.
About the time concern you have:
So, in terms of time: you have to translate 100 pages and you get 50 pdfs (50 pages each). You spend two-three hours to prep them and then just click every 30 minutes to put in a new tmx into your TM. (You might expect high probability of large-scale hits, like 10 pages from a file in your TM, or 5 pages from file 1 and 5 pages from file 2.)
My baseline speed is 2 pages per hour.
the costs to create the TM: 4 hours
Costs/Benefits Analysis: you would spend 5 hours to translate 10 pages, but you spend ca 1 hour (15 minutes to copy-paste + 1 hour to proof-read), thus your savings is 4 hours. So, your costs to prep the TM is 0 hours. If you locate 2 more pages, you would get the profit of 1 hour.
So, in terms of locating the hits of sentences in your TM, you are not correct about c/b analysis. But, again, I am a translator and I translate 5,000 words per day, 365 days a year and I don't align gazzilions of pages per year or decades, bacause I don't get paid to do that + the majority of "grown-up" customers come in or, more correctly, I start up on projects for such customers, who have 1-gigabite TMs with lots of termsbases for various fields. If you can read and brush up on the terminology for your customer's particular projects by reading 10 pages that have already been translated, it's a great benefit, imho.
In terms of locating terms in TM: I can spend up to 10 minutes to decide on a translaton of a term with a frequency of 1 term per 3 pages. // You use concord and you find this term in the file. You open the source file, see the number of the clause, open the target file, ctrl+F the clause number, find you term and you're done. I am not a professional professional translator, so right now for me the best option is to use a legacy term versus making up my own translations.
Two months ago I got an order for 100 pages (gym equipment, manuals, etc.), I pre-translated the files in trados with no cross-file hits found. I received 50 previously translated docs. I made the "pseudo-TM" in no time and found heaps of cross-file hits. The point is that the legacy files contained the translations for some older models, while this pack of docs had the new models with low inter-file correlation. Anyway, the customer would naturally not know about leveraging their legacy files (however, they might be sure that there might have been a lot of hits in the translated files and the legacy files).
So, I spent about 4 hours to prep the tmx files and then was clicking for 2 days every 30 minutes. The amount of hits was about 50 pages. The selling price was 100 pages * 10 bucks = 1 000 bucks. It generally takes you 1 hour to copy-paste + proof read 10 pages, so 50 pages / 10 pages per hour = 5 hours - (50 pages / 2 pages per hour = 25 hours), so savings = 15 hours * 2 pages * 10 bucks = 300 bucks.
+ I quickly created a glossary of the terms for the other 50 pages and the translation would have reasonably been more difficult with no leveraging legacy files.
If I didn't know about this procedure, I would not do the alignment, because I would never be able to calculate the time costs you would need to work thru (50 legacy files * 20 pages each) / ca 20 pages per hour = 50 hours. And if I started up this process, I would want to come back with a fully functional TM to bring back to the customer, because the next time they send it over to the next translator, that translator would tell them that the TM is misaligned, which they would pass on to me. Consequently, I would need to align it 100%. In addition, aligning files is extremely boring. I usually ask somebody to align the files and set off the costs versus the translation performed...
(I've never aligned gazzilions of pages.) I aligned once 1,000 pages of your best possible words. It took me ages.