Re: [Freecats-Dev] Project status

[pavel]

Hello and thank you for your responses!

I will try to get my bearings. I cannot offer help with publishing code and
things like that. Also, my programming skills are not as high as you might
think (I have not written anything is C for quite a while). The main
problem is that my regular job and my developing Ando Tools takes too much
time to allow real participation in actual development of FreeCAT.

Anyway, I would love to share my experience to help this project circumvent
some of the problems Wordfast initial had (and partly, still suffers from
some of these). The greatest practical help -- apart from advice -- I could
possibly offer is programming the Word interface (basically the
segmentation engine) which is, in fact, a quite complex task to do (taking
into account Word behaviour in tables, page breaks, preservation of special
formatting, bookmarks, fields...).

In the long run, one feature I advise to keep in mind (and what I am trying
to do now "offline" with Excelate) is including a propagation engine that
takes care of consistency and "knows" where the translation (possibly fuzzy
matches) were used, so any changes during translation and editing could be
done in a very effective and consistent way (changing and suggesting
adjustments in similar translation units across files). With Trados and
Wordfast now, the TUs are never linked to some kind of (temporal) history
of where it was used and how it was changed.  Currently, no CAT tool
working in Word does these kinds of thing -- and my feeble attempts prove
that it is not very difficult to achieve.

Maybe it is premature to talk about this, but I feel that these things are
best implemented in the core engine and not as an afterthought.

Kind regards,
Pavel S.