Here, the procedure depends on whether the translations you would like to import into your translation memory (TM) are already divided into translation units (TUs) or not. In this article, I will focus on the latter, so you should either have a TM export in TXT or TMX format, TTX files from TagEditor, SDLXLIFF files from Trados Studio, or Word files with already defined TUs (what some of us like to call “unclean” files). It’s all very simple, just follow the steps described below.
Storing translation units (TUs) as you translate is one of the two ways to fill up your translation memory (TM). It is very easy to do this, you should just think of some things and take care of some settings before you begin translating, to make your TM entries better for future use.
In order to fill up a translation memory, you first have to create one. This is very simple in both Trados 2007 and Trados Studio 2009 software versions. And here is how it goes …
A translation memory (TM) is a database where you can store already made translations so that you can quickly find them again later when translating a new text. Translations are stored in the form of so-called translation units (TUs). These consist of sentences or other sensible units like headings and cells from a table (in short: segments) from the source text and their corresponding target text segments. As you can imagine, the more such TUs you have stored in your TM, the more valuable the TM is.
When thinking about how translators work, many people probably still imagine a person surrounded by piles of dictionaries and books with the source text on paper next to them. Truth is, those days are far gone and pretty much all you need as a translator nowadays is a computer and a connection to the Internet.
One thing each (translation) project manager should know is not only the limits of everyone they’re working with, but also their own limits. Knowing how to set priorities and when to say “enough is enough” is a very important lesson to learn. The same also goes for translators: Working nights and weekends might pay off financially, but definitely does not make your life any better—all you might get from all your strain is health problems and a very poor social life. Not to mention the kind quality your brain can deliver after you’ve been looking at a computer screen for twelve hours a day and are seriously deprived of sleep.
This is why this blog entry is very short … after managing a huge project 6 days a week since the beginning of February, I’m too tired to write a full and quality article and, even more importantly, don’t want to spend more time behind the computer as I have to. So read you again in about three weeks! :-)
The most important goal of a translation project manager is to make any translation project a successful one. This is, of course, not possible without the cooperation of translators and other suppliers, but also of the clients.
I have already mentioned in one of my previous entries that organizational skills are a very important asset for a translation project manager. But having good organizational skills doesn’t mean you’re only able to organize and manage projects and their participants, it also means that you yourself are well organized: Being able to manage a complicated translation project isn’t worth much if your e-mail is unorganized, your notes non-existent, and your folder system a mess.Keep reading and learn how you can get all your information about a project in order in just three steps.
December is probably one of the most stressful months for the translation industry. The year is coming to an end and company budgets need to be used up—these are the reasons for a lot of, what I like to call, “crazy deadlines”. For example: In December, it happens quite often that translators as well as translation agencies get, let’s say, 100 full pages of text to translate until Christmas. It would usually take about a month to do this, but now the work has to be done in half the time or even less. Or maybe it’s less text, but it has to be translated overnight or over the weekend. Either way, the deadline is crazy!
A successful translation project very often lies in choosing the right translator for the source text. It takes nothing more than common sense to know that giving a financial report to a translator specializing in financial translation will give a better result than giving it to a translator specializing in, for instance, IT and software. But when would, or actually should, a translation project manager choose a non-native translator into the target language over a native target language translator? This is the topic I want to discuss in this article.