Dragon NaturallySpeaking: Twice the Product, Half the Effort.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is gaining ground in the translation industry. I attended a session on Dragon given by Tom Fennell and Andrew Levine at the last ATA conference in October, which really made me realize how much I am under-utilizing the program. Then in December, Mario Chávez reviewed Dragon in the ATA Chronicle from the perspective of medical translation and handling PDF documents. After recently editing a few documents obviously done with dictation software, I started pondering how this tool fits into a translator’s workflow and how it is best used to increase productivity while avoiding the pitfalls.

I’ve noticed more and more translators using Dragon when I edit. Keep in mind that this fact should not be obvious to an editor or a reader. This tool is relatively new to the industry and I think many translators aren’t used to proofreading texts produced by Dragon and so they miss things like “March to” instead of “March 2” because their brains simply don’t expect it to be there.

Don’t run away yet. Dragon is definitely a wonderful addition to your toolkit…IF you think faster than you can type, as was mentioned in the ATA conference presentation. With that said, I know a lot of people who think that they are such speed-demons on a keyboard, Dragon is useless for them, but Dragon does more than just accelerate typing.

The advantages:

·         Lighten your load. First and foremost, it just makes translating easier. Plus, if you put forth less effort to translate the same number of words, in theory, you can translate a few more of them…or just take the afternoon off!

·         Focus on the source. If you’re translating a PDF document, you’re usually forced to go back and forth looking at the source then the target, then the source and then target, etc. Dragon virtually eliminates this problem. This was also mentioned in the ATA chronicle review of the software.

·         Hear your translation. We’ve long heard that reading a translation out loud can help eliminate things that just don’t sound right and with Dragon, this is not a separate step.

·         Translate faster. I think most people translate much faster with Dragon. It makes lists of phone numbers or lab values and especially dates a breeze. Even on complex medical documents, I am still faster than I was before using Dragon, even though I often do a lot of research.

·         Work faster. It’s quite easy to set up automatic shortcuts with Dragon so, for example, when you receive a job request and you’re all booked up, you can say “all booked up” and have it write an entire e-mail for you just as if you had created a shortcut to insert a paragraph at the push of a button. Not to mention, you can update your Facebook status, close and open windows and programs and lots more.

·         Translate consistently and translate better. The more I use Dragon, the faster my brain seems to be able to translate and remember previous translations accurately. That may sound questionable, and maybe it is. I can only speak from my own experience. I’ve certainly at least noticed that increasing my translation speed and saying my translations out loud has resulted in fewer instances of having to go back and see how certain terms and phrases were handled.

·         Multitask. Dragon eliminates the absolute requirement that you must be looking where you are typing. For example, I might use Dragon to type in a search on Google or in a dictionary while I’m reading my source. Or, I might have looked something up and be reading the information I need as I’m dictating my newly found terminology into my translation.

The pitfalls:

·         Tomato: tomayto or tomahto? You need to know how to pronounce what you’re typing. You might think you know how to pronounce it, but Dragon might not agree with you. Don’t worry, either you or Dragon will learn.

·         Proofread differently. You have to proofread for mistakes that you know that you never would have made. I recently had Dragon decide that when I said “NM” I meant “New Mexico.” I didn’t. It was an acronym for an institution.

·         Heavy program. If you’re using a computer that is on its last leg, it probably won’t be able to handle Dragon, but most decent computers don’t seem to have problems.

·         No distractions. Yes, that is a pitfall…and an advantage. No listening to music or other sound. However, I do sometimes manage to listen to music through the headset and it doesn’t seem to affect Dragon.

How much can Dragon increase your productivity? Well, that depends. I can say that just by adding Dragon to my own workflow, I’ve increased my speed by about 25% on highly technical jobs and by up to 100% on less technical jobs, including careful proofreading. There’s certainly no doubt that the software is now on my list of absolutely essential tools but remember, don’t be afraid to test yourself and Dragon and you might be surprised, but in the end, proofread carefully.

Note: I am in no way affiliated with Dragon and there are several other dictation software programs available, it just so happens that my experience has been with Dragon.

OCR Tools: Coping with PDF Files

As a medical translator, I work with a LOT of PDF files. I probably use my OCR tool up to 10 times per day and I’m fairly certain that at this point, I couldn’t work without it. However, it took some time before I figured out exactly how to get the most out of it and I’m certain that I haven’t even scratched the surface. In case you are not familiar with OCR, it stands for “Optical Character Recognition” and is basically used to turn “dead” (not editable) documents of all kinds (including pictures and PDFs) into editable Word documents preserving the formatting of the original. This sometimes works better in theory than in practice since a bad fax can ruin the OCR tool’s ability to properly recreate formatting. 

Fixing the strange formatting produced by an OCR tool can be more difficult than recreating the formatting from scratch. With that said, it still has plenty of uses. I use the text from an OCR file pasted as unformatted text into a new clean file which I format from scratch. I find this to be the easiest way to get around the strange formatting the files can create while still taking advantage of the benefits.

Quality: When editing translations from PDF documents, I often find that translators omit text. Although this is an unacceptable translation error, it does happen. OCR helps ensure all of the text gets translated, just like using a Word file.

Computer-Assisted Translation tools: OCR enables you to use your favorite CAT tool with a dead PDF file. This helps speed up the translation process by taking advantage of the matches and repetitions that are generally inaccessible in PDF translations. You can also increase consistency by always ensuring that segments and terminology are translated the same way throughout a document.

Numbers, names and lists: Have you ever waded through pages and pages of a lab report? Ever painfully retyped tables full of numbers? An OCR tool will recreate all of those numbers for you. That means all you need to do is proofread them! Or, how about a list of names with phone numbers? Don’t type the whole list from scratch—OCR the list and proofread instead!

Tables: Although OCR tools can create strange formatting, they are great with simple tables and lines that they can read well. You may just need to correct the cell alignment and font. 

Word counts: Most translators estimate how long a project will take based on the number of words in the document. With a PDF, the word count is usually estimated a variety of ways, but the accuracy varies. I recently had a client ask me to translate a very technical medical document with 2,000 words in 24 hours. No problem, right? It looked a little longer than that to me so I sent the file through my OCR tool and it turned out that the file was 7,000 words. No, I’m not kidding. That would have been a long night. 

Flat rates: Having an accurate word count also allows you to give clients a flat rate if you so choose and/or helps provide a more accurate quote up front so no one is surprised.

Just remember that OCR tools only give an estimate. If you use it to check the word count of a document, be sure to scroll through and make sure that all or most of the text was picked up by the OCR tool. If it can’t read something, it will be inserted as a picture and maybe a picture is worth a thousand words, but not to a translator!

How do you use your OCR tool?