Translation Memory Creation: How It Works

In our previous blogs, we emphasized the advantages of having well-maintained translation resources, which reduce your translation costs, mainly in connection with continuous translation undertakings. We have also touched on the process of "cleaning" and maintaining your translation memories, but what if you don't have any? If that's the case, you should definitely create one if you publish documents with similar content. Here we explain how to go about this step by step.

Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

5 Steps to creating a Translation Memory

The process begins with two similar files – one with source text, the other with corresponding target text in a different language. To create a TM for you, we first need to pool as many of your original files with the translated equivalents. The file format doesn't matter too much. The documents  can be in Word, Excel, FrameMaker, InDesign, Acrobat PDF, or whatever other format you may have. 

Then, we apply these 5 steps in order to create your  translation resources.

1. SEGMENT EXTRACTION. We extract all text segments (basically sentences) from the source and target  files to create a kind of  bilingual database with original text and the corresponding translated text. 

2. SEGMENT ALIGNMENT. We then confirm that all segments are correctly aligned using our unique, in-house developed  iSync solution. It pairs segments based on the placement markings and content. The process is highly automated and enables very fast processing, much faster than humans and with high precision. 

3. HUMAN EDITING. A human review of the result is necessary, though, in which native translators browse the paired  segments to ensure they match. 

4. TM CREATION. At the end of the process we delete redundant segments that have no matches in neither source nor target, and we then export the bilingual text segments to the universal .tmx format or any other format you may require.

5. TM QA AND EXPORT. The last step involves applying our QA tools on the final result to ensure segments are consistent, numbers, tags and symbols match and there is no text in the wrong language. 

TMs belong to you

Once a translation memory has been created and delivered to you, it becomes your legal property, and you can use it in all your internal processes or whenever you outsource translation projects. This is important to remember, and you can always ask your existing or previous suppliers to deliver TMs they have created in projects ordered by to – we then hope you will relocate your projects to idioma :) 

There's no time to waste when it comes to ensuring you have TMs and also keeping them up to date. 

Contact us TODAY to get your TM created!

TM HEALTH CHECK™: 4 Steps to Updated Translation Memories:

If you have ever been involved in the content translation  process in your company, you are surely familiar with Translation Memories (TMs). And if you are not, you really should be, as TMs are your way to less stress, less overtime work, possibly even a promotion or other reward thanks to reducing your company's translation expenses.

Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

Why you should keep your TMs up to date

As we have mentioned in a previous blog, it is very common that TMs get outdated and out of sync with your current published documents. Even if you have gone to the effort of creating a translation memory, it most likely does not include all the additions, changes, etc. that your published documents have undergone. 

What you risk with outdated TMs

If you fail to keep your TM up to date, you risk issues in the translation process, such as:

1. Inconsistent resources and terminology that slow down translation, create context errors that compromise translation accuracy and cause confusion 
2. Reuse of 100% identical text segments that contain errors, which are used and published again and again 
3. Jack is not always a jack, nor a jack... A common TM issue is the existence of different translations of the same source segment, especially for short text segments. Such segments should be kept, but their actual usage checked.
4. If selected  segments are updated in local projects, they risk becoming inconsistent with the existing segments in your TMs causing even more confusion – what should be used when and where?.

All these issues lead to inconsistent and inaccurate translation. Translation takes longer and becomes more expensive. These extra costs can be prevented by performing a regular health check on your TMs, and making sure they undergo regular maintenance.

What does the TM overhaul involve?

1. PROJECT LAUNCH - We pool all your TM resources, i.e. those you have and those we may have in our storage. We then determine priorities for maintenance if there are multiple TMs to check – e.g. emphasize a main TM that serves as the source for the greater part of your content, or cover content that is most visible in the company.

2. TM HEALTH CHECK™

- To "clean" the TM and match every source segment with its target, we run a “Health check” analysis to detect possible errors, such as:

• number mistakes and typos, URL mismatches, tag orders, usage of special characters and spaces or formatting based on language style sheets
• untranslated text, which could signal missing target text 
• text consistency such as inconsistent matches and duplicate TM entries, including word consistency
• glossary usage / non-usage (use of forbidden terms, opposite terms, etc.)

3. TM MAINTENANCE – based on the TM HEALTH CHECK™, our human TM specialists and editors implement a thorough maintenance and editing process, some that rely on  IT-based tools to clean the memory and repair detected issues. The process includes the following: 

• Updating the segments one-to-one (source-to-target) for each TM (cleaning out duplicates, forbidden terms, etc.)
• Verifying terminology consistency including correction by human reviewers 
• Replacing your existing TMs with the updated bilingual text files to replace outdated  and faulty segments. 

4. TM IMPLEMENTATION – This step is chiefly a client-side issue. Your memory is now in good health. Going forward, to benefit from the entire process you need to ensure that the updated TMs are used at all company levels in the document flow and for all published content. And since TM maintenance and the health check should be a regular event, the company needs to decide on a policy on how to continue its involvement in its TM overhauls:

A) Manage content and update resources in-house, and only have the cleaning process covered by an external professional LSP. This is often preferred by big companies and requires a considerable organizational structure (defining the TM update process, appointing managers responsible for the TM resources and its updates, etc.), or

B) Focus on your core business and outsource TM maintenance to your LSP to

• perform regular TM health checks of your resources
• follow up on these checks with reporting on inconsistent text segments, unused glossary terminology, poor/incorrect source text, conditional glossary terms, or even inconsistent source segments. idioma offers a comprehensive reporting service that serves as a valuable foundation for maintenance and consistent translation quality in ongoing and future translation projects.

BENEFITS of up-to-date translation memories

Well, the benefits are straight forward and clear, and offer:

Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

1. Reduced translation costs
2. Reduced translation time

3. Brand and content consistency on international markets across all languages

4. Improved SEO and online visibility

5. Error-free content that ensures less potential damage control in future communication with company clients (high-quality brochures and manuals, easily comprehensible content for end-users ensuring correct application)

There's no time to waste when it comes to maintenance of your company's valuable TM resources. 

Contact us TODAY to get your TMs  checked and updated!

Language facts: Arabic

Arabic belongs to the Afroasiatic language family and is a Semitic language of the Arabo-Canaanite subgroup – therefore closely related to Hebrew or Phoenician. 

Blue mosque, Istanbul, Turkey.

Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

With approximately 290 million speakers (of Modern Standard Arabic), it ranks in sixth place among the world’s major languages. In today's form, Modern Standard Arabic happens to be an official language of 27 states. Only English and French score higher. As the Arabic world is very large, it is not surprising that a large number of Arabic dialects have developed – counting all these, the number of Arabic speakers rises to an estimated 420 million. Arabic is the language of the Holy Quran, poetry and literature as well as an official UN language. As a liturgical language of Islam, it is used by an astonishing 1.6 billion Muslims.

Complicated language of complicated society

Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

Arabic is a so-called sociolinguistic language, which means that from a purely linguistic view it's actually a group of familiar languages. For cultural (e.g. religious) or socioeconomic reasons it is considered as one language, though, despite that there are branches of Arabic that are mutually unintelligible. Arabic can be sub-classified as follows: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Colloquial Arabic. Obviously there's also a large number of dialects.

Classical Arabic (or Quranic Arabic) is used as the language of prayer and recitation throughout the Islamic world. Modern Standard Arabic, a constituted version of the language, is, though intelligible, much distinct from the spoken variants of Arabic dialects (with no observable boundaries or rules). The official constituted form of Arabic actually co-exist in common usage with various Arabic dialects while covering different social situations.

The language of culture

Because of Muslim expansion in the past, Arabic has influenced a lot of the world's languages, including Indian languages such as Urdu (which is in fact a Muslim influenced version of Hindi – that was actually also previously influenced by Arabic), Punjabi or Bengali. Also Roman languages, mainly Spanish, Catalan or Portuguese, borrowed many expressions from Arabic in the middle ages, when the Muslim world represented the cultural and scientific drive in then decimated Europe.

Alphabet

The Arabic alphabet has twenty-eight (28) letters. Arabic differs from Latin languages in that it is written right to left, but sequences of digits, such as telephone numbers, read from left to right.

أ ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي

Language facts: Hindi

Standard Hindi, also known as Modern Hindi, is mutually intelligible with Urdu, another Indian language. Hindi is the official language in India and has borrowed its vocabulary heavily from Sanskrit. Hindi has close to 500 million speakers including Hindi dialects (41% of the population in India) which makes it the 4th largest language of the world, after Chinese, Spanish, and English.

Taj Mahal, India.
Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

Language as a political tool

Standard Hindi is based on Khariboli, a dialect of Delhi and surrounding regions. In the 17th century, this dialect acquired linguistic prestige and became generally known as Hindustani or Urdu. After India became independent, a language reform led to Standard Hindi with a modern grammar and orthographic standards. While many Hindi and Urdu speakers claim these are two different languages, this is largely due to religious nationalism and communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims. It is in a fact hard to tell the colloquial languages from each other. In the Indian constitution from 1950, Hindi was declared the principal national language of India, instead of Urdu. This "settled" the dispute politically (also with a contribution of Mahatma Gandhi who criticized the division), although certain resistance persists until today. 

One country, 22 languages

Mumbai, India.
Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

It may be worthwhile to note that English is the secondary national language due to historical and cultural development of India. Fluency in English is considered a social advantage. English is India's lingua franca and is widely used in higher society, politics as well as in business. Apart from official Hindu and English, there is over 20 officially recognized languages in India, including Urdu, Assamese, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Nepali, Kannada, Gujarati and others.

Alphabet

The main script of Standard Hindi is Devanagari, it is also the most commonly used alphabet for writing Sanskrit.

अ ब भ क च छ ड/द ध/ढ़ इ फ ग घ ह ई ज क ख ल म न/ण ऑ प फ क्यू र स श ट/त ठ/थ उ व व क्ष य झ

When machine translation turns UNESCO heritage into "Refrigerator"

It suggested to "Translate this page". So they did :)

As strange as the headline sounds, this particular issue has amused Czech and Slovak internet readers for several days now. As informed by Czech news portal iDnes.cz, the official web site for promoting tourism in South Moravia Region www.jizni-morava.cz relied on machine (read Google) translation to localize the content into seven languages including English, German, Russian, Slovak, Polish, Italian and Spanish (NOTE: The web site was financed by public as well as EU funds with a total cost of one million Czech crowns – approx. 37,000 EUR). What may have seemed like an easy cost-cutting measure turned out as a free promotion of the region. Unfortunately, in a negative and mocking way.

Visit Refrigerator, Pregnant or Vitriol!

South Moravia's "Refrigerator",
originally Lednice-Valtice complex landmarks.
(Source: DollarPhotoClub.com)

Welcome to Refrigerator, the cultural heritage! Yes, the precise localization tool applied on the above-mentioned official web site changed the geographical names of South Moravian villages including the world renowned Lednice-Valtice complex listed by UNESCO (the name of the village "Lednice" in fact means "refrigerator" when translated mechanically, but come on... :) ). Other translation jewels to be found were, for example, the names of villages Březí (verbatim – Pregnant), or Skalice (verbatim – Vitriol). Sadly amusing results of machine translation or better said undesired effort of bureaucrats is less amusing when taking into account the lack of responsibility for published moreover internationally and tourism-oriented content, while there are a lot of user-friendly localization solutions available.

Lesson learned

Text you need to publish should always be translated by professional, human translators. Yes, it is more expensive than free, on-line machine translation, but if you want to increase sales and awareness + keep customers and other readership it is worth it. And there are many smart ways to get it done right and for modest outlays. Read on.

Replace machine-powered app with humans

Install an interface to human pro translators in your CMS!
Stream Translation API by idioma

Without a need to export texts from your content management system, you can actually install a channel to high-quality human translation. This price-attractive service includes instant cost and delivery time estimates, professional human localization, proofreading and pre-publishing. It also features tracking of content changes  thanks to translation memory and glossary creation to further   lower translation expenses. The solution is a translation API – an interface able to handle the traffic and localize web content. It is available as the Stream Translation API™ from idioma. Just ask your web developer to integrate the API into your content management system, or download and install our pre-programmed plug-ins yourself!

Go to api.idioma.com, or contact us directly for more information.

Benefit from a long-term translation relationship

It's been a long time since translation involved a typewriter, a printed dictionary and very skilled translator. The process of translation, as well its quality standards are taking leaps and bounds forward thanks to modern technology. Today's advanced language service providers (LSPs) utilizing computer-assisted translation tools (so-called CAT tools) have turned translation from a one-off, ad-hoc service, where only the initial price is a decisive factor, into a long-term sustainable client-supplier relationship. 

Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

Translation services: A love story

Let's explain the latter thought further: thanks to employing a combination of human translation powered by IT, considerable value has been added to translation services nowadays. There are numerous tools to ensure this, such as creation and maintenance of translation memories (read more here) or glossaries (read more here) and machine-powered quality analyses with subsequent final human input in the form of proofreading, while every single intervention is recorded and stored on clients' account. In fact, the more data and text segments (phrases, sentences, expressions) that are collected from previous translations as a result of creating glossaries, translation memories and understanding clients' specific terminology, the less content needs to be translated in future translation projects. And, as the phrases and segments used in clients' materials meant for translation tend to be repetitive (especially in technical translation and documents like catalogs, user manuals, etc.), many of them have already been translated and recorded in memories and glossaries. Eventually, this leads to a clear equation: the longer and deeper relationship with your language service provider you maintain (and the more material you have translated) = the lower cost of translation you get.

Invest in your translation healthcare

Maybe you have never thought of it this way, but an investment into your translationresources is similar to those into your health. The more you maintain an active lifestyle and a good health, the more you guard against future medical outlays. Keeping your translation resources in good condition and error-free is very similar, while it significantly and visibly pushes down your future translation costs. To achieve this, you need to find a suitable LSP that has means to clean, update, convert and store your resources. Here at idioma, we're ready to offer you such services on a whole different level, upgrading mere translation to a smart and efficient service with a long-term benefit for our clients and truly added value. 

To learn more, please visit www.idioma.com or contact us about our SMARTER translation services.

Language facts: German

German is the official language of Germany and Austria and one of the official languages of Switzerland and Belgium, as well as an official language of the European Union and the European Commission. It is used by more than 100 million speakers and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Apart from Standard German of Germany spoken by 88 million, Austrian German (Österreichisches Deutsch) it has 8 million speakers, while Swiss German (Schweizerdeutsch) has 5 million speakers. Moreover, there are about 80 million non-native speakers.
FACT: German is also the second most used scientific language.

Berlin. The divided Capital.
Source: DollarPhotoClub.com

Too many dialects

German is an interesting language also because a vast number of flavors and dialects, some of which are so distant and even mutually non-interchangeable with Standard German, so they are considered separate languages (such as Swiss German for instance). Even though Standard German existed in written form, the pronunciation was (and in fact still remains) very different in every region and dialect. The Standard German pronunciation was influenced by North German (although, strange enough, it was learnt as a foreign language in Northern Germany itself) as well as the stage form of German used in theaters. 

The standardization of written German in fact did not occur until the beginning of the 20th century. It's worthy to note that the most comprehensive German dictionary was created by the famous German authors, The Grimm Brothers. Another important role in German standardization was also played with the publication of Martin Luther's Bible. 

Interesting fact: there is one German dialect (considered a separate language today) that is not written in Latin, but in Hebrew script and it is Yiddish – the old German dialect of Ashkenazi Jews, originated in Central Europe around 9th century.

West vs. East German

Although it might seem that 40 years of division between East and West Germany caused also variation in language, it had just a little influence given a too short development period. There are certain words that are culturally different in today's western and eastern Deutschland due to Russian influence (e.g. astronaut (West) vs. kosmonaut (East), or Gartenhaus vs. Datsche (Russian expression for garden house). Also brands influenced certain terms, e.g. tissue – Kleenex in the US – is termed "Tempo" in the West, after the major tissue producer in Germany, but only a general expression "Papiertaschentuch" is used in the East.

Alphabet

The German alphabet is basically the same as the English one, exept for the addition of the special characters Ä, Ö, Ü / ä, ö, ü, ß (so called sharp S – originally scharfen S or "Eszett", sometimes replaced in writing with a double "s" (common in Switzerland). The Eszett character is rather interesting, because it doesn't have an upper case form). When sorting, these extra letters are treated like their base characters, as if the dots (umlauts) were not present. 

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