BasicCAT, yet another open source CAT software
Thread poster: xulihang
xulihang
xulihang
China
Local time: 18:53
Chinese to English
+ ...
Nov 21, 2018

BasicCAT is an open source computer-aided translation tool, which aims at providing a simple and useful tool for translators.

It supports translation memory and terminology management like most CAT tools do and it also has cutting-edge interactive machine translation functions.

Visit its homepage: http://www.basiccat.org to learn more.


 
DZiW (X)
DZiW (X)
Ukraine
English to Russian
+ ...
BasicCAT for basic people? Nov 23, 2018

Hello Xu. Could you tell us a little more: which CATs you use, what you didn't like, why decided to make your own tool with what ideas and benefits in mind and so on?

I mean one thing is always at the expense of the others. Say, the Trados team invents all those bloating bells and whistles to pretend keeping the lead while adding to the cost; WFC heavily relies on MS Office; OmegaT requires Java to run cross-platform, slow cloud services make translators rather vulnerable and depend
... See more
Hello Xu. Could you tell us a little more: which CATs you use, what you didn't like, why decided to make your own tool with what ideas and benefits in mind and so on?

I mean one thing is always at the expense of the others. Say, the Trados team invents all those bloating bells and whistles to pretend keeping the lead while adding to the cost; WFC heavily relies on MS Office; OmegaT requires Java to run cross-platform, slow cloud services make translators rather vulnerable and dependent, and so on. Why BasicCAT?

Sure, I did check basic/advanced features, yet still... Okapi or free Felix CAT for DOCX files? You must be kidding! However, while combining different free projects for achieving the same goal may look promising (especially weighting the fuzzy Levenshtein distance with LanguageTool and Stanford CoreNLP), such a HUB makes the app rather 'multivendor'.

Therefore, what benefits BasicCAT could provide to both newbie translators and those experienced with Trados, WordFast, DejaVu, or MemoQ? (BTW: Why no Youtube video yet?)

TY
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Hans Lenting
 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:53
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
+ ...
Very interesting, thanks! Nov 23, 2018

Hi xulihang,

Very interesting, thanks! I will definitely be playing around with it and report back here.

I haven't had much time yet and so only installed it (x64, Win10) and did a quick test. It seems to have some interesting ideas.

Are you the developer? I noticed that it is open source. Is it based on, or does it borrow any code from, any of the other CAT
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Hi xulihang,

Very interesting, thanks! I will definitely be playing around with it and report back here.

I haven't had much time yet and so only installed it (x64, Win10) and did a quick test. It seems to have some interesting ideas.

Are you the developer? I noticed that it is open source. Is it based on, or does it borrow any code from, any of the other CAT tools, such as:

• OmegaT (http://omegat.org/ )
• DGT-OmegaT (http://185.13.37.79/ )
• Autshumato (http://autshumato.sourceforge.net/ )
• Benten (https://osdn.net/projects/benten/ )
• Heartsome Suite (https://github.com/heartsome/translationstudio8 )
• Poedit (https://poedit.net/ )
• Silvestris Laboratory programs (http://www.silvestris-lab.org/ )

???

Michael
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xulihang
xulihang
China
Local time: 18:53
Chinese to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
BasicCAT is started from scratch Nov 24, 2018

BasicCAT uses B4J as its programming tool and the code is written from scratch. I did learn how to make an SRX algorithm by viewing OmegaT's source code and this https://github.com/loomchild/segment java library.

 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
Other languages supported? Nov 24, 2018

Click “File”->”New”, choose “en to zh” to create English to Chinese projects and “zh to en” to create Chinese to English projects.


Do you support other languages?


 
xulihang
xulihang
China
Local time: 18:53
Chinese to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Only English and Chinese are supported for now Nov 24, 2018

Hans Lenting wrote:

Click “File”->”New”, choose “en to zh” to create English to Chinese projects and “zh to en” to create Chinese to English projects.


Do you support other languages?


No. I do not know other languages and by focusing on one language pair, I can add more functions to it. Like Stanford CoreNLP only supports Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Germany.

But it will try to support more languages as for most languages, I think the differences lie in segmentation rules and whether there is space between words.


 
xulihang
xulihang
China
Local time: 18:53
Chinese to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Creating BasicCAT is a better option in terms of academic purpose, price and so on Nov 24, 2018

DZiW wrote:

Hello Xu. Could you tell us a little more: which CATs you use, what you didn't like, why decided to make your own tool with what ideas and benefits in mind and so on?

I mean one thing is always at the expense of the others. Say, the Trados team invents all those bloating bells and whistles to pretend keeping the lead while adding to the cost; WFC heavily relies on MS Office; OmegaT requires Java to run cross-platform, slow cloud services make translators rather vulnerable and dependent, and so on. Why BasicCAT?

Sure, I did check basic/advanced features, yet still... Okapi or free Felix CAT for DOCX files? You must be kidding! However, while combining different free projects for achieving the same goal may look promising (especially weighting the fuzzy Levenshtein distance with LanguageTool and Stanford CoreNLP), such a HUB makes the app rather 'multivendor'.

Therefore, what benefits BasicCAT could provide to both newbie translators and those experienced with Trados, WordFast, DejaVu, or MemoQ? (BTW: Why no Youtube video yet?)

TY


Thanks for your opinions. To answer your question, I have to give a brief introduction of myself. I am a graduate student majoring CAT in Peking University of China. I just finished an intern in a publishing house doing translating jobs. They do not use CAT tools and it is not easy to promote these tools . Foreign CAT tools are not easy to use for Chinese people and the only good Chinese CAT tool SnowmanCAT has limited functions. Another problem is the high price of commercial CAT tools.

I think instead of promoting for CAT companies, why not build a free CAT tool on my own as I am a CAT major student. I can take control of every bit of this tool and add whatever functions I want. I like taking control.

I spent one month making BasicCAT to support IDML files to meet my needs, which will shows fewer tags and can convert English fontstyle to Chinese fontsyle. Microsoft office's openxml is complicated. I do not have enough time and I do not have to translate word files for now. So leveraging other tools is a good option.

I am a fan of open source and would like to share the inside and out of BasicCAT with others. So I make it open source. OmegaT is an excellent project but too old. I am very familiar with OmegaT and designed BasicCAT's search and replace based on its design. I also learned SRX algorithm from its code. I think working with other open source projects not only saves works, but also helps each other grow.

BasicCAT is cross-platform as it runs on JVM. It is written in B4J, an very handy tool to use. I think it is also suitable for training CAT major students.

As a Chinese saying goes, "To do a good job one must first sharpen one's tools." I am a part-time translator as well as a programmer. So I will prefer to sharpen my own tools.

I have to main two languages versions, so no youtube for now but only Chinese videos on bilibili.


Tiberiu Leon
Jorge Payan
chewsihui95
 
Tiberiu Leon
Tiberiu Leon
Local time: 12:53
English to Romanian
+ ...
Grats! Dec 15, 2020

I would like to congratulate you for your efforts and for releasing this as open source.
I installed the program a couple of days ago and tested it a while. The program is responsive, integrates some useful services and I encountered no obvious bugs. Keep up the good work and thank you for making your efforts public.


Tom in London
xulihang
 
Mario Cerutti
Mario Cerutti  Identity Verified
Japan
Local time: 19:53
Italian to Japanese
+ ...
Multi-language dictionaries? Jan 2, 2021

Hello Xu,

I have read through your BasicCAT documentation and it seems dictionaries are not multi-language, that is it's not possible to enter two-language target terms for one source term and to display them all regardless of the source term language, and for any source language set (I translate from Japanese and English to Italian and it would be great if one single, three-language dictionary could be used).

Would you please confirm?

Thank you!

[E
... See more
Hello Xu,

I have read through your BasicCAT documentation and it seems dictionaries are not multi-language, that is it's not possible to enter two-language target terms for one source term and to display them all regardless of the source term language, and for any source language set (I translate from Japanese and English to Italian and it would be great if one single, three-language dictionary could be used).

Would you please confirm?

Thank you!

[Edited at 2021-01-02 12:42 GMT]
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xulihang
xulihang
China
Local time: 18:53
Chinese to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Currently, not multi-language Jan 2, 2021

Mario Cerutti wrote:

Hello Xu,

I have read through the your documentation and it seems that BasicCAT dictionaries are not multi-language, that is it's not possible to enter two-language target terms for one source term and to display them all regardless of the source term language, and for any source language set (I translate from Japanese and English to Italian and would like to use one single, three-language dictionary).

Would you please confirm?

Thank you!


BasicCAT does not support multi-language projects right now. The translation memory and term databases are designed for one language pair. It will not be difficult to implement this though. I have an onlline TM search tool which supports multi-language. I may add this feature in the future and enhance cross projects TMs and terms mangements as well.


 
Mario Cerutti
Mario Cerutti  Identity Verified
Japan
Local time: 19:53
Italian to Japanese
+ ...
Multi-language dictionaries Jan 2, 2021

xulihang wrote:
I may add this feature in the future and enhance cross projects TMs and terms mangements as well.

Many thanks Xu,

I'll keep coming back to your website from time to time to see how BasicCAT further develops on this aspect, because I think it deserves much attention. And may I say that it's not so basic after all?

[Edited at 2021-01-02 12:42 GMT]


 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
Elementary Jan 3, 2021

Mario Cerutti wrote:

And may I say that it's not so basic after all?


How about: It’s elementary, dear Mario?


 


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BasicCAT, yet another open source CAT software







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