Generally, there are three Categories of Translations Tools:

1: E-dictionary for a single word: for example, Youdao, Kingsoft, etc.

2: Machine translation for passage: for example, Logomedia， Systran

3: CAT Tools:

The main function of the CAT tool is to provide an effective platform for translators to combine all kinds of functions like search, replace, etc. of computers with people’s translation abilities.

People in different countries use different translation tools. But today the most famous one is Trados.

Trados Introduction:

TRADOS was founded in 1984 by Jochen Hummel and Iko Knyphausen in Stuttgart, Germany to provide translation services for IBM. In 1990, the first version of one of TRADOS’s main components, MultiTerm, was created as a memory-resident multilingual terminology manager for DOS.

By the end of 1992, TRADOS developed the first MultiTerm for Windows. At the same time, the second main component of TRADOS, the Translator’s Workbench, introducing linguistic fuzzy-matching on translation memories, was established for DOS and 1994 for Windows.

A huge success of TRADOS in 1997 was the decision of Microsoft to base its internal localization memory store on TRADOS. Microsoft also acquired a share of 20% in TRADOS. In the same year, WinAlign, a visual text alignment tool, was released as the first fully-fledged 32bit application in TRADOS.

Read Also: On Qualities of Translator (I)

In 1998 TRADOS acquired the S-Tagger technology by International Translation & Publishing, Ltd. (ITP). S-Tagger is a conversion tool for converting FrameMaker and Interleaf files into a format that can easily be edited and translated in MS Word using Translator’s Workbench.

In April 2000, TRADOS Translation Solution Edition 3 was released supporting XML and Bi-directional Languages. It contained the Translator’s Workbench, the HTML/XML editor TagEditor, MultiTerm, WinAlign, the S-Taggers, and T-Window for PowerPoint.

In March 2001, TRADOS announces the launch of TRADOS 5. As a multinational corporation, TRADOS has offices in Germany, France, Belgium, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, China, Japan, Switzerland and the United States.