Document Conversion - CAT CompatibilityHOW IT WORKS
- Simply submit your files via e-mail or Skype. During business hours, we confirm the total cost and delivery time within 3h.
- Delivery of small orders normally within 24h.
- The completed files will be sent to you by email or deposited on our FTP server.
- We will send you an invoice after completion of the project or at the end of the month. Payment is due 28 days after receipt (Paypal, Moneybookers, bank transfer).
Business Hours
9:00 to 12:00 a.m. and 1:00 to 5:30 p.m. China time (1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. 5:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. UMT)
Payment
Via Paypal, Moneybookers, or bank transfer to China 28 days after receipt of invoice at the latest.
Contact
Skype: logitope
MSN: chat[at]logitope.com
Mail: wb2[at]logitope.com
Phone: +86-27-85584715
Documents converted by Logitope are professionally formatted with special attention on CAT compatibility.
Crucial for an efficient use of CAT tools is the correctness of the text flow. Excess line breaks result in wrong segmentation, and some applications such as Trados Studio 2009 do not allow merging segments that are separated by line breaks. However, there are other important considerations regarding CAT compatibility. Our conversions are based on the following principles:
- All formatting is applied manually (cf. note on automatic conversion below)
- Minimalist approach – unnecessarily complicated formatting often results in more time-consuming and difficult post-formatting after translation. Nested structures such as tables within tables, tables within frames, can lead to CAT errors in the worst case.
- Our formatting mirrors the actual logical structure of the document. For example, a table is used only if the text is logically divided into cells, while columns are employed if the text at the end of one column is continued at the top of the next column. These measures make it likely that the target language text is automatically placed in the correct position and only minimal post-formatting is necessary after translation.
- Styles – we use MS Word Styles to structure documents. This allows the generation of an automatic table of contents and makes adjustments easier.
- To make image annotations editable, we usually employ grouped text boxes, meaning the image can still be moved together with all its annotations. To take into account that the target language text might be longer than the source text, we use text boxes that are larger than required by the source text, as long as they don't interfere with the graphical elements of the picture. This decreases the probability that the text boxes need to be ungrouped and resized after translation.
Automatic Conversion
Logitope uses automatic conversion tools only as a preliminary step in order to read scanned text (OCR). All formatting is then erased and re-applied manually. Automatic conversion tools sometimes achieve a visually very accurate reproduction of the original, but only at the price of excessive use of formatting attributes and an extremely complicated and usually illogical structure that make adjustments frustrating and time-consuming. In many cases, the original text flow is destroyed, for example because words that syntactically belong together are placed in different text boxes. An additional problem in relation to tag-based CAT tools (such as Trados Tageditor, Trados Studio, Idiom, Star Transit, etc.) is that the excessive use of formatting attributes by automatic conversion software can result in a very large of number of tags that make translation all but impossible (see picture below).
Broken text flow and tags in Trados Studio 2009
resulting from automatic conversion
Automatic conversion software is valuable for certain purposes, in particular optical character recognition. Logitope uses ABBYY Finereader and Nuance Omnipage.