At the beginning of Fall 2018 semester when I was registering for classes, I noticed one of the courses I needed to register for was this course titled “Intro to CAT.” I thought, “Okay, not bad, that’s only one acronym, I can handle this. I got this!” Then the semester began. We were assigned readings from a book titled The Translator’s Tool Box by Jost Zetzsche. This is where the learning curve began. Oh boy, acronyms galore.

I was introduced to acronyms such as TEnT, MT, TM, TB, and the list goes on. After being accepted to the Translation & Localization Management (TLM) program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS), I felt very vested in this program for my performance in this program would determine my level of success post-graduation. Needless to say, when I was doing the assigned readings from this book, I was wondering to myself how I could go about memorizing all these acronyms and all these foreign concepts.

As the semester continued plowing forward, we were assigned more readings and we started being introduced to more and more different CAT tools, such as SDL Trados, WordFast, and AntConc to name a few. As the weeks went by, the initial feeling of concern slowly turned into one of satisfaction and confidence: satisfaction knowing that I was finally starting to have a grasp on all the things we were being taught, then confidence because of my grasp on all this new-found knowledge.

About 3/4 of the way into the semester, we were assigned our final project: take the skills and knowledge that we’ve learned and apply it toward a translation project. During the process, jot down notes of things that went well and lessons learned. Below is the fruits of my labor:

CATch

Here you can find the SOW for our client Curbed.

Here you can find the original source text for our project, while you can go here to find a copy of the translated text.

Here is a link to the recording of my group’s presentation.