I never believed in mission statements. Companies don’t want to contribute to a better world and they certainly don’t want to dance around campfires to sing about the environment and the legacy of human kind. Companies only have one goal in mind: all babies must eat.
On an invididual level things are of course different. But before we can love another, we have to love ourselves first. There’s nothing we can contribute if we don’t survive ourselves. And that’s where work comes in: all babies must eat, and that includes translators.
One thing that always annoyed me in CAT tools was the fact that I constantly had to recount the number of words to see how many more words I had to do that day, especially for larger projects. Sometimes you’re just watching that clock, wondering whether you have made enough money that day to order pizza. Counting words in other CAT tools always takes a few seconds and you have to press multiple buttons for it; however, in Cattitude the counter is always updated live, so that there’s no need to recount or wait–ever.
The live tracker shows you exactly how much percent of a project you have done, and how many words you have done since “Today”. Today is a somewhat flexible concept in Cattitude. It basically means the moment on which you last reset a certain counter in Cattitude (a bit like the odometer in your car after you filled her up). This moment is then defined as Today and it is from that moment that Cattitude starts calculating how many words you have translated and how much money you have made.
As a translator, I always love to see that money counter go up. And though I really love my job, sometimes it’s time for pizza. And maybe a small donation to save the world.