Involvement of CAT: Yes or No
Translation memory (TM) arrangements, the most widely used toolkits in the localization of digital information at HQ-translate agency, enable the translation and international accommodation of electronic content (e-content) for local markets. The idea behind TM systems is to store in a computer system the original e-content and the translation that has been produced by human translators; the stored translated version of the source text has been broken down into smaller items, generally one sentence long. Today the most popular CAT tools: TRADOS, Déjà vu, Wordfast. The priorities of using CAT systems are fairly obvious: they increase the translator’s productivity and better translation quality by securing that terms and sentences are used consistently within and across translations. Users in business and international companies report a 25–60% rise in productivity. Yet, it must be stated that the use of TM systems may also have negative effects on translation quality. One of the major disadvantages of TM systems is that they usually operate at sentence level. That’s why, there is a severe danger that the translator will focus too much on standalone sentences, possibly disregarding the contexts in which the sentences are embedded. Moreover, the matching algorithms of TM systems are based on very easy formal criteria, such as the similarity of character strings. Therefore, the human translator’s notion of the grade of similarity between a part to be translated and a part retrieved from the database may differ considerably from the level of similarity calculated by the CAT system. This may result in situations wherein exact matches result in wrong translations, or one translation of a fuzzy match requires little or no adjustment but another fuzzy match with the same similarity degree is not useful at all (for a discussion on the aspects of evaluating the retrieval mechanisms of memory systems, see Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (1996), Whyman and Somers (1999), and Reinke (2000a, 2004). Despite the negative sides, it should be noted that TM systems generally build into the translation workflow relatively smoothly. These CATs leave human translators in control of the actual translation process, while relieving them from routine work and maintaining translation as a creative job whenever the translation resourcefulness of a human nature is required. For more information, visit us at: HQ-translate company
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