Before the rise of Translation Management Systems (TMS), there were CAT tools. A CAT (Computer-Assisted or Computer-Aided Translation) tool is software that allows a user to work with bilingual text – the source and the target (translation). Its core components include:
Over time, to get the translation job done faster and making it more scalable, those components were no longer enough. That’s how a variety of business management features appeared in a CAT environment, resulting in the birth of TMS. For easier and quicker performance, many CAT tools emerged in the cloud too. They are the essence of a TMS.
Let’s have a look at the history of this technology and the oldest tools' background, from the 80s to 2010. Click on the image below to see an enlarged version you can zoom further.
Some machine translation providers are holding out hope for MT systems that adapt to document context. Could this development eliminate the need for custom MT engines? Will context-enabled MT help MT achieve human parity? Will we still need to customize a few years from now? Let’s discuss further.
5 August 2020