Protect Your Investment in TM Technology
26/01/14 17:05 Archived in: E-zine
By Peter Kjeldsen,
Like in any other industry or business, it is of vital importance to protect your investments. With constant technology and tool changes you cannot expect to keep working with the same tool for the next 20 years. It is therefore important that you become somewhat independent of your various tools.
At the moment let’s say your company is using a TM tool. You invested a few years ago and bought 5 licences, you are now limited to using that tool and can only expand in that particular direction. If you want to change TM, the only way out of your dilemma is to buy an alignment tool for the new tool you are going to use and start aligning all your previous work and build a new TM database. But what happens if you've lost/deleted the original source language documents? Well, that question is very easy to answer - you can start building your new TM database from scratch. And I'm sure all your projected savings are gone with the wind, before your next pay review.
The old tools also keep you stuck in "the good old days" and you are going to lose quite a few customers if you insist on only translating Word 6.0 files when everyone else has moved on to newer more powerful word processors. So what are you going to do? One option is, of course, to fork out a fortune to update your existing TM technology with the next version of the same software.
In the translation memory arena, there is of course the TMX format for translation memories, which would if it was implemented fully, allow you to exchange translation memories from different translation memory tools among each other. But as with any other attempt to standardise a certain area, there are far too many different interests involved to make a quick solution that will suit everyone. So don't hang around waiting for an omnipotent solution - because with all the good ideas the various tool providers get, you might be waiting for a long time, while one half baked cake replaces the other.
TMX has matured and almost been replaced by XLIFF by some providers and I believe that the TM developers did a good job in both cases, but a standard is not a standard unless everyone follows it, with the same implementation and no variation.
Variations are officially allowed for both formats and that gives rise to numerous “issues” and “challenges” for freelance translators and smaller translation agencies without the necessary programming skills to write at simple conversion tool.
So what is the solution? So far the best solution I have seen is on a regular basis to export your TMs from whatever tool you use and import them into an external database e.g. mySQL, big savings can be made using this approach and at the same time you will be sure that all your TMs always can be converted or exported to whatever format your new TM tool is using. This process will also require some basic technical abilities if you want to design your own solution, but you can also use one of several readymade solutions.
Like in any other industry or business, it is of vital importance to protect your investments. With constant technology and tool changes you cannot expect to keep working with the same tool for the next 20 years. It is therefore important that you become somewhat independent of your various tools.
At the moment let’s say your company is using a TM tool. You invested a few years ago and bought 5 licences, you are now limited to using that tool and can only expand in that particular direction. If you want to change TM, the only way out of your dilemma is to buy an alignment tool for the new tool you are going to use and start aligning all your previous work and build a new TM database. But what happens if you've lost/deleted the original source language documents? Well, that question is very easy to answer - you can start building your new TM database from scratch. And I'm sure all your projected savings are gone with the wind, before your next pay review.
The old tools also keep you stuck in "the good old days" and you are going to lose quite a few customers if you insist on only translating Word 6.0 files when everyone else has moved on to newer more powerful word processors. So what are you going to do? One option is, of course, to fork out a fortune to update your existing TM technology with the next version of the same software.
In the translation memory arena, there is of course the TMX format for translation memories, which would if it was implemented fully, allow you to exchange translation memories from different translation memory tools among each other. But as with any other attempt to standardise a certain area, there are far too many different interests involved to make a quick solution that will suit everyone. So don't hang around waiting for an omnipotent solution - because with all the good ideas the various tool providers get, you might be waiting for a long time, while one half baked cake replaces the other.
TMX has matured and almost been replaced by XLIFF by some providers and I believe that the TM developers did a good job in both cases, but a standard is not a standard unless everyone follows it, with the same implementation and no variation.
Variations are officially allowed for both formats and that gives rise to numerous “issues” and “challenges” for freelance translators and smaller translation agencies without the necessary programming skills to write at simple conversion tool.
So what is the solution? So far the best solution I have seen is on a regular basis to export your TMs from whatever tool you use and import them into an external database e.g. mySQL, big savings can be made using this approach and at the same time you will be sure that all your TMs always can be converted or exported to whatever format your new TM tool is using. This process will also require some basic technical abilities if you want to design your own solution, but you can also use one of several readymade solutions.