Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

December 6, 2011

Translation Memory

Filed under: Memory,Translation,Translation Memory — Patrick Durusau @ 7:59 pm

Translation Memory

As we mentioned in Teaching Etsy to Speak a Second Language, developers need to tag English content so it can be extracted and then translated. Since we are a company with a continuous deployment development process, we do this on a daily basis and as an result get a significant number of new messages to be translated along with changes or deletions of existing ones that have already been translated. Therefore we needed some kind of recollection system to easily reuse or follow the style of existing translations.

A translation memory is an organized collection of text extracted from a source language with one or more matching translations. A translation memory system stores this data and makes it easily accessible to human translators in order to assist with their tasks. There’s a variety of translation memory systems and related standards in the language industry. Yet, the nature of our extracted messages (containing relevant PHP, Smarty, and JavaScript placeholders) and our desire to maintain a translation style curated by a human language manager made us develop an in-house solution.

Go ahead, read the rest of the post, I’ll wait.

Interesting yes?

What if the title of my post were identification memory?

Not really that much difference between translation language to language and identification to identification, where we are talking about the same subject.

Hardly any difference at all when you think about it.

I am sure your current vendors will assure you their methods of identification are the best and they may be right. But on the other hand, they may also be wrong.

And there always is the issues of other data sources that have chosen to identify the same subjects differently. Like your company down the road, say five years from now. Preparing now for that “translation” project in the not too distant future, may save you from losing critical information down the road.

Preserving access to critical data is a form of translation memory. Yes?

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