We often work, as freelance translators, using either CAT tools or online editors nowadays. if you're still stuck working mostly with agencies, more often than not, online editors will provide jobs and workspace daily.
Now, I'm not a particular fan of all these online tools - Phrase (formerly Memsource), Crowdin, Lokalise, WordBee, XTM, Polyglot, and whatnot. If there's something I appreciate about my work is doing it on my terms - including the tool used.
However, there are still some advantages of using browser extensions and leveraging browser spell-checking settings that are simply not compatible with a desktop CAT tool - so why not exploit those to have improvements in terms of features and quality, as well as to give our productivity a boost? Let's dig into some of those.
The simplest option you can use (if you're a Google Chrome user like I am), is changing the spell-checking option in your Google Chrome settings. Simply go to Three dots > Settings > Spell check, and pick Enhanced spell check (a short guide is also available among the Google Support materials).
This will improve the spell check and send the text you send to Google for improvements. The main change, technically speaking, is that instead of falling back to your Word or native Windows spell checker, the advanced spell checker (at least to my understanding) uses the Google one, which is very good - speaking at least for Italian, the language I work towards.
Simply put, this advanced spell check will spot more grammar errors and spelling mistakes than usual (compared to using the Basic spell check settings). Try to believe me!
Another area of improvement is using browser extensions to improve your writing experience, not only when surfing the web, Google-searching the perfect term for a concept, but also when using - we already talked about them - online tools, such as Memsource and whatnot.
One extension I strongly recommend installing (in Chrome and other browsers based on Chromium, such as Microsoft Edge) is LanguageTool. It's worth knowing that the extension has an official website where you can download not only the browser extension, but also LanguageTool in the form of an app (like a desktop app), plugin (to use directly within Microsoft Word, Google Docs (boosted productivity with Google Docs spell checker + LanguageTool!), OpenOffice and the like), email extension (Gmail, Outlook is in beta at the time of writing), or just directly use it as a website editor (although I tend to find this last approach more time consuming with copy-pasting text, due to it being less integrated into the specific app).
Other key features of LanguageTool are paraphrasing sentences, creating custom dictionaries, and even ignoring specific rules (for example if you don't find benefit in it flagging the capitalization of letters, you can decide to ignore such rule).
LanguageTool also has a premium plan available, which I personally never used, since the benefits of the free version are enough, and the price doesn't provide enough quality gap in my honest opinion. If interested, you can read more about the differences between the free and paid versions.
That's all for now. I hope this was helpful!