Translation Memory: To Be or Not to Be
Translation memory (TM) systems, the most widely used toolkits in the localization of digital information at HQ-translate agency, enable the linguistic transition and international accommodation of electronic content (e-content) for local markets. The idea behind TM systems is to store in a computer system the original e-content and the translation that has been produced by human translators; the stored translated version of the source file has been broken down into smaller portions, generally one sentence long. Today the most popular CAT tools: TRADOS, Déjà vu, Wordfast. The advantages of using TM systems are fairly obvious: they increase the translator’s productivity and better translation quality by proving that terminology and phrases are used consistently within and across translations. Users in governmental and cross-border organizations convey a 25–60% rise in performance. Yet, it must be stated that the use of TM systems may also have negative effects on translation quality. One of the major contras of TM systems is that they usually perform at sentence level. That’s why, there is a real danger that the translator will focus too much on separated sentences, possibly disregarding the contexts in which the sentences are built-in. Moreover, the matching algorithms of TM systems are based on very plain formal criteria, such as the similarity of character strings. Therefore, the human translator’s notion of the degree of similarity between a segment to be translated and a piece retrieved from the database may differ considerably from the grade of similarity calculated by the TM system. This may cause situations wherein exact matches result in wrong translations, or one translation of a fuzzy match requires little or no adjustment but another fuzzy match with the same similarity degree is not useful at all (for a discussion on the aspects of evaluating the retrieval mechanisms of CAT systems, see Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (1996), Whyman and Somers (1999), and Reinke (2000a, 2004). Despite the negative sides, it should be noted that TM systems generally build into the translation run comparatively smoothly. These CATs leave human translators in control of the real translation process, while liberating them from routine work and maintaining translation as a creative job whenever the linguistic resourcefulness of a human translator is required. For more info, visit us at: HQ-translate company
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