The digital revolution is in full swing. The typewriter is gone and the computer has taken its place. Like the typewriter, more and more professions will disappear. As a translation agency, you have to get on board the raging digital train if you don’t want to suffer the same fate as the old-fashioned typewriter. What will the future of translation look like in five years’ time?
Translation memory: start of the digital revolution
Translation memory is one of the technologies underlying the digital revolution of the translation world. A translation memory is a database consisting of sentences and phrases in the source language with the corresponding translation in the target language.
The translator works with a translation software and while translating, this database is continuously searched to check if a sentence or a term has been translated before. If it has, then the translation can be used again. A very efficient and consistent way of working.
- Just imagine how many translated terms a translator had to be able to remember before the digital revolution!
- One page after another had to be turned to find the previous translation.
- Fortunately, this is now a thing of the past and you are only a few clicks away from each previously translated word.
The rise of machine translation
But the digital train races on unabated. Starting in 2000, machine translation took off. A term that still causes quite a bit of hesitation for many. And although machine translations are not 100% accurate, it is a technological tool that enables the translator to work better and more productively on a translation.