Tool category : memoQ Translators' Essentials

What is translation memory? / Translation Memory explained

Translation Memory (TM) is a database for sentence pairs (matching source and target segments); in other words, the heart of translation technology. It speeds up translators’ localization processes while maintaining consistency, and increasing translation quality. Translation memory, unlike machine translation, offers the possibility to reuse previous translations and handle language repetition across a project. 

How does translation memory works?

Translation memory works in the background of your CAT tool, offering sentence suggestions as you translate. Its memory consists of your previous translations and only identical or similar sentences are suggested. The similarity between the source and target segments is indicated with percentages (100% is the perfect match) while differences are highlighted with colors.

What are the benefits of translation memory?

Speeds up Translation: A TM offers previously translated sentences that are identical to the current translation, with differences only in numbers, tags, formatting, punctuation or spacing.

Reduces Translation Costs: Translation memory is usually the most effective with texts that include many repetitions, such as website content, games, contracts and product manuals.

Increases Translation Quality: Proactively prevent inconsistencies by storing correct phrases and sentences. It can be extremely useful when several people are working on the same text. 

Next: Term Base

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What is LiveDocs?

LiveDocs is a built-in feature of memoQ, an alternative to Translation Memory. With LiveDocs, you can align multiple files in just a matter of seconds and later use them as reference files. As opposed to TM, LiveDocs preserves whole translated documents, not just segments. 

How Does LiveDocs Work?

To leverage existing translated documents, you first need to create a LiveDocs corpus and import your preferred reference material. A LiveDocs corpus can handle all file formats that memoQ supports for translation. Now imagine you have a source document and its counterpart translated in Microsoft Word. Import both documents into your new LiveDocs corpus. memoQ will automatically align your files, therefore, every sentence in your source document is matched with the equivalent in the target document. Next time you translate, memoQ will offer segments from these documents the same way as it does from translation memories. 

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A LiveDocs corpus can contain monolingual and bilingual documents, alignment pairs and binary reference materials.

What Are the Benefits of LiveDocs?

Automatic alignment: LiveDocs automatically aligns your source and target documents. You can also easily check reference files during translation.

HUB: Store monolingual documents in your LiveDocs corpus to find the right terminology without leaving memoQ. Moreover, you can also store third-party files for references.

LiveDocs corpus: During translation, memoQ will offer you suggestions coming from matches in your LiveDocs corpus. You can even use these matches to pre-translate your file.

Next: Translation Quality Assurance

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Learn more About Translation Memory

A poor translation can have an immediate and disastrous impact on the acceptance of your product, and furthermore, it can easily become an embarrassment to your brand.

Translation Quality Assurance is a comprehensive tool that checks for machine-detectable errors while you translate in a translation management software.

Translation Quality Assurance is a key component of every project to deliver flawless translations; it usually comes as an integrated module with every translation tool or translation management system.

In memoQ, Translation Quality Assurance consists of two levels of quality review. While the Automatic Quality Control checks the text for possible mistakes during translation, the Linguistic Quality Assurance categorizes mistakes and create error statistics to provide structured feedback to translators.

How does Translation Quality Assurance Work in memoQ?

Automatic Quality Assurance

1- Warnings

A warning message can be a difference in punctuation between the source and the target segment, a missing number, a missing or misplaced inline tag, or a missing translation of a term that memoQ recognizes in the source segment. It could also be missing capitalization or extra space at the end of your segment. Warnings can also state if a translation is inconsistent or too long.

2- Errors

Error messages are usually related to tag inconsistency between the source and target segments, but can also show up for other reasons. You can fully control the behavior of automatic quality assurance, and you can even ask memoQ to treat some problems as errors rather than warnings.

Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA)

memoQ can easily detect errors in documents, however, reviewers can also use Linguistic Quality Assurance models to give much more meaningful feedback about a translation. memoQ allows you to set up your own LQA model, which is usually a form that a reviewer fills in when reporting on an error. memoQ can handle popular standard models such as LISA.   Linguistic Quality Assurance models provide the following options for reviewing a translation:

Define what happens when there is an error: Use penalty points, specify severity (minor, major, critical), or require comments on errors .

Categorize and customize your feedback: You can define your own error categories for reviewing, or use the categories provided by existing models. Categories usually include translation accuracy, terminology, language, and consistency.

Define criteria to accept or reject translations (pass/fail).

Next: What is Translation Memory?

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Learn More About Translation Quality Assurance