One of my worst characteristics is that I’m very impatient. But one of my best characteristics is that I’m very impatient. I hate waiting. I really do. And I hate it even more if my users have to wait. So when waiting is inevitable, I want to know what I’m waiting for. Nothing is more annoying than a progress bar showing a percentage, especially if it’s one of those bars that jumps to 99% within a second and then stays there the rest of your life.
Cattitude tries to be fast at everything. Generally it succeeds pretty well. Sometimes less, because there are other priorities, like quality. Other CAT tools sometimes find matches a few milliseconds quicker, because they don’t dig deep enough. But when I use Cattitude, I know that I get the best matches technically possible, and that is a very reassuring thought.
Analyze this!
Some things however really take time. Analysis, for example. It takes time to offset 4000 segments one by one against millions of sentences in your database to determine if there are any good matches and if so, what percentage those matches are. And in those cases, progress bars are inevitable. Or are they?
Cattitude doesn’t work with progress bars. Of course, it tells you how much percent of the work has been done, but the meter never gets stuck at 99%, and while Cattitude is at it, it also informs you what exactly it is doing. Look near the mouse cursor in this screenshot for example: it points to the status bar that currently shows the analysis in progress for this file. 595 of 660 lines have been analyzed, for segment 595 a 100% match was found and the contents of this segment are: ⏪️0⏩️, get in a vehicle!
Once Cattitude has analyzed the file, it generates a nice HTML file with shiny colors presenting all the results. Speaking about analysis though: have you ever started working on a project, only realizing halfway that you forgot to properly analyze it, so that you don’t know how much to charge the client?
No problem. Cattitude comes to the rescue. You can travel back in time and analyze the project using the database as it was before you started translating it. The above file was entirely translated already. This is what the analysis currently looks like.
Cattitude also informs you about progress when it’s exporting large files in certain formats. It may take a few minutes before that 50 MB Excel file is done, and it’s nice to know what cell and what contents Cattitude is currently working on.