Surveying the use of CAT tools, terminology management systems and corpora among professional translators: General state of the art and adoption of corpus support by translator profile

Several international surveys show that language professionals are well acquainted with computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools as well as with (integrated) terminology management systems. However, corpora can be valuable in the translation process as well. To complement the previous surveys, we conducted a survey among Belgian and Dutch translation professionals which assessed their use of CAT tools, terminology management systems and corpora. We distinguished the translator profiles of in-house and freelance translators. On the basis of the literature review we hypothesized that corpora, CAT tools and translation management systems are used more frequently by in-house translators. But, whereas the latter two are indeed more popular among the in-house translators of our survey, corpora are much less frequently used by both translator profiles in surprisingly equal measure. Parallel corpora are used most by the respondents. However, the distinction between a translation memory (TM) and a corpus is not always clear to professional translators in our survey. In order to increase familiarity with corpora among translators we plead for a broad implementation of corpora into CAT tools.status: publishe