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[Panel] Forget me not There can be few readers of the ITI Bulletin whose curiosity hasn't been aroused by translation memory. Yet most translators still don't use it. The ITI Rates & Salaries Survey reported that only 15% of respondents used translation memory tools, although this rose to 40% and 50% for those earning £50k-£54,999 and £75k+ respectively. If you're not in those groups, read on to find out what you're missing. If you are, read on to find out whether you could be doing even better. Because we've now reviewed the five leading translation memory packages on the market to help you make 1999 your most productive year yet.
TRANSLATION MEMORY FROM O TO R
So what's all the fuss about? Why do you keep seeing adverts for translation memory products? Why are increasing numbers of agencies trying to get you to work with these products? What's more, why are increasing numbers of freelance translators using them without any prompting? We'll be answering all these questions and more in the world's first extended review of translation memory products.
The idea of translation memory is basically very simple. It's to stop you scratching your head and losing time while you do it. That's the reason for the enigmatic title of this review. No longer will you bring digits to cranium in the hope of stimulating your grey cells to provide an answer to the question: "Oh, how did I translate that last time round?" Instead, your translation memory program will instantly remind you, prompting the satisfied exclamation: "Ah, so that's how I put it last time round!"
That's basically the long and the short of it. From "Oh" to "Ah". Translation memory is nothing more than the computerised equivalent of two massive parallel filing cabinets containing every sentence you have ever translated, both in the original and in your translation.
This, as you can imagine, does not have any obvious appeal to someone translating poems, advertisements, newspaper articles and the like, but is obviously highly exciting for anyone involved in fields where there is a certain repetition in the procedures or practises described. Consider the operations involved in adjusting the valve clearances on a car engine, or installing a new PCI card in a personal computer, describing the procedures for selecting items in a pull-down menu, the symptoms of a given disease or social service case histories and you'll realise that there are in fact quite a number of fields where there is a high probability of sentences or phrases being repeated.
Then there are fields, like software, where time-to-market is such a crucial factor in the success of a product that it's often essential for work on the product documentation to commence while the product is still in the final stages of its development. This can involve a large number of very small changes to the product literature. If most of them can be performed automatically or semi-automatically, this reduces the time-to-market still further, on the one hand, while also increasing productivity.
Moreover, there are many fields plagued by frequent product updates that aim to ensure a competitive position is maintained. Here, again, the best translation memory software will be capable of immediately translating everything that is the same, allowing us to just focus on what is different. Some translation memory software can even make at least some of these changes automatically.
Completing the picture, more and more product ranges now feature shared components, modules or subassemblies, which means that a translation memory user who has completed a translation for one product may well find that subsequent documentation on a sister product contains substantial chunks of text that are exactly the same.
The software localisation industry cannily recognised all these potential benefits around ten years ago, mainly with the aim of making the localisation process as quick as possible. As the systems became increasingly user-friendly, technical translators and translation companies were quick to follow suit, realising that the productivity increases achieved when these systems are used properly translates into happier customers and more money in the bank.
Kerching!
Translation memory is like most things in business. If you want to make more money, you have to invest some first, and none of these systems really comes cheap. Indeed, any of them are likely to be the most expensive software you buy.
Before you start fingering your credit cards, you need to ask yourself a number of questions in terms of how fast a return you are likely to get on that investment.
Firstly, there's no point in considering any of them unless a sizeable proportion of your work arrives as files on disk or via the Internet. Although optical character recognition software has improved tremendously over the past few years, it still requires substantial correction, resulting in productivity losses that may very well not be outweighed by using translation memory.
Secondly, consider the type of work you do carefully. If you can identify areas in which it is repetitive (and you need to think of sentence construction rather than just terminology), then you should seriously consider translation memory. Take another look at the examples in the previous section. Remember that these do not have to be technical areas. Book translators engaged in projects with extensive specialist terminology, for example, will also benefit. One such project of my own was a CD on birdwatching in Italy. There was a vast number of "specialist" terms to describe the different body parts and feathers of a myriad of birds, their shape, colouring and so on. What's more, the phrases used in these descriptions all followed very similar patterns. Translation memory made that project much less laborious, more enjoyable and profitable.
If you have just one or two regular large customers that fit the bill, so to speak, you are more than likely to see a return on your investment within a year, and maybe as little as three months or even your first large repetitive project. Every productivity gain after that is a kerching! on your cash register.
The smell of suite success
All the different translation memory packages are in fact suites of software products that integrate to varying degrees. We tested the offerings of 5 different manufacturers: Atril (Déjà Vu), IBM (Translation Manager), SDL (SDLX), Star (Transit) and Trados (Translator's Workbench).
All of these offer the same basic types of programs:
I) An alignment program
This allows you to create translation memory databases from existing translation files. If, for example, you have been translating motorbike manuals for five years and kept all your source and translation files, one of these programs will enable you to build up a massive database immediately, allowing you to exploit the full potential of your system from the word go. They work by creating your first database - the computing equivalent of a printed parallel text translation. On one side there's a source segment (which can be a clause, sentence or even paragraph), while on the other there's the target language equivalent. It's obviously important that all these segments are lined up properly and that's what the alignment program does.
There are, however, big differences in the alignment programs offered. Transit, for example, offers a highly automated program that will save you a massive amount of time. Trados offers WinAlign, a semiautomatic program with a graphical alignment function that allows you to spot and rectify any alignment problems very quickly and simply. Both these alignment tools will save you a lot of time (so you can make more money) but they are also costly extras. Déjà Vu, SDLX and Translation Manager are all supplied with their own alignment programs at no extra cost. The most cost-effective choice will depend on the volume of files you have to align immediately and the likelihood of your having to align a large number of files in the future. Trados caters for clients who only have an immediate short-term requirement by also offering WinAlign on a short-term lease basis.
II) A database maintenance program
Life isn't predictable. Everyone makes mistakes. The most carefully researched terminological choices may need to be changed, sometimes for no other reason than that there has been a management change in the company you work for. Power cuts and equipment failures can cause computer crashes and corrupt your cherished databases (yet another reason for having an effective backup strategy!). What's more, your databases can become enormous over the years and need pruning. A database maintenance program enables you to cope with all these eventualities. Only SDLX doesn't come with a database maintenance program. Its databases are, however, in Access - meaning you can edit them if you have Microsoft Office Professional.
III) A terminology program
These are slightly more sophisticated versions of the electronic glossaries many of us have built up over the years. Moreover, they can import these glossaries and indeed other dictionary files. IBM Translation Manager already comes with terminology dictionaries, while rather more sophisticated dictionaries are available as extras for Transit and Translator's Workbench. Some of these terminology programs are very complex including fuzzy matching algorithms that enable them to search for all words with a given root, so that they could - for example - find "logic" when "logical" is the word you want but isn't in the dictionary. That said, unless you're a beginner working in-house with suitably verified glossaries, you stand to gain little from these programs, and whether one is superior or inferior to another should not influence your choice of package too much.
Building up and maintaining glossaries takes time - more time than they are ever likely to save you, particularly since all the better programs allow you to search for individual words in the translation memory, displaying them in context - which is much more useful. What's more, you don't have to go through any special operations to get the terms there. Two programs are slight exceptions to this rule: Déjà Vu - which will "assemble" translations from the largest available units (but settle for individual words if it can't find anything else), and Transit - which is able to insert words from its glossaries in fuzzy matches (see below) when these words constitute the only differences between a segment in a translation and a segment in its memory.
IV) A document editor
This is the program in which you actually carry out your translation. It generally takes the form of two parallel windows, with the source text on one side and the target text on the other. In addition, there is often a further window showing the segment/s in the translation memory. The segments displayed will either be 100% matches, meaning the system has found exactly the same sentence in its database and you can simply import this directly into your translation (several of the programs can do this automatically) or "fuzzy" matches - which are segments with a number of small differences. Sometimes, of course - especially in the beginning - you won't get any matches at all.
All the programs allow you to set the degree of "fuzziness". Some people choose a very high setting, considering absolutely any suggestion helpful to jog their memories, while others find that anything requiring more than minimal editing is simply a distraction. Finally, most document editors also contain a window to the package's terminology program.
Translation memory features aside, the document editor is basically a word processor. Some of them are pretty primitive - offering little more than cut and paste, search and replace, while others show full formatting information or offer an extensive selection of AutoText features. The big exception here is Trados' Translator's Workbench, where you work directly in Microsoft Word alongside a second window with panels showing the translation memory matches and terminology matches.
V) Filters
These are used to convert files from one format to another, whether to import them into an alignment program or document editor, or export them from the document editor into their original format. The reason for this is that whatever format a file is supplied in, you will of course work in the document editor/translation environment of your translation memory product. This is in itself a productivity benefit in that you always use the same interface and don't have to cope with re-remembering different menu and button locations, and different keystroke short cuts.
One difference between the various different packages is that some come with a full selection of filters as standard (Déjà Vu, SDLX and IBM Translation Manager), while others only offer them as costly extras (Transit and Translator's Workbench). Note, however, that all the packages come with a filter for Microsoft Word as standard.
Before buying a package, you need to carefully consider what you need from these four basic components of any system. The pros and cons of the different systems are considered in the individual reviews below.
Never mind the quality feel the width
Opinions are divided on the quality argument. There's no doubt that translation memory can help increase terminological accuracy and consistency. The more experienced and specialised the translator, the less of an advantage that will be. It's spectacularly helpful for junior in-house translators, however, who don't need to spend any time building up translation memories or glossaries, and immediately benefit from the many years experience embodied in them. Many comment that using a translation memory system is like always having a pet senior translator on hand to help them out.
When it comes to style, however, we find ourselves on the other side of the coin. Only three of the programs (Déjà Vu, Transit and Translator's Workbench) allow you to split and join segments entirely at will. Not being able to do so can tie you too rigidly to the source text - more so than an experienced translator would allow themselves to be in a "free translation". It is also easy to be distracted from the "flow" of a translation when working on it in segments. It is of course true, however, that the influence on fluency of working in segments decreases as you become used to it. Nevertheless, many translation memory users find it useful to have a quick read-through upon completion, editing the final document to increase its fluency and style in general. This of course needs to be factored in when considering any potential productivity gains.
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