The demand for translations services has been consistently increasing throughout the years. This big raise has led to many innovations in specialized technology to help the translation industry and language service providers in general.

Today, CAT tools are among the most used technology thanks to the multiple benefits their features provide. From increasing consistency, reducing time and costs, keeping track of the expressions and their translations, CAT tools really are supportive for the roles of translators, editors, and even project managers.

It’s important to understand that CAT tools and Machine Translation may have some similarities but they are not the same. With Computer-Aided Translation tools, linguists are still in charge of articulating the ideas and sentences. As the name suggests, the aim of CAT tools is merely to act as a support. Modern CAT tools do not have a ready-made bilingual dictionary. The database is created each time the translator works on a translation.

Unlike other disciplines, languages do not lend themselves to computer algorithms. In the case of Design programs like CAD software, for example, they work in an automatized way because the rules of geometry are constant. In the same way, computers can solve arithmetic problems based on a set of rules they are given since these rules don’t ever change.

When it comes to languages, however, there are no absolute rules nor absolute meanings. The same words can have a different meaning or connotation depending on the context, which is why Machine Translation cannot be fully trusted as a quality translation.

Additionally, the rules that govern grammar and terminology change over time. Some old words and expressions do not get to the next generation, become less used and eventually “die”. In the opposite way, some new terms are coined and syntactic conventions evolve.

It is true that many technology tools work faster – and even smarter – in some cases. In the translation industry; terminology databases are largely relied to research terms, CAT tools help ensure terminology consistency in large documents and save time. But due to the ever-changing nature of languages and communication, it cannot be said that CAT tools or even other technology innovations are replacing human translations.

As technology keeps evolving, tools like machine translation get better all the time yet, even when opting to activate machine translation on CAT tools, the skill of human translators is still needed to correct registers, check the word choice and stylistic nuance so the quality of the translation is good.