[Freecats-Dev] Re: Segmenting and fuzzy matching blah blah

[Dave Simons]

Nice reply, Henri, except the part where...

> > In any case, if the program really does insist on presetting
> > the "translated" window to the fuzzy match, it should at least
>  > give me the opportunity to banish it to the pits of doom with
>  > a single keystroke, leaving me a virgin window to work with.
>
> This happens easily with Trados.

Sorry, it doesn't. The options you mention...

> - The fuzzy rate level under which no fuzzy target segment is copied
> - Whether or not to copy the current source segment IF no fuzzy is
>    found starting from this threshold

...are available in Wordfast too. But they do not address the operational 
problem I exposed.

Furthermore, that second option merely compounds the problem. To illustrate 
this with an extreme case, I've had a "Trados-aware" customer who sent me a 
pretranslated, non-cleaned Trados file using the "copy the current source 
segment" option. The only thing is, he didn't have a TM! The target 
segments were exactly the same as the source segments. It turned out this 
was standard practice for them. They honestly thought translators went 
through the non-cleaned .doc files changing the text directly in them. Of 
course I just cleaned the file and started anew. The customer got a 
Wordfast file instead of a Trados file but never spotted the difference.
I even went to the customer's premises to try to find out what was going on 
and try to explain a few things to them. It turned out none of the people 
working there knew much about Trados at all. A little knowledge is a 
dangerous thing, they say.

Pretranslation has to be a conscious decision, i.e., the default should be 
to put nothing at all in the target boxes unless specifically asked for. 
Defaults should be hard coded to their least dangerous variant. I'd even 
venture as far as to say that changing them should be a technical challenge 
(à la "Pandora's Box" in Wordfast). Many configuration tools hide sensitive 
options in an "advanced" tab in this way.

Anyway, that's all client/UI stuff. We're not at that stage yet. I'll bring 
all this up again at a propitious time.

Dave