There are now a variety of Computer Aided Translation (CAT) applications on the market. Most have their good and bad points, but one is in a class of its own. Felix, a CAT application developed by Ginstrom IT Solutions (GITS), which is run by a professional translator based in Okinawa, has all the benefits of your computer remembering what you have translated and showing you similar translations from the past so you can improve both your speed and consistency, but without any of the headaches and steep learning curves of the other software. Add in the fact that it costs less than most of the other CAT applications—most of which fail to perform even nearly as well as Felix does—and there’s not much left to think about.
Felix works inside Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and there is even a program called TagAssist that allows you to use it in HTML files. In addition to this revolutionary simple-to-use CAT software, Ryan Ginstrom, the owner of GITS and developer of Felix, also has a number of free applications (tools) that can be downloaded from his website.
While these tools can be used with Felix to further improve your translating efficiency, many of them can be used individually just to make life easier.
Count Anything is a small program that will give you a word count from a variety of file formats. Not only do you not need to open each file, but it will even count the words in those pesky text boxes, and there is an option to ignore sections that only contain numbers.
Analyze Assist is similar to Count Anything, but it also tells you how many of your sentences are duplicated within the file or files that you use it on. Also, if you use it in combination with a Felix translation memory file (TM), it will tell you how much of your file is in the TM, and allow you to quickly estimate how much work (= time = money) will be involved in translating the file.
These tools alone speed up the process of estimating how long it will take to do a translation, and that means you are already saving time (= money!!). All this for free!
If you still have any doubts whether Felix is worth the price, just download the fully-functional trial version. There is no limit to how long you can use it, and no functions are removed in the trial version. In fact, the only limitation is that you can only use memories with up to 500 lines in them. That should be plenty to give it a test run.
Ryan even offers a money-back guarantee. To quote from his website: “Any time within 60 days of your purchase you can ask for and receive a full refund, no questions asked.”
There is plenty more information about Felix and the various tools that can be used with it, so why not go any take a look around the site while you download the latest version for free, and take the friendliest CAT application for a test drive.
