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Video Jan 23, 2025

What is Translation Memory

Hi there, and welcome to three Questions with MotionPoint. I'm your host, Dominic Ditherbide. And today I have the pleasure of being with Frank Drucker, our director product management here at MotionPoint. Frank, how are you doing?

I’m wonderful, pal. How are you today?

I'm doing great. I'm happy to talk to you. Happy to be here. Happy to have this discussion. Today, we're gonna talk about one of the most important things to cost effective website translation, translation memory.

So it's a very familiar thing in our industry. I would ask you, Frank, how would you define translation memory? What is it?

So basically, translation memory is a database for storing the purpose of storing translations.

Inside, translation memory, memory, you typically find sentences or small pieces of content in their original language with their corresponding translations.

Advanced translation memories, you can even find images whether they have embedded text or not along with the same sort of concept alongside their translator or lost images.

It's amazing. So translation memory stores your previously translated content, so you don't have to pay for translation twice. And advanced ones can even do that at the image level, right, not only free copy. So that's brilliant. Thank you, Frank, for that.

I would I would ask you next, well, what are the main benefits that people get when they have a translation memory that works efficiently?

Sure. So high quality translation can be expensive. You wanna preserve the work that the translators have done so you can store it and reuse it, find the technology, and buy linguists. Alright? So, that's number one. Number two is it greatly aids the linguists, in performing their jobs.

So there's some CSA research out there down that basically shows that, there's the majority vast majority of translators use the translation memory. Only twelve percent have never used translation memory, in performing their duties.

I mean, that that makes total sense. It's almost table stakes when you're doing a website translation project to have your translation memory. So I mean, so those benefits are massive, right? You get to to reuse your translation memory, you get to save costs, but you also get to get some leverage on consistency, right? You get the same translations every single time. If there's a certain way that you like to describe something that's, you know, associated to your brand or is to your, you know, terminology and that local market, but you wanna make sure that you're continuously using that same translation and speaking the same way. So I can understand that being one of the most important benefits, Frank.

So when you outsource your translation memory and you have a partner that’s gonna help you get this done, what should people look for?

Oh, that's a great question. So above all, you wanna make sure you own the translation memory. Not all companies allow you to own own your translation memory, which will be very important if down the road, you wanna switch or change your translation service provider. Also, your translation memory is where you're storing all your valuable translations. So you want a partner that's going to update and maintain translation partner that's able to leverage that memory to be able to, you know, save you translation.

Yeah. That makes total sense. I mean, ownership of your translation memory is actually a very important thing for us to discuss.

In our industry, most vendors try not to give their customer the ownership of the translation memory because that way it's very hard for them to switch to another translation provider. It's a way of keeping, you know, customer retention high in in this industry. And something you gotta look out for because you, at the end of the day, are paying for those translations and therefore you should try to be the owner of those translations as well. And the other part is the translation memory actually takes a lot of work to to keep updating.

Right? So when you have to do that work, you wanna make sure that your translation partner is maintaining your translation member up to date. Because if we don't do that, then they're gonna pay for a translation again even though you had already done so. So something that's very important for us to look out for.

And of course, the consistency part of it. I think the last part that you mentioned where we need to be able to leverage the translation memory in multiple different ways where we can get leverage from AI or maybe algorithmic translation that can try to find similar segments that you've already translated and translating them again, using that algorithmic technology, which is is a growing part of our industry. Right, Frank? Get us.

I mean, I think it's a very fun and deep subject that we can talk about for a long time. Absolutely.

But I appreciate that. I think that does it for three questions with MotionPoint. So thank you very much for coming. And to our audience, I'll see you guys next time.