You Need to Learn Languages Like a Translation Memory

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Any translation company works the same way when receiving a new document. They analyze the file with what is called a Translation Memory (TM). This is a file in which previous translations for the same client have been saved. Analyzing the file utilizing a TM allows you to separate words and expressions as different levels of “matches”. You thus get an amount of “new words”, different levels of “fuzzy matches”, “repetitions” and “context matches”.

Here’s an easy way to understand what they stand for:

• New Words: Words and expressions never encountered.
• Fuzzy Matches: Expressions that are rather similar to what was done in the past but for which the context, order and such will be different.
• Repetitions: Words or expressions appearing a number of times in the document. While those need to be translated multiple times, we need to remember that it has been translated once and translate it the same way for the rest of the document.
• Context Matches: as states the name, words, and expressions that appear in the same context than previous translations and for which the translation in the TM is obviously correct without double-checking.

This is actually very similar to how learning a language goes. The more we learn a language, the…