In Word, there are many different functions that can be used to speed up translations. Macros, for example, are a great way of simplifying and standardizing repetitive phrases or formatting. Macros take some knowledge to implement, but they are very useful for all translators. For instance, if there is a specific phrase that is continuously used over the document, then you can create a macro so that you can just press a button every time you need to insert that word or phrase. Imagine the amount of time you can save by instead of typing out a full word every time, you just press a button and the entire word or phrase comes out.

Some translators also prefer to use voice to text programs to do their translations. The advantage of voice to text is that it is overall faster than typing. If you have a long document, you can get through it faster than if you were typing. Voice to text does come with some disadvantages though. You will need to make sure that you have a good microphone so that it can clearly pick up on your voice. You will also need to make sure that you speak clearly so that it does not mistake any of your words. You will also have to get used to the voice controls and customize it so that it fits your work habits. However, there are some programs that you can use to help fine tune the listening so that it captures exactly what you’re saying even if you aren’t speaking clearly.

In terms of programs that can be used, if you are not looking to spend too much money, there are free options like Google Docs that have a decent voice recognition system. Microsoft Word also has a dictate function that its users can use to type out their translations with their voices. Then there are more premium options such as DRAG0N which have built in AI that can learn from your voice patterns, or can learn from your direct input. Many translators who use voice dictation and get used to it tend to not go back to just typing out their translations.

For Asian languages such as Japanese, there are also programs such as ATOK that can automatically convert the text you are writing into the appropriate characters. Instead of manually having to sift through characters, the program will learn and recognize when certain characters should be used rather than others and then enter them for you. It can save a lot of time for translators not having to take the time to look for the appropriate character every time they translate.

The first one is how to search for an exact phrase. While a dictionary can provide the exact word you want, there are often times where the word might not be used the way you think it should be, or there might be specific contexts in which it can be used or it might just be an outdated term altogether. To find out if a word or phrase you want to use can be used the way you want it to be, you can perform a Google search and put the term or phrase in quotation marks. So, for example, if you wanted to search for only the phrase raining cats and dogs, you could put it in quotation marks, “raining cats and dogs,” and then every single result will be websites that have the words in that exact order. You can also use the “verbatim” search function to search for only the word that you enter.

Next, if you want to find alternatives to words in phrases, you can use Google to search for alternatives. For example, if you wanted to search for different types of machine translation in one search, you could search like this: neural OR statistical OR rule-based machine translation. When you do that, Google will generate search results for machine translation that includes the words neural, statistical, and rule-based. This is handy if what you are searching for has numerous variations to it, but you only need a few alternatives as opposed to all of them.

On the flip side, there is a way to exclude search results from appearing. So in the case that you want all the different variations of a phrase but not something else, then you can use the minus sign to exclude the results that you don’t want. So if you want all the different kinds of machine translation, but don’t want statistical machine translation, then you can search –statistical machine translation and it will exclude all mentions of statistical machine translation. This is great if you know that you don’t want a search result to appear and are looking for other things instead.

One of the simpler tricks that does not require any special input is just comparing the amount of results that one version of a phrase generates versus another. So if you were wondering which spelling of versus is more commonly used, you could search for “vs” first and see how many hits are generated and then search “versus” and then see how many hits are generated. After comparing which one generates more, you can more confidently say that the one with more hits is the more commonly used word and therefore, safer to use in your translation.

The last trick is searching within a specific website for a specific phrase. If you wanted to look for the phrase “machine translation” on SDL’s website for example, you could search it as follows, site:sdl.com “machine translation” and then Google will generate all the instances of machine translation being mentioned on SDL’s website.