miércoles, 9 de diciembre de 2015

To CAT or not to CAT

Are you one of those interpreters who thought they were safe from CAT tools and alike? If you are, you can start thinking about changing careers: CAT tools are here to stay and they will conquer the interpretation world too.

I must admit I was no fan of CAT tools in the beginning (and I am talking about way back in the days), but now Word Fast is one of my best friends and as I started to wonder what could be done to make our lives easier in the booth, or when doing consecutive interpretation, I came across some interesting applications of technology for us, interpreters.

Remote interpreting is already an evidence of how useful technology can be for us and for our clients because it allows for more privacy for medical interpretation and saves time and money due to the fact that the interpreter dos not need to be on site.

Fortunately, the days where a machine will be able to take our jobs from us are very far, however some technological advances can make us much faster and accurate when working. For example, the Smartpen allows interpreters to perform in a hybrid mode: they can read their notes while listening to the speech, which dramatically increases accuracy and is very useful for court settings, for example.

As for the booth, it would be very convenient to have an app in our tablets that is able to transcribe speech and allows us to tap in a certain word to provide equivalents in the target language. That would be very useful and it is a real possibility thanks to décalage.

However, right now we do have some interesting tools and apps that help us train better such as Voice-o-meter that helps us train the perfect voice volume and modulation; Vbookz pdf voice reader can be used to play articles and books and do interpreting practice, as it is possible to regulate the speed; with Interplex lite users can access Interplex glossary databases on an iPhone or iPod Touch; and Listening drill allows users to import TED talks, audio books, MP3 files, and other file formats and use them for foreign language practice.

Technology is here to stay and we may as well take advantage of it.

References
Silva, Cris


Drechsel, Alexander

Orlando, Marc



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