The Virtaal CAT Tool is yet another free translation (CAT: Computer Aided Translation) tool with Translation Memory (TM) for the desktop. It was initially developed for software translation. The tool provides a very simple and minimalistic interface. Virtaal supports many file formats, including PO, Java .properties, OpenOffice, Mozilla, XLIFF, TMX, TBX, CSV, Qt .ts.
Because of its minimalistic approach, Virtaal takes very little space on your computer and needs very little processing time, making it fast and resource-friendly. But this approach also means that you won’t have the comfortable environment that you might be used to. Unfortunately, this tool also lacks some important features we would always want to have. The most important one is a TM Import option.
Some Features
Auto-completion
The Virtaal CAT Tool will save you some time by completing some long words for you. OpenOffice users will already appreciate this feature. You will see the auto-completion option suggesting a possible word, and the suggestion can be accepted by pressing “Tab.” If the suggestion is not what you want, you can simply continue by entering the word you had in mind. If you have accepted a suggestion you do not want, you can simply undo it with “Ctrl+Z.”
Auto-correction
This tool can also save you some time by fixing certain common typing mistakes or spelling errors. How mistakes are corrected depends on your language, and it is possible that there is no information for your language. If the tool automatically corrects something you didn’t want, you can simply undo the step with “Ctrl+Z.”
Use a Suggestion from TM or MT
If the tool has a suggestion obtained from a Translation Memory or through Machine Translation, it is displayed underneath the editing area. You can put the first suggestion into the target text with “Ctrl+1” or use “Ctrl+2”, etc., to select the others. You can also double-click the suggestion to obtain the same effect.
Virtaal uses a Local TM
All translated segments of any file opened, edited, and saved in Virtaal are added to the local translation memory (TM) in a file called tm.db. The TM is not purged or deleted when Virtaal is closed, and the TM file can only have the name “tm.db”. The consequences are that (a) your translation remains on the local machine and (b) translations from all previous texts are served as matches for all future texts.
See more features here. And here is a link to the Online Documentation.
Conclusion
It is true that this tool has a very small footprint and is easy to use. It does also have some nice features. However, we can not recommend this tool for serious translation tasks. Not being able to import TMs is a big problem because it denies us the possibility to leverage previous work. In addition, the tool does not seem to be developed anymore. We would instead recommend the following CAT tools: OmegaT, MateCAT, and Smartcat.
Available for: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX
Download Virtaal:
Additional Information:
