What would one know and what’s needed for that?
CAT wasn’t
born yesterday and that’s why there are very many terms related to or born with
it; moreover, there’s a good deal of them one cannot grasp without some
specific contexts.
Indeed,
notions, techonologies and definitions one could recall in connection to CAT
are more than enough. I must say it is not the subject of this publication,
nothing like that, instead I’d like to highlight a few questions, which
everyone is trying to solve by himself and quietly. A reader may ask: “why
should I try a question that may never ever touch me on?”.
The
questions are of level like Comparative Linguistcs and, sure, almost none of
them draws attention of an ordinary translator or developer; but this is not
true when it comes to CAT technologies. One of the most annoying bottlenecks
starts slamming one’s brains in the event there’s a need to explain one
language grammar feature with and by means of another. The most crucial point
lies in the complete absence or partial inconsistency of the language pair
phenomena.
For
example, if there’s a pretty Chinese lass trying to hint at what a Chinese
measure word is she has to dig up such English equivalents like ‘dozen’,
‘piece’, ‘pair’ and put them forward in the proper context.
The other
way around, some native Russian speaking penpal is briefing his or her Chinese
speaking company on what a Russian future participle is, he (or she) should be
able to operate, ate least, Russian grammar Tense, Aspect, Mood, Person, etc.
Both of
these examples have one thing in common: any case student is to understand at
some basic level what is what in the grammar of the language he studies. It is
also clear that learning a grammar is boring and it gets impossible with no
active vocabulary at all. Here comes the answer put as the title to this
article: the grammar as well as vocabulary.

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