Involvement of CAT: Pros and Contras
Translation memory (TM) techniques, the most widely used toolkits in the localization of digital information at HQ-translate agency, enable the linguistic transition and transnational 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 document has been broken down into short portions, generally one sentence long. Today the most popular CAT tools: TRADOS, Déjà vu, Wordfast. The advantages of using TM systems are fairly obvious: they increase the translator’s productivity and increase translation quality by proving that terminology and expressions are used consistently within and across translations. Users in business and transnational companies submit a 25–60% rise in performance. Yet, it must be stated that the use of TM systems may also have negative effects on translation quality. One of the major contras of TM systems is that they usually perform at sentence level. Therefore, there is a serious danger that the translator will focus too much on separated sentences, possibly disregarding the contexts in which the sentences are built-in. 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 degree of similarity between a piece to be translated and a part retrieved from the storage base may differ considerably from the grade of similarity calculated by the CAT system. This may lead to 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 degree is not useful at all (for a discussion on the aspects of evaluating the retrieval mechanisms of memory systems, see Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (1996), Whyman and Somers (1999), and Reinke (2000a, 2004). Despite the drawbacks, it should be noted that TM systems generally build into the translation workflow relatively smoothly. These CATs leave human translators in control of the actual translation process, while free them from routine work and supporting translation as a creative activity whenever the translation resourcefulness of a human being is required. For more info, visit us at: HQ-translate company
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