Translation memory from O to R

ITI   Michael Benis

Forget me not

There can be few readers of the ITI Bulletin whose curiosity hasn't been aroused by translation memory. Yet most translators still don't use it. The ITI Rates & Salaries Survey reported that only 15% of respondents used translation memory tools, although this rose to 40% and 50% for those earning £50k-£54,999 and £75k+ respectively. If you're not in those groups, read on to find out what you're missing. If you are, read on to find out whether you could be doing even better. Because we've now reviewed the five leading translation memory packages on the market to help you make 1999 your most productive year yet.

TRANSLATION MEMORY FROM O TO R 1/4

So what's all the fuss about? Why do you keep seeing adverts for translation memory products? Why are increasing numbers of agencies trying to get you to work with these products? What's more, why are increasing numbers of freelance translators using them without any prompting? We'll be answering all these questions and more in the world's first extended review of translation memory products.

The idea of translation memory is basically very simple. It's to stop you scratching your head and losing time while you do it. That's the reason for the enigmatic title of this review. No longer will you bring digits to cranium in the hope of stimulating your grey cells to provide an answer to the question: "Oh, how did I translate that last time round?" Instead, your translation memory program will instantly remind you, prompting the satisfied exclamation: "Ah, so that's how I put it last time round!"

That's basically the long and the short of it. From "Oh" to "Ah". Translation memory is nothing more than the computerised equivalent of two massive parallel filing cabinets containing every sentence you have ever translated, both in the original and in your translation.

This, as you can imagine, does not have any obvious appeal to someone translating poems, advertisements, newspaper articles and the like, but is obviously highly exciting for anyone involved in fields where there is a certain repetition in the procedures or practises described. Consider the operations involved in adjusting the valve clearances on a car engine, or installing a new PCI card in a personal computer, describing the procedures for selecting items in a pull-down menu, the symptoms of a given disease or social service case histories and you'll realise that there are in fact quite a number of fields where there is a high probability of sentences or phrases being repeated.

Then there are fields, like software, where time-to-market is such a crucial factor in the success of a product that it's often essential for work on the product documentation to commence while the product is still in the final stages of its development. This can involve a large number of very small changes to the product literature. If most of them can be performed automatically or semi-automatically, this reduces the time-to-market still further, on the one hand, while also increasing productivity.

Moreover, there are many fields plagued by frequent product updates that aim to ensure a competitive position is maintained. Here, again, the best translation memory software will be capable of immediately translating everything that is the same, allowing us to just focus on what is different. Some translation memory software can even make at least some of these changes automatically.

Completing the picture, more and more product ranges now feature shared components, modules or subassemblies, which means that a translation memory user who has completed a translation for one product may well find that subsequent documentation on a sister product contains substantial chunks of text that are exactly the same.

The software localisation industry cannily recognised all these potential benefits around ten years ago, mainly with the aim of making the localisation process as quick as possible. As the systems became increasingly user-friendly, technical translators and translation companies were quick to follow suit, realising that the productivity increases achieved when these systems are used properly translates into happier customers and more money in the bank.

Kerching!

Translation memory is like most things in business. If you want to make more money, you have to invest some first, and none of these systems really comes cheap. Indeed, any of them are likely to be the most expensive software you buy.

Before you start fingering your credit cards, you need to ask yourself a number of questions in terms of how fast a return you are likely to get on that investment.

Firstly, there's no point in considering any of them unless a sizeable proportion of your work arrives as files on disk or via the Internet. Although optical character recognition software has improved tremendously over the past few years, it still requires substantial correction, resulting in productivity losses that may very well not be outweighed by using translation memory.

Secondly, consider the type of work you do carefully. If you can identify areas in which it is repetitive (and you need to think of sentence construction rather than just terminology), then you should seriously consider translation memory. Take another look at the examples in the previous section. Remember that these do not have to be technical areas. Book translators engaged in projects with extensive specialist terminology, for example, will also benefit. One such project of my own was a CD on birdwatching in Italy. There was a vast number of "specialist" terms to describe the different body parts and feathers of a myriad of birds, their shape, colouring and so on. What's more, the phrases used in these descriptions all followed very similar patterns. Translation memory made that project much less laborious, more enjoyable and profitable.

If you have just one or two regular large customers that fit the bill, so to speak, you are more than likely to see a return on your investment within a year, and maybe as little as three months or even your first large repetitive project. Every productivity gain after that is a kerching! on your cash register.

The smell of suite success

All the different translation memory packages are in fact suites of software products that integrate to varying degrees. We tested the offerings of 5 different manufacturers: Atril (Deja Vu), IBM (Translation Manager), SDL (SDLX), Star (Transit) and Trados (Translator's Workbench).

All of these offer the same basic types of programs:

I) An alignment program

This allows you to create translation memory databases from existing translation files. If, for example, you have been translating motorbike manuals for five years and kept all your source and translation files, one of these programs will enable you to build up a massive database immediately, allowing you to exploit the full potential of your system from the word go. They work by creating your first database - the computing equivalent of a printed parallel text translation. On one side there's a source segment (which can be a clause, sentence or even paragraph), while on the other there's the target language equivalent. It's obviously important that all these segments are lined up properly and that's what the alignment program does.

There are, however, big differences in the alignment programs offered. Transit, for example, offers a highly automated program that will save you a massive amount of time. Trados offers WinAlign, a semiautomatic program with a graphical alignment function that allows you to spot and rectify any alignment problems very quickly and simply. Both these alignment tools will save you a lot of time (so you can make more money) but they are also costly extras. Deja Vu, SDLX and Translation Manager are all supplied with their own alignment programs at no extra cost. The most cost-effective choice will depend on the volume of files you have to align immediately and the likelihood of your having to align a large number of files in the future. Trados caters for clients who only have an immediate short-term requirement by also offering WinAlign on a short-term lease basis.

III) A terminology program

These are slightly more sophisticated versions of the electronic glossaries many of us have built up over the years. Moreover, they can import these glossaries and indeed other dictionary files. IBM Translation Manager already comes with terminology dictionaries, while rather more sophisticated dictionaries are available as extras for Transit and Translator's Workbench. Some of these terminology programs are very complex including fuzzy matching algorithms that enable them to search for all words with a given root, so that they could - for example - find "logic" when "logical" is the word you want but isn't in the dictionary. That said, unless you're a beginner working in-house with suitably verified glossaries, you stand to gain little from these programs, and whether one is superior or inferior to another should not influence your choice of package too much.

Building up and maintaining glossaries takes time - more time than they are ever likely to save you, particularly since all the better programs allow you to search for individual words in the translation memory, displaying them in context - which is much more useful. What's more, you don't have to go through any special operations to get the terms there. Two programs are slight exceptions to this rule: Deja Vu - which will "assemble" translations from the largest available units (but settle for individual words if it can't find anything else), and Transit - which is able to insert words from its glossaries in fuzzy matches (see below) when these words constitute the only differences between a segment in a translation and a segment in its memory.

IV) A document editor

This is the program in which you actually carry out your translation. It generally takes the form of two parallel windows, with the source text on one side and the target text on the other. In addition, there is often a further window showing the segment/s in the translation memory. The segments displayed will either be 100% matches, meaning the system has found exactly the same sentence in its database and you can simply import this directly into your translation (several of the programs can do this automatically) or "fuzzy" matches - which are segments with a number of small differences. Sometimes, of course - especially in the beginning - you won't get any matches at all.

All the programs allow you to set the degree of "fuzziness". Some people choose a very high setting, considering absolutely any suggestion helpful to jog their memories, while others find that anything requiring more than minimal editing is simply a distraction. Finally, most document editors also contain a window to the package's terminology program.

Translation memory features aside, the document editor is basically a word processor. Some of them are pretty primitive - offering little more than cut and paste, search and replace, while others show full formatting information or offer an extensive selection of AutoText features. The big exception here is Trados' Translator's Workbench, where you work directly in Microsoft Word alongside a second window with panels showing the translation memory matches and terminology matches.

V) Filters

These are used to convert files from one format to another, whether to import them into an alignment program or document editor, or export them from the document editor into their original format. The reason for this is that whatever format a file is supplied in, you will of course work in the document editor/translation environment of your translation memory product. This is in itself a productivity benefit in that you always use the same interface and don't have to cope with re-remembering different menu and button locations, and different keystroke short cuts.

One difference between the various different packages is that some come with a full selection of filters as standard (Deja Vu, SDLX and IBM Translation Manager), while others only offer them as costly extras (Transit and Translator's Workbench). Note, however, that all the packages come with a filter for Microsoft Word as standard.

Before buying a package, you need to carefully consider what you need from these four basic components of any system. The pros and cons of the different systems are considered in the individual reviews below.

Never mind the quality feel the width

Opinions are divided on the quality argument. There's no doubt that translation memory can help increase terminological accuracy and consistency. The more experienced and specialised the translator, the less of an advantage that will be. It's spectacularly helpful for junior in-house translators, however, who don't need to spend any time building up translation memories or glossaries, and immediately benefit from the many years experience embodied in them. Many comment that using a translation memory system is like always having a pet senior translator on hand to help them out.

When it comes to style, however, we find ourselves on the other side of the coin. Only three of the programs (Deja Vu, Transit and Translator's Workbench) allow you to split and join segments entirely at will. Not being able to do so can tie you too rigidly to the source text - more so than an experienced translator would allow themselves to be in a "free translation". It is also easy to be distracted from the "flow" of a translation when working on it in segments. It is of course true, however, that the influence on fluency of working in segments decreases as you become used to it. Nevertheless, many translation memory users find it useful to have a quick read-through upon completion, editing the final document to increase its fluency and style in general. This of course needs to be factored in when considering any potential productivity gains.

IBM Translation Manager

This one's the big daddy of them all, developed by IBM to satisfy its own localisation requirements. For a while, it ruled the market but gradually slipped from pole position due to a combination of slow development and poor marketing. Version 2.5 is a full 32-bit program and the only product in this review to be supplied complete with an alignment tool, terminology dictionaries and filters (for most popular word processor formats excepting Word 97 - only Word 95 - and downloadable free Microsoft Word plug-ins for PageMaker and QuarkXPress). A wide range of languages are supported in addition to the usual Latin languages. You can find the latest information on the Website detailed in the contacts panel.

The speed of sweet simplicity

That said, IBM Translation Manager is in many ways the simplest of the programs, with what barely appears to be any special user interface. This can be confusing at first, since you have separate windows for every function, which can be resized and positioned as you prefer. Selecting an imported document for translation or selecting the "Translation Environment" option in the "Window" pull-down menu does, however, cause all three relevant windows (Translation, Translation Memory and Dictionary) to be displayed simultaneously in more or less the same way one finds with Deja Vu, Transit and SDLX. The plus side to all this is precisely that you can customise things pretty much as you like and, above all, that this program is blisteringly fast to open and work in.

What you actually see when working is the source text itself, with bracketed codes indicating the formatting information of the original file, together with the text that you need to overwrite as you would in your normal word processor. The Translation Memory window shows any matches found, and the Dictionary window shows the relevant terminology available in the quite acceptable basic dictionaries that IBM supplies.

Searching and database management is simple, fast and logical. Moreover you have the option of searching the dictionary for words and the translation memory for sentences without leaving the Translation Environment. The one big disadvantage here is that you can't search for individual words in the translation memory, meaning you can't consult the possibly very many sentences containing the word that's causing problems without shutting down your project and opening the database separately. Although this doesn't take very long since the various items of Translation Manager all open and close so fast, it nevertheless means this useful information is several mouse clicks away. What's more, you can't survey it whilst considering the current sentence and are therefore more likely to forget the various different alternative solutions possible. You will also find it more difficult to envisage how they can actually be incorporated in the segment in question. Compare this with the Scan, Fold and Concordance functions offered in Deja Vu, Transit and Translator's Workbench respectively.

Like most translation memory programs, Translation Manager offers very little in the way of word processing features. You can select from three fonts in terms of how the text is displayed, plus a number of different colours to distinguish between translated text, untranslated text, the active segment in which you are working etc., but that's it. Forget WYSIWYG. All the formatting information in your files that would be used to show italics, bold, tables and the rest is displayed as codes between brackets. A number of options are available that allow you to protect this information (accidentally changing it would change the formatting of your translation) and display it in full or abbreviated form. This is the aspect most likely to cause confusion in new users. Most segments will at least be enclosed between these code tags, while you may find others around certain words (such as an underlined word, for example) or characters (like the superscripted 2 in pr^(2)). You naturally need to pay attention to ensure that these codes are around the equivalent words in your translation. Translation Manager does nothing special to make this any easier than any other program, but doesn't present any obstacles either.

What many users will miss, however, is the possibility of using the AutoText features that most word processors now provide to help increase your productivity. All you get in Translation Manager are the basics of cut and paste.

On the other hand, a useful feature that could be refined further is the possibility of joining segments together. This can be helpful when translating into languages that tend to use longer sentences with a more complex structure than is usual in your source language, or in which information tends to be presented in a different order. A classic example of this is the way English instructions tend to follow the temporal order of the operations concerned, while French or Italian instructions first describe the principal operation and then the other operations leading up to it. Unfortunately, however, Translation Manager won't allow you to do this in reverse, since although segments can be split, you can't do this into units smaller than a sentence. It's worth noting, though, that not everyone finds such a function useful. Many would say that it's simply easier to enter a number of sentences in the target segment or allow one sentence to flow across several segments. Especially when the system (as is the case with Translation Manager) doesn't have any automated functions that allow these smaller/larger segments to be used automatically.

IBM's alignment tool - which goes by the perfectly descriptive but rather unglamorous appellation of Initial Translation Memory Tool, works fast enough but is not automated in any way. Nor does it allow you to customise the segmentation rules to suit the punctuation practice of different languages or clients. You can join segments, but once again, you can't split them into units smaller than a sentence.

Competitive and reliable

So what's it like to work with? Well, it's undoubtedly the least user-friendly of the programs. If you've never used a translation memory package before it will take a couple of days before you're using this one confidently. This isn't helped by the documentation supplied (Online Help and a series of hypertext documents with very little in the way of illustrations), which is comprehensive but not particularly well organised and doesn't hold your hand through the initial operations needed to create a database and complete your first translation. Otherwise it's fast, relatively uncomplicated and bug-free, though without the bells and whistles you'll find on many of the other programs. If you want to try it, you can download a fully functioning demonstration version from the IBM TM Website for evaluation.

The price is about average at £1495 for the full version, which makes the whole package quite competitive if you consider that a wide range of filters and dictionaries are included. Moreover, if you don't need the non-Latin character sets (e.g. Cyrillic, Arabic etc.) or Initial Translation Memory alignment facility, you can get the Personal version for just £525. So, if you have a big customer that particularly wants you to use IBM Translation Manager you won't have too much to regret. It will keep your customer happy and improve your productivity. But if you're making a choice to satisfy your own needs only, Deja Vu, Transit or Translator's Workbench are all easier to use. What's more they also offer additional productivity-enhancing features that will give you a bigger bang for your buck, as they say over the pond in the land of the Big Blue.

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