Translation Memory

Translation that was done with the help of the computer had mainly three tasks to perform. These were editing, terminology management and the translation itself. Special software programmes were developed for editing, with translators in mind. One of them, for example, helped translators who had to overwrite the source text or rewrite the source text extensively.This programme prevented the whole text from being overwritten accidentally.

Terminology management means “collecting subject-specific terminology, entering the terminology in a machine-readable glossary or terminological database, and making sure that all this can be accessed from the translation editor during the actual translation process” (“Machine-aided Translation”, 135). Software was developed for this function also in machine-aided translation.

Besides this, there were other programmes that helped the translator to choose equivalent words and phrases and help her in the decision making process in translation. The main tool thus developed was translation memory (TM). This was one of the earliest technologies to be developed in the 1970s in connection with translation, and began to be sold at a commercial level from the 1990s. This tool is capable of advising the translator regarding the translation of complete sentences or larger parts of the text. It “allows the translator to store translations in a database and ‘recycle’ them in a new translation by automatically retrieving matched segments (usually sentences) for re-use” (“Computer-aided Translation”, 48). Translation Memory has a database that contains selections from source and target texts, arranged in pairs. These pairs are called Translation Units (TU). The way TM functions is like this – it divides the source text into various segments. Each of these source text segments is compared to a source text segment that is already stored in the database. When it finds a matching segment, it retrieves the relevant translation unit for it. In ordinary terms, the translation memory database searches for suitable translations for the source text. In doing so, it compares the source text with the selections it already has in its database. If it finds a suitable translation, it informs the translator about it.