On 17 January we officially launched our brand new tool Term Hunter! As we mentioned in the last post of this blog, Term Hunter analyses the text to be translated, matches it with the selected glossary, highlights the terms that appear in the source language and adds their translation in the target language in brackets: no confusion, no wasted time and no errors.

At Gloss It we want to encourage you to give it a chance, as we are convinced that it will forever change the way you approach translation. Term Hunter is a very task-oriented tool, which makes it excellent at its job. At first sight, replacing a handful of terms may not seem like much, so we invite you to join us in the following thought experiment to discover just how far it can go.

ONCE UPON A TIME

Imagine that you print out an academic article, open the Excel table in which you save the glossary of this subject and start reading the text. As you go on, you mark the terms you recognise with a fluorescent marker and then write down the translation of each term after checking it against the glossary.

Sound familiar?

For translators of an older age who remember their time in the classroom, this process may seem familiar. For those who have been trained in an environment with computer-based translation support tools, perhaps not so much. Hunting for terms with the underlining tool and searching for their equivalent was the first step towards a specialist translation in those days when translation memories and terminology managers did not yet exist. In short, the message of the task would be: read the text and highlight the terms that appear in it so that it will cost you less to translate it later.

The translation process was not as linear as they wanted us to believe. Even if you tried to establish the equivalence of each term from the very beginning, more than one of us gave up on it by the second page because the initial reading focused on the term - and not on the content - ended up seeming like a waste of time. Over the years, the development of CAT tools has made the underlining system obsolete, since the translation program itself proposes the equivalence when we reach a text segment containing one or more terms. The time savings and effectiveness are proven: without a doubt, there are tasks that a computer will always perform better than a human being.

AN ADAPTIVE HUNTER

This is also the objective for which we have developed our new tool: to automate the processes that can be automated. However, Term Hunter's ability to carry them out by adapting to the particularities of human translation makes it a unique proposition. Our aim is to offer you everything you may need without forcing you to change the way you work and without you having to renounce the advantages you have incorporated into your routine. Every translator has his or her own preferences and we will be there to make your day-to-day work easier by accommodating them.

In our desire to increase user comfort and adapt the technology to your needs, we have made every effort to ensure that Term Hunter keeps your working environment intact. Once you have processed and downloaded the file in the source language, all you have to do is start typing in your usual program, knowing that the text now contains the target language equivalence for all the terms in the glossary. We believe there is nothing better than working with slippers and a cup of coffee in your comfortable office, so we want Term Hunter to contribute to this sense of familiarity by bringing the same comfort and adaptability to your computing environment.

The ability to dump the results of the hunt into the source file is one of the cornerstones of its versatility: whatever you translate, you can do it from the environment in which you feel most comfortable. Forget about automated interfaces and text partitions that can unintentionally and negatively affect text flow, rhythm and expressiveness. Term Hunter offers you the possibility of continuing to work as usual, with the program and format that you find most useful (or that the client demands), so you do not have to say goodbye, for example, to the excellent revision and change control tools of Microsoft Word as long as you have a terminology manager that has your back. No more unnecessary exports, whose occasional formatting errors may be irrelevant in some cases, but in others may interfere with the strict templates of a dubbing script.

In short, we could say that Term Hunter picks up the highlighter, the glossary and the pen to do the first reading for you. That task that some of us never managed to accomplish can now be done effortlessly regardless of the number of words we are working with. Detecting and translating the terms in the text without influencing any other aspect of the translation not only makes it easier to consult the text, but also allows you to continue translating without any constraints of any kind, either in terms of tools or formatting, while reducing the number of interruptions that take you away from the text and break your concentration. This allows you to focus your attention on the aspects that depend exclusively on the human being without having to sacrifice an inch of comfort.

The new Term Hunter tool is included within Gloss It, our scalable, intuitive and collaborative online application, so you can use it wherever and whenever you want. All you need is an internet connection to enjoy Gloss It and Term Hunter from the device of your choice.