MODERN TRANSLATION TOOLS

The translation language industry and its services and technologies are constantly changing and evolving almost on a daily basis. MGE Lingual Services, Inc. is on the developing end of many of these new technologies and we study and evaluate them extensively to see how they may impact or play a role in our workflows. In short, we utilize and tailor many of these tools to help improve quality, expedite translations and reduce costs.

WHAT IS TRANSLATION MEMORY?

In it’s basic form, translation memory is a full text database where translations are recorded. Any future material that uses similar or identical text can borrow from the database. This “leveraging” of text can be beneficial not only by increasing consistency, but by reducing translation time and cost. Although these programs aid in the translation process, they are NOT considered machine translation programs. Machine translation systems actively produce language and translations based on linguistic data. A translation memory system leaves all the translating to a human translator. Basically, translation memory records segment pairs (usually a sentence). The source language segment is combined together with a target language segment. If an identical (or similar) source language segment comes up in another translation later, the translation memory program will find the previously translated segment and suggest it as the basis for the new translation. The suggestion may be either approved as it is, edited to match the current context or rejected entirely. Not only do these systems suggest “exact matches”, but also "fuzzy matches" that display similar segments that have been translated in the past.