Tuesday, August 30, 2005

The downside of project memories

I find project memories fairly useless: it is true that they include fuzzy matches, and permit a translation company to limit the size of the memories sent to translators, but they are of very limited usefulness as regards terminology, since the concordance feature will only find terms that are in either the 100% or fuzzy matches, but will miss any term that appears in segments where the fuzzy threshold is not reached.

Post script:
One thing that was probably not clear in my original post: I think that project memories are almost useless, but cerainly not translation memory. Project memories are created by analyzing a project against an existing (full) translation memory, so that they may contain only the segments from the full memory that match (either 100% or as fuzzy matches) the segments contained in the text to be translated.
My issue with project memories is that any term contained in a segment of the full translation memory that is not similar enough to a segment in the text to be translated as to be included in the project memory is not going to appear in the project memory, and will, therefore, not appear in a concordance search.

4 comments:

  1. Trados is giving you a hard time — to judge from your last three entries. As a Trados user myself (“der Not gehorchend, nicht dem Trieb”), my brief excursions into other TM applications have not really convinced me that any of them are better, just different with problems in different areas.

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  2. Hi Michael:

    Yes, currently Trados is giving me problems... but mostly it's not that I don't like TM programs in general: it's that I'm frustrated by how little real progress there has been since they were first introduced ages ago (besides Trados I've quite a lot of experience with TM/2 and also with the first few versions of DV).

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  3. I agree with Michael that all CAT tools have their problems, some more, some less.

    On the other side, Trados is sold for a lot of money, and I mean: a lot of money. I'd expect it to be more helpful, yet other less expensive tools have proven to be easier to use and to produce better results. I really don't feel like buying Trados anytime soon.

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  4. I have used DejaVu, but I have never used Trados. Now, I'm using Wordfast (www.wordfast.net), which I find very, very functional and easy to maintain. The price is also right. In conjunction with WF, I use the LogiTrans feature of LogiTerm (www.terminotix.com). It's true, as Michael says, that all CAT tools have problems. It's just a question of finding the one that's most congenial with your modus operandi.

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