Involvement of CAT: To Be or Not to Be
Translation memory (TM) systems, the most widely used toolkits in the localization of digital information at HQ-translate agency, enable the linguistic transition and international compliance 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 manageable items, generally one sentence long. Today the most popular CAT tools: TRADOS, Déjà vu, Wordfast. The advantages of using translation memory systems are fairly obvious: they increase the translator’s productivity and enhance translation quality by ensuring that terms and statements are used consistently within and across translations. Users in governmental and international companies convey a 25–60% rise in efficiency. 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 isolated sentences, possibly disregarding the contexts in which the sentences are embedded. Moreover, the matching algorithms of TM systems are based on very simple formal criteria, such as the similarity of character strings. Thus, the human translator’s notion of the level of similarity between a part to be translated and a part retrieved from the storage base may differ considerably from the grade of similarity calculated by the TM 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 grade is not useful at all (for a discussion on the aspects of evaluating the retrieval mechanisms of CAT systems, see Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (1996), Whyman and Somers (1999), and Reinke (2000a, 2004). Despite the vices, it should be noted that TM systems generally incorporate into the translation routine comparatively smoothly. These CATs leave human translators in control of the real translation work, while liberating them from routine work and maintaining translation as a creative activity whenever the translation resourcefulness of a human translator is required. For more information, visit us at: HQ-translate company