Context, the Mystery of the Dead Cat

By a strange coincidence, computer-aided translation is CAT.  Although it may serve as a good companion, we often get scratched playing with it.
Scientists love cats. They are especially fond of the dead ones.
Or the half-dead ones, like Schrödinger's cat. They often mistreat cats in their "thought experiments" or stories to demonstrate their points.
There was one such poor cat in an episode from HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" (1998) entitled "Galileo Was Right."
It was May, 1970 in Orocopia Mountains, California.  Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin and their backups Richard Gordon and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt were in a field trip led by Caltech geology professor Lee Silver.  Jack Schmitt was the only geologist among the astronauts.  (He would later walk on the moon in Apollo 17.)

Silver: Let me put it this way, doing field geology is like solving the mystery of the dead cat.  If you bring me a dead cat, all I can tell you is that it's dead, and it was a cat.  But if you hand me a dead cat, and you tell me you found it in the middle of the road... Ha! What killed it?
Scott: A car?
Irwin: A truck?
Gordon: Heat exhaustion?
Silver: Now you're getting it. O.K. You find the dead cat in the kitchen of your favorite restaurant. What killed it?
Scott: The chef?
Silver: What are we talking about here, Jack?
Schmitt: Context.
Scott: Context?
Silver: Context. The difference between a road kill and a meal.

-- transcribed from DVD

Context.  Not only is it important to geologists, scientists in general, or forensic invesgators, but it is also important to translators.  Many words would have different translations in different situations, so we have to know the context.
And here comes CAT, computer-aided translation (or computer-assisted translation), assisting, but also rubbing, translators today. When working through one of those translation management systems and translating strings extracted from web pages or other documents, the source files may not be available, sometimes it is difficult to see the context.  The translators can only guess.
Situations like this often remind me of that poor dead cat.  I only see a paw, or a bit of the tail, but I have to figure out what that cat would have looked like, when it was alive and kicking. For example, when we see the word "charge," we may ask:
To charge a fee for a certain service?
Charge to a card?
(Bulls) charge at the bullfighter?
To charge a battery?
Hmmm...  We just have to see where the paw was. Even if the word was translated correctly, there might be another problem when using, or reusing, the translation memory.  We often find awkward translation with short strings after "applying" TM because the context is different.  That is why some systems allow multiple translations for a term or a segment, but many systems just pick the last one used. Imagine a cat trying to walk with misplaced legs.
Simply awkward!

More on the Apollo 15 story, let me share some interesting clips. The famous hammer-and-feather experiment conducted by David Scott (On the moon, of course.)
A clip from the episode "Galileo Was Right" Apollo 15 astronauts were on their way back home...
Two episodes I enjoy most in this miniseries are "Galileo Was Right" (10) and "Le Voyage dans la Lune" (12).  The latter is about Apollo 17 but also tells the story of Georges Méliès making his 1902 movie. External Links
Wikipedia - Apollo 15
Wikipedia - From the Earth to the Moon (TV miniseries)