Ordinal followers
Ordinal followers refer to the various symbols used in numbers, figures or dates.
The most common ordinal followers are the full stop and the comma. Usually, the full stop and comma signs are used by segmentation rules to parse the entire translation memory (TM) based. However, if the full stop and the comma signs are given ordinal follower status in certain phrases, these contexts will be ignored by and will not interfere with the TM parsing mechanism.
For example, you have a date entry like 23.03.2000. You do not want the TM to interpret the full stop as a full stop, so you give it an ordinal follower status in this context.