Building and Enhancing Translation Memory with Alignment Tools (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: When you're starting with translation memory, I told you that you can build it pretty fast. You know, you start translating your 2,000 new words a day and the translation memory will build up. But you might have been a translator for quite some time and you might have a bunch of documents that you want to import into translation memory. So can you actually make a translation memory from your previous work? And the answer is that you can. So there is a tool called Alignment. It's a tool, a feature, a functionality that actually allows you to create a translation memory from your existing translation. So you might have a document in English, a document in Italian, and you translated them manually. And you take those documents and import them into a translation memory. And what you're doing, you're aligning them. You're trying to align the English sentences with the Italian sentences. So you're going to get with a side-by-side view where you see all these sentences. You know, languages are tricky. So maybe three English sentences turn into a one long Italian sentence. Coming from Italy, I know I used to have to chop my sentences more. When I moved to the UK, my sentences were that long. I had to really kind of force myself to be a bit shorter. So with Alignment, you actually can sort of manipulate and try to align all the English with the Italian, in my case, or whatever language pair. One good point of translation memory is that it can store any language. There is no constraint. Any language can be imported and worked with a translation memory. So no matter what language combination you translate in, everything can be imported in a translation memory. So hopefully you've got a bit of a sense of what a translation memory is, what's inside. You hopefully know what now is a segment, how all of that works together to give you suggestions as you translate. And one of the nice things of translation memory is that even if you're starting from scratch, either you build it pretty quickly, as soon as you start doing your first translation, or you could even import what you've worked at, you've done before. So you create this asset that is going to last you for the future.