If you translate professionally and you're still working in Word, you're leaving speed, consistency, and money on the table. A CAT (computer-assisted translation) tool changes that — and our long-running training series starts at the very beginning.

Computer-assisted translation tools split your document into segments, save every translated segment into a translation memory, and surface matches the next time a similar sentence appears. That single mechanism quietly transforms how a translator works: terminology stays consistent across thousands of pages, repeated content gets reused automatically, and clients pay less for the parts they’ve already paid you to translate before.

The Wearabize channel — run by Muhammad Shalabi, a professional English–Arabic translator based in Cairo — began with exactly that introduction in 2016. The first episode walks you through what a CAT tool actually is, why translators in the Arab world need one, and what the SDL Trados interface looks like the first time you open it. It’s in Arabic, which is the language most CAT-tool documentation is not.