1. Tool Introduction
1.1 SDL Trados 2019
As a CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) software, Trados is based on translation memory and terminology database technology, providing an integrated set of tools for quickly creating, editing, and reviewing high-quality translations. The translation memory provides convenience for translators dealing with a large amount of similar translation content, significantly reducing translation time and improving efficiency. In addition, Trados supports multiple plugins, offering customized, diverse, and convenient translation experiences for translators, such as Multiterm and machine translation software API interfaces.
1.2 NiuTrans
NiuTrans, founded in June 2012 by Shenyang Yayi Network Technology Co., Ltd., is a specialized brand that integrates machine translation technology research and development, software development, and machine translation technology licensing. With 40 years of focus on machine translation technology innovation and research, it has a team of over a hundred in machine translation production, academia, and research. It has independently developed a machine translation system centered on Chinese, supporting translation between 304 languages. Through rich applications and functions, it provides a full-stack solution for machine translation services, aiming to provide a foundational platform for the industrial application of machine translation, helping enterprise users eliminate language barriers in international business. The platform officially launched in 2018, using the latest neural network machine translation technology for independent development and is an open platform centered on “machine translation,” supporting translation between 300+ languages. In addition to basic text translation capabilities, it has also opened more API interfaces, allowing users to integrate various translation capabilities into their own applications/platforms by calling the above interfaces to help solve various translation problems.
2. Illustrated Tutorial
This tutorial is based on the API interface provided by NiuTrans; other MT software has similar operations, which can be referenced.
2.1 Registration of “NiuTrans” and Downloading Related Plugins
(1) Use a browser to search for “NiuTrans.”
(2) Click to enter the first page.
(3) Click to register.
(4) Fill in personal information as required.
Note: After clicking register, NiuTrans will ask the user to fill in a verification code via phone call, but the call may be blocked as a spam call, so be sure to unblock it in time.
(5) Find the API interface key.
① Enter the personal center in the upper left corner.
② Find the API-KEY option.
Note: New registered users will receive a certain number of characters for translation use.
(6) Download the relevant plugin for Trados 2019.
① Return to the personal center.
② Click to enter the “Trados Plugin” option shown above.
③ Download according to the specific version of Trados being used.
2.2 Plugin Installation
(The following steps ① to ⑤ are from the official instructions)
(1) Before starting the installation, please confirm that the downloaded plugin installation package is consistent with the version of Trados on your system.
How to confirm the version:
① Trados software name
② Open Trados software – Help – About.
If Trados software is not installed on the computer, please download it from the official website.
Official download address: https://www.sdl-china.cn/cn/
(2) Unzip the corresponding version of the plugin installation package.
(3) Open the unzipped file and right-click to run the corresponding .bat file for your version of Trados as an administrator.
(4) After running, if “1 file(s) copied” appears, it indicates that the script .bat for the 2019 version was executed successfully.
(5) Open Trados software, and if the following image appears, it indicates that the plugin was installed successfully. Click “Yes” to agree to load this plugin.
2.3 Specific Use of the Plugin
(1) First, open Trados and create a new translation project.
(2) Complete the option settings.
Mainly add project files and select the source and target languages.
Note: Depending on the needs, the source and target languages can be set to Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Greek, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Indonesian, Khmer, Lao, Italian, Filipino, Turkish, Ukrainian, Swedish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Polish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Hindi, Hebrew, Bengali, Armenian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Latin, Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Albanian, Macedonian, Estonian, Lithuanian.
Translation can be done between the above languages.
This tutorial uses English to Chinese translation.
(3) Click “Next” to see the following image.
This section does not require much from the students; those interested can check the box for “Allow editing of the original text.”
(4) Adding translation resources.
After completing the above settings, click “Next” to enter the page for selecting translation resources.
Note:
1. Here we can create a new or select the required translation memory, and we can also enable the online third-party machine translation plugin.
2. If in the previous steps you have already installed the relevant plugins, you will see a plugin named NiuTrans waiting to be used here. We will enable it.
(5) Official translation.
After completing all settings, open the editor page and start the official translation.
As shown, this page is currently no different from normal translation, but the difference is that when we click on a blank paragraph, the software will automatically generate a translation and mark it in blue AT style in the “Translation Details” to indicate that it was obtained through automatic translation.
After clicking seven times continuously, the software generated the corresponding translation based on the third-party translation tool, but this translation does not have a high recognition of certain details, such as the capitalized R in bold not being recognized, so at this time, post-editing is required for manual correction.
In addition, when the number of text lines is small, translations can be generated line by line, but when there are many lines, this method becomes inconvenient. At this point, we can click to enter “Batch Tasks.”
Check the option “Apply automatic translation when no match is found” in this option to perform automatic translation in batches.
3. Learning Insights
Implementing this operation will greatly benefit students when dealing with large volumes of similar translation content, effectively helping us shorten the time required for translation. However, we can also see that the accuracy of using third-party software for translation still has room for improvement, especially in recognizing literary translations. In summary, for translation students, the most important thing is to improve their own translation skills; automatic translation is merely a tool and should not be seen as a “lifeline.”
4. Video Tutorial
Note: This learning work is for reference only, and corrections are welcome.
Author: Xu Shiqi
Editor: Peiqing, Fufu
Reviewer: Zhiwei, Congcong