CAT Tools in an Academic Environment: What Are They Good For?

Dorothy Kenny
Dublin City University

Abstract

Many universities have now incorporated commercially available translators ' workbench-style systems into their translator-training programmes. But, when it comes to computer-aided translation (CAT), the university's role need not be confined to teaching students how to operate some third party's system; rather new CAT tools open up whole new areas of research. For example, experience of Trados's Translator's Workbench suggests that workbench features such as automatic terminology recognition and translation memories stand to bring about fundamental changes in the way terminology is recorded and texts are authored. State-of-the-art CAT tools can also make a contribution to Descriptive Translation Studies and translation pedagogy.

Table of contents

Over the last few years there have been several calls for greater integration of computer-aided-translation (CAT) tools (see section 1 below) into the translation curriculum. Dieter Wältermann (1994:130), for example, is adamant that:

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