Machine Translation: an honest perspective
We live in a time where technology advancements happen on a daily basis and slowly but steadily, most aspects of our lives, are being assimilated within the digital world. But what about translations? Is this industry following similar development trends in terms of advancements? In a world of technology… Machine translation stays at the forefront of our digital revolution. An outsider might expect that by now, that computers should be able to handle a slightly more complex translation, it’s 2018 after all, right? Wrong. While Google Translate brought machine translation into the mainstream more than 10 years ago, the technology first arose at the beginning of the cold war, in the 50’s. It’s been a long time since then and it might take equally long until computers will be able to meet the expectations of the 20th century visionaries. Language is a very “human” thing and given that we are
How does a Translation Memory work?
We have mentioned quite a lot in the past the use of Translation Memories as a means to obtain a consistent yet cost efficient translation at little to no effort from our translators. What we want to do now is to explain to you why and how this works, allowing you to better understand our system. Using a translation memory does not mean using a machine translation but rather re-using previous translations. The Translation Memory, or TM, represents a database of „pairs”, formed by sections of already translated and approved text, in both source and target languages. Usually, the software we use in this regard (whether it is alignment programs or SDL Trados), divides the segments automatically, usually in sentences, list or table elements. Any new text is then compared to the one stored in the database and similar segments will be recognized and shown as a ”fuzzy” match. When
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