Open AccessIn search of the recurrent units of translation
Author(s) -
Lieve Macken
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
linguistica antverpiensia new series - themes in translation studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2295-5739
DOI - 10.52034/lanstts.v8i.251
Subject(s) - computer science , sentence , natural language processing , computer assisted translation , translation (biology) , example based machine translation , machine translation , repetition (rhetorical device) , artificial intelligence , workbench , transfer based machine translation , terminology , linguistics , philosophy , messenger rna , visualization , gene , biochemistry , chemistry
Translation memory systems aim to reuse previously translated texts. Be-cause the operational unit of the first-generation translation memory sys-tems is the sentence, such systems are only useful for text types in which full-sentence repetition frequently occurs. Second-generation sub-sentential translation memory systems try to remedy this problem by providing addi-tional translation suggestions for sub-sentential chunks. In this paper, we compare the performance of a sentence-based translation memory system (SDL Trados Translator’s Workbench) with a sub-sentential translation memory system (Similis) on different text types. We demonstrate that some text types (in this case, journalistic texts) are not suited to be translated by means of a translation memory system. We show that Similis offers useful additional translation suggestions for terminology and frequent multiword expressions.