مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - TRANSLATION MEMORY SYSTEMS FOR AVOIDING CONTEXT DEFICIENCY

Abstract :

Developments in information and communication technologies as well as globalization have changed the way that translators work. In today’s translation industry we can no longer talk of translator’s workstation that does not contain electronic resources and aids for translation. In this paper, I first give a brief account of the current scene of the translation industry in terms of technology use. Then I concentrate on the use of translation memory (TM) system as a tool used in translating non-literary texts. Following a general summary of the benefits that these systems provide, their limitations and challenges are discussed. Today it is a common practice in the translation industry to send translation vendors/translators only the fragments of updated source texts which have not been translated before. While the obvious reason here is to save money and time, the inability to access the entire source text, - in other words context deficiency- gives rise to various problems for translators. The aim of this study is to draw attention to one particular benefit of TM systems which has not been studied with enough emphasis on until today. I want to show that TM systems can eliminate the common practice of sending only text fragments to translators/translation vendors which leads to possible deteriorations in translation quality. Namely, if clients are made aware that they will still save time and money even if they send entire source texts some parts of which have already been translated previously, translators will not be made to translate contextless text fragments.