Evaluation of Computer Aided Translation (CAT) Tools in the Translation Process: A Plea for Complementing CAT-Tools with Corpus Linguistical Tools and Methods

Abstract

The demand for translations of high quality is on a peak while the budget and time resources are low. Consequently, translators need technological support and use Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools. Using the open-source tool OmegaT, this thesis investigates how CAT tools support the translation process. The objective of the study are political texts published by the European Parliament. The analysis further demonstrates that CAT tools have certain constraints. Using parts of the monolingual corpus DeReKo, the thesis exemplifies how these limitations can be overcome by using corpora as an additional resource during the translation process. This thesis contributes to the improvement of CAT tools as the main technological resource used by translation experts and outlines weaknesses which negatively impact their work. The findings can be used for optimizing all types of technology dealing with language data because they show how natural language must be understood to process it automatically. Furthermore, the approach taken in this work with regard to the critical examination of available resources can be applied in the future to evaluate and optimize new translation tools.