For experienced translators and translating companies managing vast amounts of paperwork, translation memory (TM) has evolved into a necessary instrument. Translation memory increases the efficiency, consistency, and cost-effectiveness of the translating process in view of worldwide corporate cooperation and fast-expanding multilingual documentation demands.

What is Translation Memory?

Translation memory refers to a database that stores “translation units” – pairs of corresponding segments (sentences or phrases) in both the source and target languages.

For example:

Source segment in English: Thank you for your business.

Target segment in Spanish: Gracias por su negocio.

As the translator works, translation memory software matches new sentences and phrases with those already existing in the database. Matches above a certain match threshold (e.g., 70% or above) can be used automatically without editing. Lower matches are presented as suggestions that the translator can edit.

Over time, the database grows rapidly, enabling high match rates for commonly repeated text. This significantly reduces translation time and cost. If you’re looking to streamline your workflow, an online translation service Rapid Translate, can be an invaluable resource, combining translation memory technology with expert services.

Key Benefits of Using Translation Memory

Using translation memory provides several important benefits:

1. Increased Translator Productivity

Translation memory enables translators to reuse and revise existing translations rather than starting from scratch every time. This saves considerable time and effort while ensuring consistency. Productivity gains of over 50% are commonly reported.

2. Faster Turnaround Times

Higher translator throughput means translation agencies can take on more work and deliver faster turnarounds to clients, often reducing lead times by half or more.

3. Lower Costs

Increased efficiency and reuse translate directly into lower costs. Savings of 20-40% are typical on projects leveraging translation memory.

4. Consistent Terminology and Style

Translation memory ensures that client terminology, product names, taglines and preferred style choices are maintained across all documentation and languages. This supports brand consistency in global markets.

Handling Different Document Types

While originally focused on technical documentation, translation memory use has expanded to many document types:

Technical Documentation. TM greatly benefits from software and hardware specifications, user manuals, training materials, and support knowledge bases. The highly repetitive terminology and style in these documents result in very high match rates.

Marketing Content. TM helps ensure messaging and branding are consistent across global campaigns while allowing flexibility to adapt to local nuances.

Legal Contracts. TM enables high leverage of language from past contracts while managing legal precision.

Website Content. Websites involve diverse content that changes frequently, making consistent translation challenging. TM is invaluable for this use case.

Integrations with CAT Tools

Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools integrate directly with translation memory technology to maximize productivity. Translators use them to manage translation memory and automatically search for matches.

Popular tools like SDL Trados, MemoQ and Memsource offer advanced features that complement translation memory:

  1. Terminology management.
  2. Quality and consistency checks.
  3. Project management capabilities.
  4. Tight integration with TM servers.

Using CAT tools and translation memory together provides a major boost to the translator’s efficiency and output.

Cloud-Based Translation Memory

While initially stored locally on translators’ computers, translation memory is now primarily hosted on cloud-based servers.

Cloud-based TM provides much greater power, flexibility and collaboration capability versus standalone databases:

  1. Centralized TM Access. Any authorized user can access the TM database instantly from anywhere via a desktop or mobile app. No more emailing TM files around.
  2. Real-Time Updates. Updates and new translations are instantly made available to the entire translation team.
  3. Multi-User Collaboration. Linguists and reviewers can collaborate seamlessly on the same data. Comments and workflow status updates are shared in real time.
  4. Advanced Search and Reporting. Powerful search makes finding and analyzing stored translations much easier. Analytics provide insights into TM usage and savings.

For most translation teams, cloud-based TM has become mandatory. Popular SaaS platforms include memoQ server, Memsource Cloud and SDL Trados Studio GroupShare.

Choosing Translation Memory Technology

Selecting TM technology involves optimizing capabilities, quality and cost:

Capabilities:

  1. Cloud-based server vs. desktop TM system.
  2. Supported file formats.
  3. Supported languages and language pairs.
  4. TM merge and cleanup tools.
  5. Integrations with CAT tools.
  6. Terminology management.

Quality:

  1. Translation quality and style.
  2. How consistently is TM applied?
  3. TM backup and data integrity safeguards.

Cost:

  1. Subscription models (pay per word/month).
  2. Level of post-editing provided.
  3. Productivity gains and cost savings.

Leading agencies invest heavily in technology and linguist training to maximize capability, quality and cost leverage from translation memory.

Translation Memory Best Practices

Adopting some best practices helps ensure organizations maximize their TM investment:

  1. Define a clear TM policy and usage guidelines.
  2. Start TM early, even with small docs, to ramp leverage.
  3. Perform quarterly TM server merges and cleanup.
  4. Continuously expand language pairs.
  5. Control access to avoid inconsistent use.
  6. Monitor TM leverage and savings regularly.
  7. Back up data and have recovery procedures.
  8. Invest in linguist training and feedback.

With the proper strategy and discipline, quality and productivity gains from TM usage can be dramatic.

Risks and Challenges

While providing major benefits, some limitations around using TM must also be managed:

  1. Potential for poor quality segments to be reused.
  2. Overly literal translations if editors rely too much on TM. 
  3. Inconsistencies when TM is not used properly.
  4. Loss of context when reusing individual sentences/phrases.
  5. The upfront investment is required to build TM content.
  6. Change management to get users to adopt workflows.

Organizations need to invest in technology, processes and resources to maximize gains while mitigating associated risks.

The Future of Translation Memory

New developments around artificial intelligence and machine learning are making for more automated translation processes, which reduce the work of human linguists. Raw machine translation output is getting better and better.

However, most experts agree that machine translation can never replace human-quality output anytime soon. In the future, new hybrid models that combine the power of translation memory leverage and machine translation are more likely. To meet demand, the technology will have to augment linguists.

In fact, translation memory will continue to be a key technology for the industry for the next decade and beyond. As organizations begin to expand internationally, those who leverage it effectively will gain a serious competitive advantage.

Conclusion

For organizations handling multilingual documentation, adopting translation memory technology has become a necessity to achieve efficiency, quality and scale across global markets.

When combined with advanced CAT tools and cloud-based collaboration workflows, translation memory drives step-function productivity gains for translation teams. The business case around cost, speed and consistency is now clearly compelling for most companies.

As with any strategic technology, careful planning and change management discipline are required to achieve success. Organizations must invest in technology, processes and resources to maximize quality gains.

But for most, the era of managing documentation translation without translation memory has passed. With the right strategy and execution, huge wins can be captured as translation memory propels global content localization to new performance levels.