Translation Memory Software- Gearing up for Multilingual Clientele

Translation Memory Software- Gearing up for Multilingual Clientele The dramatic growth rate is seen across every industry sector, in terms expansions across geographical boundaries, collaborations and revenues. This has influenced the need for more technological up gradation and use of computer applications to speed up work and provide greater effectiveness. Such developments have given rise to the use of websites and online product documentation as sales tools generally made up of crafted messages, recurring statements, and other details to communicate with the customer. Among the new technologies, language translation software and translation memories help to capture this content and avoid repetitive tasks.

A translation memory, or TM, is a database that stores sentences or parts of a sentence, headings or titles that have previously been translated. In fact, this stores all previously translated the words, phrases and paragraphs along with the source text in language pairs called “translation units�. These translation units can then be reused to translate the same sentence or units whenever required. The growth of the translation memory database becomes helpful in translating documents faster. Professional translators who are into translating technical documents use Translation Memory systems to avoid working on the words repeated frequently in these documents.

Typically used in combination with softwares such as a computer assisted translation (CAT) tool, word processing program, terminology management systems, multilingual dictionary, or a machine translation output, Translation Memory software consists of text segments in a source language and their translations into one or more target languages. These segments can be blocks, paragraphs, sentences, or phrases. TM systems utilizes not just complete matches between the source file and previously translated file or sentence, but also looks for fuzzy matches, where the source file has some sizeable similarities with a previously translated sentence.

Translation memory software can be used by anyone who localizes content. Ideally, this software can be used in website translation and customization as well as localization software. Researches have shown its effectiveness in translating documents with a high level of repetition and producing multilingual documentation. This software has a number of offline and online functions. The offline functions include Import and export of source files and translated files,, Analysis and Term extraction. The online functions include retrieval, automatic translation, updating and networking.

Although translation memory software automatically translates the content out of the context and publishes it in different languages and formats in a consistent manner, it differs from machine translation, in that the machine translation translates a document automatically without any human input. The TM software helps quicker translation, making it feasible to work on more projects and increase revenue. It also ensures customer satisfaction through the consistency and quality of translations.