Medical Translation Insight

The good folks at ABBYY have developed a whole bunch of tools that have simplified the lives of translation clients and practitioners. A lot of us are familiar with ABBYY FineReader. We have previously discussed how tools like FineReader streamline the translation of scanned PDFs in dossiers and clinical research studies.

Now ABBYY has entered the increasingly crowded space for tools that create translation memories. Its ABBYY Aligner tool is based on ABBYY's existing linguistic technology and uses lexical data to perform its alignment duties.

ABBYY's press release offers up the following details:

The application aligns texts in 10 popular European languages (English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian) with support for 90 translation directions. The resulting texts can be saved either in RTF or TMX format which are international standards supported by virtually any CAT tools. ABBYY Aligner opens files in TXT, RTF, PDF, HTML and documents created in popular Microsoft® Office applications (DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, PPS, PPSX, XLS and XLSX).

Have you taken the leap and purchased ABBYY Aligner? How does it compare to other tools?

[Tip of the hat to Jost Zetzsche's Tool Kit.]


For further reading, check out the following:

• What you need to know about translation memories provides an overview of translation memories, text alignment, and some of the pros and cons in the technology.
• We previously looked at OCR software, including ABBYY FineReader, here and here.
• L10Nworks is a repository of translation and localization freeware/shareware tools.

ForeignExchange Translations provides specialized medical translation services to biopharma and medical equipment companies.