October 6, 2016

Use Wordfast online TMs as concordance reference in other CAT tools

By admin-emal-1005 Views-No Comment

I work for one agency, which only sends me remote TMs & glossaries for Wordfast as a reference. I don’t have a Wordfast license. However, there’s a neat hack to access these remote references in my favorite CAT tool without buying Wordfast.

Wordfast has a free online service called Free TM or Wordfast Anywhere (www.freetm.com). Here you can set up a project like in most other CAT tools. (You need a free account; if you don’t want to give your real e-mail, use a disposable one, like Mailinator.com).

To set up your remote TM, proceed a follows:

  1. In the “TM & Glossaries” Tab, go to “Setup”.
  2. Click “Add” for either TM or glossary, depending on which one you’re adding.
  3. Choose “Add remote TM with a given URL”
  4. Copy the remote TM link provided by your client or customer into the box that appears. (It should start with “gltm://”)
Freetm.png

Fig. 1: Add the remote TM in Wordfast Anywhere.

Now you’ve added the remote TM to Wordfast anywhere. To search it, click either “Concordance” or “Glossary Search”, depending on whether you want to search the TM or glossary.

Freetm.png

Fig. 2: Find the search link for your remote TM in Wordfast Anywhere.

In the browser window that pops up (enable pop-ups!), copy the link from the URL bar. You can now add this link to the CAT tool of your choice like any old search engine! Just make sure you’re logged in to WF Anywhere in your browser in the background.

I’m showing you an example using MemoQ. Here the option is called “MemoQ Web Search” (Ctrl + F3). In SDL Studio, it’s under Advanced > Lookup > Web Lookup. It will be similar for other tools.

Just add the WF anywhere URL to your list of custom search engines, according to your CAT tool’s specifications. Voilà! You can now access the client’s TM and glossary without having to use Wordfast. Just select a word in your project and press the Web Search hotkey (Ctrl + F3 in MemoQ) to get straight results from the remote TM / glossary in your favorite CAT tool. Share if you like!

Freetm.png

Fig. 3: Add the remote TM link to MemoQ as a custom search engine.

Leave a Comment