Translation Memory (TM)

Translation Memory is a technology based on the experience of many translation companies. It increases the efficiency of translators' work by means of excluding multiple translations of similar text fragments.

When a new version of equipment or software is released the system documentation is usually not very different from the old one. That is, the translation of the fragments that have not been changed must be automated. That is what TM systems do. They save the translations made once and later, when working on new projects, they translate the identical segments automatically. TM Systems also offer the translator options of translation for similar segments. That is, the translator needs only to translate the new fragments, that occur for the first time, edit similar segments and look through the document to check the consistency with previous translation.

Transit system also features a mechanism that finds not only a phrase from a document, translated previously, but also similar phrases from the translated part of the document in process.

Translation Memory & Machine Translation (MT)

Machine Translation is an attempt of linguists, programmers and artificial intelligence specialists to create a program, that could fully replace the translator. It is a very hard task to achieve. That is why every one who knows a foreign language and has seen machine translations takes these programs rather sceptically. To do software translations justice, we should note that research in this field (and programs as well) is making progress. In many cases: when an accurate translation is not required, when the translation process must be fully automated, when a person does not know the language, but wants to get the general idea of the document's content such programs can come of great use.

Conclusion

If you do not have a good knowledge of a foreign language (or do not know the language at all), Transit will not be of any use to you, while MT software can help you overcome the language barrier and understand at least something of foreign texts.

If you are a professional translator, and you need to translate quickly and accurately - Transit can become your main tool. However, MT program can also help if customised correctly and used to produce a draft word-for-word translation.

You can download a PDF file (Adobe Acrobat, 155KB) of an article, giving a fairly objective account of different TM programs. Please, bear in mind that it deals with the software versions that existed in 2000.