Involvement of CAT: Virtues and Vices
Translation memory (TM) technologies, the most widely used toolkits in the localization of digital information at HQ-translate agency, enable the translation and transnational adaptation of electronic content (e-content) for local markets. The idea behind TM systems is to store in a computer system the original e-content and the translation that has been produced by human translators; the stored translated version of the source file has been broken down into short portions, generally one sentence long. Today the most popular CAT tools: TRADOS, Déjà vu, Wordfast. The priviledges of using TM systems are fairly obvious: they increase the translator’s productivity and increase translation quality by proving that terminology and sentences are used consistently within and across translations. Users in governmental and international agencies convey a 25–60% rise in work throughput. Yet, it must be stated that the use of TM systems may also have negative effects on translation quality. One of the major discouraging things of TM systems is that they usually work at sentence level. That’s why, there is a serious danger that the translator will focus too much on standalone sentences, possibly disregarding the contexts in which the sentences are built-in. Moreover, the matching algorithms of TM systems are based on very plain formal criteria, such as the similarity of character strings. Thus, the human translator’s notion of the level of similarity between a piece to be translated and a segment retrieved from the storage base may differ considerably from the degree of similarity calculated by the CAT system. This may cause situations wherein exact matches produce wrong translations, or one translation of a fuzzy match requires little or no adjustment but another fuzzy match with the same similarity level is not useful at all (for a discussion on the aspects of evaluating the retrieval mechanisms of TM systems, see Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (1996), Whyman and Somers (1999), and Reinke (2000a, 2004). Despite the drawbacks, it should be noted that TM systems generally incorporate into the translation run relatively smoothly. These CATs leave human translators in control of the real translation work, while relieving them from routine work and keeping translation as a creative act whenever the translation resourcefulness of a human translator is required. For more information, visit us at: HQ-translate company
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