MT or TM – the difference is people

By Solveig Rose-Mollard
Translated by Colin Rae

If you’ve visited the Klein Wolf Peters website, you’ll know that we describe our company as a place where people generate content for people. No matter whether our role is that of project manager, editor, or translator, we practise what we preach. Right from our first contact with you, and whenever you have a special project for us, we’re keen to talk to you directly about your needs and your expectations, so we can decide together how to proceed. “And for us to make maximum use of our translation memory, it would be best if…” “Hang on a minute!” you think: “What did they just say? Translation memory? So what’s actually on offer is machine translation and artificial intelligence, and not a balanced, harmonious finished product crafted with a real person’s richness of expression after all?” Let me assure you, there’s no need to worry.

Chances are you’re already familiar with the term “machine translation”. Just visit the relevant page offered by a popular search engine, or that of a certain well-known MT provider, then paste in a sentence or even whole paragraphs, and a fraction of a second later it will spit out a workable translation in the language of your choice. Thanks to enormous bodies of reference texts, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, the results these sites produce are now a far cry from their non-sensical, word-for-word translation beginnings. What they can now generate is something that largely flows quite well. If all you want is to glean the gist of the original, machine translation is a fast and easy way to get it. But never forget that machine translation is prone to errors, some of them serious, and can even end up saying the opposite of what was originally written.

At Klein Wolf Peters, we go well beyond mere “understanding”. Our translations speak to your target audience, convey content, comply with your conventions, and dovetail seamlessly with your style. This is a job for human rather than machine translation. As a provider of professional translation services, we keep a close eye on technological developments in our industry. Choosing the right tools for the job at hand means we can give you the result you expect – natural-sounding copy that reads well – in the most effective way. One of these tools is computer-assisted translation with a translation memory (TM). This software stores everything our team translates for you – logically sorted into customer projects and subprojects, protected from unauthorised access and in accordance with all legal provisions. All team members who work on your projects have access to these resources, which ensures consistency of terminology and phrasing for you and us. For instance, say I’m translating the introduction to a text on a topic we’ve dealt with in the past: the software shows me how we worded it last time so that I can opt to use it again here if appropriate. And that’s regardless of whether it was me or one of my colleagues who did the previous translation. The result is copy that speaks with one voice – your voice – no matter who in our team is translating or reviewing it.

Incidentally, this goes beyond just 100 percent matches, as they’re known, where the text is the same word for word: the software also shows us partial matches and highlights any changes, so we can adapt the earlier translation to reflect the current text. This function also draws our attention to any cases of deviations from established terms, allowing us to follow up with you to make sure that these were indeed sanctioned changes. In this respect, our zeal for consistency can even help optimise your source text. And here’s another advantage: should you order a translation without realising that one of your colleagues or someone in another department has already sent it to us, our TM will notice that as well – and you can avoid unnecessary costs.

Finally, we always amend the translations in our TM based on your feedback and on any final versions you share with us, to ensure that all our future work will take your approved wording into account. That way, your voice is channelled into our tool ready to be echoed by our entire team.

MT and TM are terms similar enough to invite confusion, but they differ in one fundamental aspect: people. People are at the heart of everything we do at Klein Wolf Peters – and that applies just as much to you, our customers, as it does to us as language professionals.