What is a translation memory about?

What is a translation memory?

A translation memory is a linguistic database that continually captures your translations as you work for future use.

All previous translations are accumulated within the translation memory (in source and target language pairs called translation units) and reused so that you never have to translate the same sentence twice. The more you build up your translation memory, the faster you can translate subsequent translations, enabling you to take on more projects and increase your revenue.

How does  a translation memory work?

A translation memory tool stores segments of text as translation units (in source and target pairs). A segment can consist of a sentence or paragraph. Translation memories should be used by anyone who localizes content from one language into another. They are most effective when translating documents with a high level of repetition.

What is the difference between a translation memory and a machine translation?

Machine translation automatically translates a document without any human input. These kinds of tools are fast, but result in a poor quality translation as a machine cannot understand the subtleties or contexts of language. As a result, quality and accuracy tend to be around 50% - 70%. In addition, machine translation can only be used for a limited number of supported languages.

Translation memories are typically used in conjunction with a dedicated computer aided translation (CAT) tool, word processing program, terminology management systems, multilingual dictionary, or even raw machine translation output.

In this case it is of importance to mention the vital role of the CAT tools such as: Déjà Vu,  Global Sight, SDL Trados, Omega T, or Wordfast.