Skip to main content
logo logo
Translation Memories 1

Advantages and risks of using TM (4/10)

In the example above, all segments with an exact match in the TM have been pretranslated before the translator starts work, leaving blank only those segments for which no exact match was found in the TM. ©eCoLoTrain

Efficiency

Translation speed and efficiency can be increased by re-using the translations produced for similar (related) documents.

This can be done by using the pretranslation feature of TM tools:

Consistency

Re-using existing translations from the TM guarantees consistency in the translation of identical pieces of different documents.

Negative effects

Nevertheless, using TM tools can also have negative effects on translation quality. This is due to the way in which texts are displayed in the editor of the TM system. It can lead to a strong tendency towards sentence-by-sentence translation without taking into account the context of the individual segments.

Ambiguities

In the case of ambiguities or pronominalisation in the source text, 100%-matches might lead to wrong translations. Consider, for example, the translation of the English sentence "Windows finds it for you" in two different contexts (1) "You do not remember where the text is", and (2) "You do not remember where the document is". The segment will be considered a 100%-match by a TM tool, although in many target languages the pronoun "it" has to be translated differently.

Next