Documentation Center

Best Practice-Maintaining your Translation Memories

Getting the most out of your translation memories. Tips for a faster system.

When an author checks their document for quality, the suggestions they receive should be the best possible in terms of style, grammar, and cost. There are a number of actions that should be regularly carried out on your translation memories to ensure you get the best possible suggestions from Quality Assistant.

Keep the Translation Memory Clean

You should regularly review the contents of your translation memory. Examine each entry to ensure you do not have duplicates. Then ensure all entries you have are grammatically correct, contain no spelling mistakes and are in the form and style that matches your company’s style guide.

When doing this it is important to keep in mind that anything in your Translation Memory may have already been translated, therefore editing an existing entry will require re-translation. It is therefore up to the manager of the Translation Memory to decide if the improved quality of the edit out-weighs the cost of re-translation.

A clean and tidy translation memory has an added bonus in that it is smaller and therefore searches against it are faster. This means a document can be checked more quickly, improving an author's productivity.

Divide your Translation Memory by Department, or Document Type

The style between different types of documents can be very different. Legal documents have different style guides to marketing documents, or technical documentation. To ensure authors receive the best quality suggestions their documents should be checked against only the translation memory that best matches the document style they are working on.

Splitting your translation memories by department has an added bonus in that each is smaller and therefore searches against it are faster. This means a document can be checked more quickly, improving an author's productivity.