3 translation acronyms you need to know
When working with a translator and/or localizer you might have noticed that their jargon is a bit different from yours. Find out what these 3 translation acronyms mean and how that can simplify the communication with your translation team.
CAT tool
Miau! CAT simply stands for: computer-assisted translation, meaning all sorts of tools that support translators in their work. CAT tools are a standard nowadays and every translator you work with should work with a CAT tool. Most of the times a CAT tool also has a translation memory (see next point).
There are plenty of CAT tools which provide mostly the same functions. Even the layout can be quite similar. But in the freelance world the majority of translators work with SDL Trados. There are also other CAT tools such as MemoQ or Transifex.
TM
Translation memory.
The translation memory is the “brain” or “long-term memory” of your translation tool (e.g. a CAT tool). The translation memory saves every piece of text that had been translated. So, imagine you translated the sentence “my house is red” to “Mein Haus ist rot.” The memory will remember this pair. Than, once you translate a similar sentence such as “my house is blue” the memory will be like: “hey, I remember this!” and show you a so called translation suggestion.
In the suggestion the memory recognizes which word is different, so to say the memory understands that the sentence is the same except for the word blue. Pretty cool, right? A translation memory is pretty essential for translators and so helpful to keep your content correct and consistent.
MT
Same letters, different order: MT stands for machine translation. As you might know a machine translation is a text that had been translated automatically by a machine. Google Translate is the most known program… but not the best.
You should always hire translators to post-edit your machine translated content. Like this mayor translation mistakes can be spotted before the content goes online. Remember: machine translations are good but errare machineum est. 😉
You just started your expansion to Germany and haven’t heard of these acronyms yet? Contact me for free advice to set up an efficient localization workflow!