termbase management

The difference between a termbase and a translation memory

18.10.2024 by Delingua

If your business regularly works with translations involving multiple languages, you may have already encountered the terms “termbase” and “translation memory”. While both are essential tools for translators, they each serve a different purpose.

In this straightforward guide, we’ll explain the basics of termbases and translation memories, the differences between the two, and how they can help to improve your translations.

What is a termbase?

A termbase (TB), also known as a terminology database, is a collection of specific words and expressions used in a particular subject area, industry, or company. A term entry may include definitions, examples as well as the corresponding translations of these words and expressions in other languages. The primary purpose of a termbase is to ensure consistency and accuracy in translations by providing a reference for the translator.

For example, when translating a legal document, the corresponding termbase might include terms like “jurisdiction,” “liability,” or “indemnity.” When translating a marketing brochure for a technology company, on the other hand, it may include terms like “cloud computing,” “cybersecurity,” or “digital transformation.”

What is a translation memory?

A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores previously translated content in the source and target language. The content is stored as bilingual segments – or translation units – in the database for future use. When a translator encounters the same or a similar sentence or string in a new translation, the translation memory will provide the previously translated version as a suggestion for the translation, saving time and improving consistency.

For example, if while translating the user manual for a product, the sentence “Press the red button to start the machine” has already been translated, the translation memory will provide the stored translation as a translation suggestion for a new sentence like “Press the green button to activate the machine.”

How do they differ?

While both termbases and translation memories are databases used in translation, they serve different purposes. A termbase is a reference tool used to ensure consistency in terminology across translations, whereas the purpose of a translation memory is to reuse previous translations and thereby save time.

How do they work together?

Termbases and translation memories work together to improve the quality and efficiency of translations. For example, a termbase can be integrated into computer-assisted translation software to ensure consistent terminology across translations, improving the accuracy of the translation memory suggestions.

How can they benefit your business?

Using a termbase and translation memories can benefit your business in several ways. By ensuring consistent use of terminology, you can improve the accuracy of your translations, making your content easier to understand for your target audience. Additionally, by reusing previous translations, you can save time and reduce translation costs.

Using these tools can also help you maintain brand consistency across languages, strengthening your corporate voice and ensuring that your messaging is clear and effective in every language. This can improve customer satisfaction.

Want to know more about our advanced solutions for termbase management and translation memories? Reach out to us and we will be in touch shortly.

This article was originally published by LanguageWire Company (Verity Hartley).

How generative AI can help elevate your work and boost efficiency

26.4.2024 by Delingua

In the last year, awareness of Generative AI has skyrocketed. The availability of newer and more powerful GPT models has given everyone a chance to benefit from this new technology.

But what exactly are those benefits? How is generative AI really going to change the way you work and why should we be investing our time in understanding these new, powerful tools.

Let’s look at some ways you can use AI to help you work smarter and faster than ever.

Kickstart Creativity

Generative AI is a great starting point for getting your ideas on the page. When working creatively, nothing can be worse than blank page syndrome, where the cursor blinks at you incessantly while you wait for inspiration to strike.

From creating article outlines, to writing first drafts of content, Generative AI can help you jump start your creativity and speed up your workflows. Use it to create first draft outlines or give you heading ideas to get you started. If you’re really stuck it can even create a first draft from scratch to fill that first page.

You can use the new wave of AI tools to help break this cycle and start getting new ideas on the page for you to then finesse with your own style, voice and creativity.

Maintain Consistency & Quality

When working on multilingual content, you want to always maintain a consistent tone of voice and use the right business language. This can be tricky when you have content creators or translators working all around the world and often across different languages.

By interlinking your Generative AI tool with your company termbase and other linguistic assets like translation memories, you can ensure that any content your AI tool generates for you will maintain the correct business tone and language to ensure consistency.

You can train your AI model on your linguistic assets to ensure that it knows your tone of voice, what terms you use and how to spell and write them correctly. This will save you time and effort when validating and boost the overall quality of your content.

Personalise Customer Experiences

It can be difficult to provide always-on multilingual customer service, especially on a global scale. However, AI chatbots can help provide a customer service presence even when your employees are off the clock.

With the latest versions of AI models, these chatbots can be programmed to provide a huge amount of personalised interaction with your customers, in their own language.

Always-on AI chatbots can provide friendly, helpful support to your customers at any time of the day and respond in a conversational manner that seems natural. They can pull data directly from customer databases to personalise the experience and make answering customer queries simple in any language.

Boost Productivity

Data analysis is one of the key areas where AI can help make our lives much easier. AI models are trained on large datasets, and they can easily absorb, review and analyse data in a second before returning the results in an easy-to-read format.

One powerful way this can be used is to summarise long texts. AI can quickly read and create a summary of a longer document by identifying the key points and adding them to a bulleted list. It can also create short-form copy from long-form documents, for example it could build social media posts based on blog articles.

You can input large data sets of any variety into your AI tool and asking them to identify trends, format the content in a variety of ways or to extract key information quickly and easily, cutting down on the manual effort required.

Additionally, you can use an AI tool to help you be more productive in other tools such as Excel by asking you to write a formula that will analyse your data for you in that application.

You do need to be careful about where and what data you upload to open and public AI tools as there is no protection on who can see your data once it is uploaded. Make sure you only upload sensitive data to a company you trust who can provide assurances that nothing will be kept or shared after the task is completed.

Make Generative AI work for you

Generative AI is a powerful tool that you can use to enhance your daily workflows. From creativity to communication, the possibilities are endless. Getting the most out of AI includes understanding how to input the right prompt. If you would like to learn more about AI prompting, read our detailed guide.

Interested to learn more about what LanguageWire AI tools can do for you and your business? Contact us and let’s talk more!

This article was originally published by LanguageWire Company (Verity Hartley).

The importance of linguistic quality assurance in translation

10.1.2024 by Delingua

What is the true price of linguistic quality?

In today’s global marketplace, it is increasingly important for businesses to be able to accurately communicate with customers, partners, and employees from across the globe.

Poor quality translations could cost your business in revenue, access to global markets, business reputation and in some worst cases scenarios even result in physical harm or loss of life.

Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) is an essential component of the end-to-end translation process. It plays a key role in making linguistic quality a measurable and achievable goal by ensuring that translations consistently meet the necessary defined standards protecting you, your customers, and your business.

In this article, we will dive a little deeper into how Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) can help your business take the quality of your translated content to the next level.

What is Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA)?

Linguistic (or Language) Quality Assurance (LQA) is a system of processes for evaluating and verifying the quality of translations across a project. It ensures that the translations are accurate, clear, and convey the intended message. LQA should always be performed by professional linguists who are also subject-matter specialists. They must be experts in target languages and cultures. This includes any language variants such as French and French Canadian.

It is usually in the final stage of a translation or a localization project and endeavours to find and correct all the mistakes, mistranslations and style guide irregularities that may have been overlooked at earlier stages. LQA is an often overlooked project phase but it can make the difference in turning your translated content from good to excellent.

What is the Purpose of an LQA Review?

Adding a linguistic quality assurance review stage to your translation projects ensures the highest quality in your final products.

Some believe that editing and proofreading are enough to catch the majority of errors produced within the translation process. While they do help detect mistakes, some will often slip through undetected. This is often due to a difference of opinion on subjective translation errors and the lack of a standardised ruleset. That is why fixed guidelines on translation criteria are an essential part of a quality assurance system.

How does Quality Assurance differ from Quality Assessment?

Quality assurance and quality assessment are related but not the same. Typically quality assurance (QA) refers to the system or process that helps optimise the quality as a whole across a project, such as the translation of an app, a product or a large document.

A quality assessment is a step added to evaluate the quality of a translation against a pre-defined set of standards. For example, a quality assessment can be performed by a third-party linguist who evaluates and scores the translation for completeness and correctness.

After a translation is completed, another additional step, the review, is added to ensure the overall linguistic quality of a project. While a review can also look at individual pieces of translated content, for example checking only some specific parts of the translation, it also allows you to take a step back and look at the final product as a whole.

The review should be carried out by language experts who have not been involved in the process so far, to provide the greatest level of objectivity. This will ensure the content achieves the highest standard of linguistic quality and cultural consistency.

In addition to the above, there is also Localization Quality Assurance to consider. This looks at the bigger picture beyond simply the translated content and makes sure the necessary tools are in place to assess the layout, formatting, imagery and even UX functionality of content such as websites, video games, documents or software applications. It can also be used to assess the entire process end to end and find workflow improvements.

However, all of these systems and processes are working towards the same goal: providing high-quality translations and localized content for your audiences.

Linguistic Quality Assurance: An Essential Workflow Step

Certain industries, where translation quality can result in legal ramifications or even potential harm to an end user, cannot afford to not include quality assurance in their translation workflows.

Poor quality translations will reduce a company’s credibility and reputation and can often prove to be a costly mistake to fix. They can delay or even prevent a product’s access to the global markets resulting in lost business going to your competitors.

At LanguageWire we hold quality at the centre of everything we do for our clients and within our internal processes. You can learn more about our commitment to our quality policy here.

This article was originally published by LanguageWire Company (Verity Hartley)