Involvement of CAT: Yes or No
Translation memory (TM) techniques, the most widely used toolkits in the localization of digital information at HQ-translate agency, enable the proofreading and cultural 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 pieces, generally one sentence long. Today the most popular CAT tools: TRADOS, Déjà vu, Wordfast. The priorities of using TM systems are fairly obvious: they increase the translator’s productivity and better translation quality by providing that terms and sentences are used consistently within and across translation works. Users in industry and international organizations report a 25–60% rise in efficiency. 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. Therefore, there is a severe danger that the translator will focus too much on standalone sentences, possibly disregarding the contexts in which the sentences are introduced. Moreover, the matching algorithms of TM systems are based on very ordinary formal criteria, such as the similarity of character strings. That’s why, the human translator’s notion of the degree of similarity between a piece to be translated and a piece retrieved from the storage base may differ considerably from the level of similarity calculated by the CAT system. This may result in situations wherein exact matches produce wrong translations, or one translation of a fuzzy match requires little or no adjustment but another fuzzy match with the same similarity level is not useful at all (for a discussion on the aspects of evaluating the retrieval mechanisms of CAT 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 incorporate into the translation workflow relatively smoothly. These CATs leave human translators in control of the real translation work, while relieving them from routine work and keeping translation as a creative act whenever the linguistic resourcefulness of a human translator is required. For more info, visit us at: HQ-translate company
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