From time to time translation agencies receive requests for a “literal” translation. This seemingly inoffensive adjective is much like the term “obscene.” No one is quite sure how to define it, but we all know it when we see it. When a literal translation is explicitly specified, an agency specializing in intellectual property (IP) translation reacts somewhat like a minister who is asked to preach a religious sermon: “that’s the only kind I know.” So what do clients mean when they ask for a literal translation?

What exactly is translation memory? McElroy clients have always demanded the high quality that results from customized translations performed by experienced individuals with technical backgrounds, with the additional quality assurance processes of technical editing and proofing. (In other words, a human approach!) For some types of work, the productivity and the consistency of these highly qualified translators is optimized using translation memory tools. This is NOT machine translation. Translation memory tools draw strictly upon the translation that has already been performed by the translator, so that effort is not repeated and translation throughout a body of work or across multiple projects is consistent.

McElroy Chief Editor Dr. Mark Ritter teaches a course for the Austin Community College Localization Certification program on Translation Memory and Machine Translation. An excerpt from his course introduction follows. It serves as an excellent overview of Translation Memory and illustrates the value that using this technology can offer to some of McElroy’s clients.

Theoretical Background and Structure of TM Systems

Translation memory can be considered a special case of example-based machine translation, albeit with one very important difference. In EBMT, the aim is to use an existing corpus of translations to produce translations of new material. The idea is that, instead of writing a very complicated set of transfer rules in advance, an MT designer can harness the much more sophisticated transfer rules that exist in the minds of the human translators who have already produced a huge body of translations.