When you are looking to pay for a professional translation, the is a good chance you will come up against a magic word: Trados.
What exactly are they talking about? It’s actually quite simple: it is a very popular translation software that helps translation clients in a great way. The program creates translation memories of the translated texts as they are created by the translator(s). These memories can reproduce words and sentences later to ensure that they are consistent. The memories can be stored and organized according to language pair, and give the information on the specific time the translation unit (“segment”) was created and then edited, and the users responsible for the creation/edition.
Trados provides clients with two basic benefits:
First, the possibility of analyzing the text to give an accurate reading of how much work will be involved in the translation. This will ensure that the translator or translation agency do not make wild claims about the number of words involved, saving the client time and money.
Second, and more important from the perspective of quality is that it allows there to be uniformity in the terminology, which is one of the key signs of a professional translation. As mentioned above, sentences that are repeated in the original document will be translated the same way every time they appear. Also, Trados features a “Concordance” function that gives translators the possibility of searching through all previous translations of any word in the current source file and any other relevant translations done previously, which is an effective way of ensuring consistency.
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Tags: clients, concordance, professional, segments, sentences, software, trados, Translation, translation memory, translators
Trados is absolutelty essential for every professional proofreader and localisation company alike.
Clients adore the idea of having uniformity not just across a single file, but multiple files over months and years. They are quite fond of the idea of reduced costs for differing levels of matches too!
Just make sure you have a somewhat up to date computer before analysing a large file, or you will waiting! /goes to make a coffee