USING FREE CAT TOOLS TO INTENSIFY STUDENTS’ INDEPENDENT WORK (CASE STUDY: OMEGAT)

Abstract

Purpose. The article is devoted to the substantiation of the use of free open-source software, specificallythe CAT tool OmegaT, as an effective means of intensifying the independent work of translation students.The paper analyzes the existing contradiction between the high cost of commercial software and the urgentneed to form the technological competence of future specialists within the limited classroom time. The studyaims to develop methodological foundations for the implementation of OmegaT to transform passive textreproduction into a high-tech process of linguistic analysis and knowledge capitalization. The focus is oncreating a professional ecosystem that allows students to accumulate digital assets throughout their studies. Methods. The study employs a complex of scientific methods: a theoretical analysis of contemporary scientificpublications (2023–2025) regarding the use of AI and CAT systems in higher education; a systematic approachto describing the architecture and modularity of OmegaT; and a modeling method for educational tasks basedon the “simple to complex” principle. The author proposes and structures a set of five representative practicalassignments based on the use of regular expressions (RegEx) for segmentation, neural machine translation(NMT) plugins for post-editing, morphological tokenizers for terminology management, and opticalcharacter recognition (OCR) tools for processing non-editable formats. Results. It has been proven thatthe use of OmegaT eliminates financial barriers and provides students with equal access to professional toolsregardless of their socio-economic status. It was determined that the intensification of independent work isachieved through the automation of routine operations (segmentation, ensuring terminological consistencyvia glossaries, tag verification), which allows for an increase in the volume of processed text by 30–40 %.Particular attention is paid to the psychological and pedagogical aspect: working in a CAT environment createsa “success situation”, reduces cognitive stress, and promotes the creation of personal digital assets (TranslationMemory), which remain relevant after graduation. The study demonstrates that students develop a “subjective”approach to their work, perceiving themselves as translation project engineers rather than mere word-forwordtranscribers. Conclusions. The implementation of the free software OmegaT transforms the student’srole from a “translation performer” to a “translation project manager”. This contributes to the developmentof autonomy, technical precision, and critical thinking during the post-editing of AI results. The proposedmethodology for preparing students to work with APIs, plugins, and flexible segmentation settings directlymeets the demands of the modern labor market and international language service providers. Future researchprospects are related to the integration of Large Language Models (LLM) into the OmegaT environmentand the refinement of automated quality assurance (QA) tools specifically for the Ukrainian language.