Translation Memory - Simple explanation

Understanding Translation Memory
When translating your content: website, product or document, you need to ensure internal consistency and consistency with further updates or related content. All without the ned to translate again the same text in several ocasions. This is the main characteristic of Translation Memories: a software enabling comparison of text, enabling reuse of previously translated content.

How does it work?
The text from your content is divided in small units (segments, generally sentences). When observing the behaviour of the text we can observe a duplication of the text. The duplicated text is translated by a specialized professional translator. Both source and target text is stored in a database. When performing an update or simply a change in the content, the Translation Memory looks for the corresponding original and identic segments present in the database. The advantage of the system is that you can change parts of the content, leaving to the tool the task to identify where the changes have happenned. This enhances translation speed and guaranties consistency.

Increased quality and enhanced translation speed
The use of Translation Memory avoids repeating translations, decreases review or proofreading effort and as mentioned, enhances consistency. During translation phase, only human translators perform the work. Machine translation do not provide a minimum of linguistic quality or adaptation to the context, market or style.
Translation Memories can save you time and money.

Translation Memory benefits
A translation memory is basically a database storing segments of text in the source language together with the corresponding segment translated by the professional translator. The Translation Memory permits storing the content, perform comparisons and searches.

The main objectives are to guarantee consistency and resuse of the content in your translations (in the same document or between subsequent projects). Translation Memory tecnology is an unequaled guarantee of consistency in your documentation. No matter the format you work with, the technical terms used in your content will ne reused through your translation project.

Better turnaround times and money saving: Reuse of previously translated text, enhanced management of your content, increase speed.

FAQs, Q&As, consulting questions...refer to the blog

In our everyday practice with our clients and our free consulting related to localization, many of the questions that come up are questions we have been answering many times to different audiences.

Some of the questions and advice we provide need some elaborate research, some other are client specific and can contain confidential information. We will not be posting our consulting reports here.

However, some questions can be shared and posted with no problems. Answers to issues like:

* What is a TM?
* What can you do and what are these .tmx files inherited from my previous translation vendor?
* What DTP tool should I choose for my manuals?
* What PDF print options do you advice?
* Can you translate this .rc files without messing the code?
etc.

can perfectably be posted and published. "The Globalization Rapporteur" blog is a perfect place to centralize that information.

Coming next... Frequenly asked questions and related.