Forum: Wordfast support
Topic: Help! Wordfast not translating (I'm new to Wordfast)
Poster: neilmac
Post title: Not a magic wand
[quote]Marcelina Haftka wrote:
Hello,
Wordfast (as other CATs) is supposed to facilitate and speed up your work. But you are the one who is supposed to translate, populate your translation memories and glossaries, make appropriate choices.
Of course, you are given the possibility to use the machine translation function, but usually for this you need to have an API key or another pay-for-MT option enabled with your MT provider.
Maybe try to start with reading this: [url removed]
Good luck!
Marcelina [/quote]
As Marcelina points out, it's YOU that is the translator, so YOU have to do the donkey work, at least at first. You create the TM (Translation Memory) and as you go along, translating the text, WF "remembers" it. Then, on future occasions, when the same or similar texts appear, the program can insert them for you and save you from having to type. As you gradually build up your TM, or TMs, you can then leverage past translations, which can really speed up your output, if used properly. And if you don't have any actual translation work to do at the moment, you can always create your first TM/s by translating any random text yourself, or feeding it/them with text you may have translated previously.
Machine translation (MT) is different. You can use free MT programmes such as Google translate or DeepL in conjunction with Wordfast, but you may find it more convenient to use a paid-for API for this, for example GT4T.
Topic: Help! Wordfast not translating (I'm new to Wordfast)
Poster: neilmac
Post title: Not a magic wand
[quote]Marcelina Haftka wrote:
Hello,
Wordfast (as other CATs) is supposed to facilitate and speed up your work. But you are the one who is supposed to translate, populate your translation memories and glossaries, make appropriate choices.
Of course, you are given the possibility to use the machine translation function, but usually for this you need to have an API key or another pay-for-MT option enabled with your MT provider.
Maybe try to start with reading this: [url removed]
Good luck!
Marcelina [/quote]
As Marcelina points out, it's YOU that is the translator, so YOU have to do the donkey work, at least at first. You create the TM (Translation Memory) and as you go along, translating the text, WF "remembers" it. Then, on future occasions, when the same or similar texts appear, the program can insert them for you and save you from having to type. As you gradually build up your TM, or TMs, you can then leverage past translations, which can really speed up your output, if used properly. And if you don't have any actual translation work to do at the moment, you can always create your first TM/s by translating any random text yourself, or feeding it/them with text you may have translated previously.
Machine translation (MT) is different. You can use free MT programmes such as Google translate or DeepL in conjunction with Wordfast, but you may find it more convenient to use a paid-for API for this, for example GT4T.
