THE PERFECTMATCH TOOL

FOR UPDATING AND

CONSISTENCY IN A
COLLABORATIVE
TRANSLATION PROJECT.

PETREA Galina, MH. FIUM, 18.10.2017

 SYNOPSIS

The objectives for the present study

include:
The technical-linguistic aspect of CAT
The Eco-Translatology & Theory of
Situated Translation
The сognitive processes involved in CAT.
 A SURVEY
The responses of an online Questionnaire made by Helena
Blacafort and Tatiana Gornostay in which various translation
professionals have been interviewed concerning their
experience of use of CAT and MT tools in their work the
results obtained have been revelatory.
The Questionnaire included 41 items and 139 respondents
were involved.
The translation professionals from the translation industry
participating in the survey have been contacted through:
•mailing lists;
•thematic groups on LinkedIn;
•social networks Twitter, Facebook;
•professional forums Translators’ Cafes;
•freelance translators through personal contacts.
THE SURVEY
 PERFECTMATCH
The PerfectMatch tool among other ones within the Translation
Memory (TM) – represents the instrument among other family
software, insuring quality, consistency, rapidity, precision not only
within one translator’s individual share in a larger translation
project, but also consistency, unification, harmonization at
alignment within a holistic collaborative project.
The PerfectMatch concept would be explored within the present
work from the aspect of – the primary translation principle and
criterion – the Source Text ST  Target Text TT equivalence, as in
man-made translation vs machine made – Computer Assisted
Translation (CAT).
 QUOTE
Although “technical translation has traditionally been
regarded as the poor cousin of “real translation”, it has
been estimated that technical translation accounts for
some 90% of the world’s total translation output each
year, as María Fernández-Parra, mentions.
 CAT vs MT
While Computer Assisted Translation CAT, refers to the integration of
computers into the workplace, the Machine Translation – refers to fully
automating the translation process.
Thus a CAT tool might be started from scratch, blank and completed
progressively by the translator himself by manually inputting STs and
translating them, thus accumulating a Translation Memory:
a corpus of parallel texts distributed on different topics and
domains;
as well as
collects and manages a multitermbase (terminological base), rich
enough to further avail himself, use and complete new translation
tasks.
 TM

The “filling cabinet” or “extension of translator’s brain” as it was

metaphorically called and very illustratively represented by
Eagles, his definition looks like it follows:
 DATA COLLECTION
The difference between a Translation
Memory TM and a TermBase is that the
former contains source-target segments
at sentence levels (sentences,
paragraphs, titles), whereas the latter -
source-target segments at term level:
single-word or multi-word terms.
Term extraction is the task consisting in
the operation of identifying term
candidates in a given text with the
purpose of creating, enlarging updating
the termbase.
 TASKS PERFORMED BY CAT
Additional tasks performed by CAT tools are:
word-count, indicates the number of translated words and of
words to be translated;
statistics and analysis tasks compares the source text or
texts to the existing translation memories in order to provide
information to the translator such as the percentage of
repetitions in the source text, including full matches, fuzzy
(partial) matches and segments with no match (0% match).
Text-alignment is another process done during the CAT, the
process of breaking down the source and target text into
segments and matching each segment to its corresponding
target language segment. The translation sets a level of
required matching to be shown a threshold of sensitivity - not
less than 75% of similarity.
 TYPE OF TEXT PERSPECTIVE
Regarding the necessity of TM - it makes sense in
specialized translation to have such a collection of
sentential items because of the repetitive nature of
many technical and scientific texts. Moreover the
translator might create field-specific, project-specific
or client-specific TM.
Out of 139 participants in the above-mentioned
Questionnaire, only 23 are literary text translators,
among others there are technical text translators - 93,
legal text translators - 59, mass-media translators – 29.
 1. PRE-TRANSLATION PHASE
Pre-translation is the task performed by the CAT tool, prior to human
translation. The CAT tool automatically attempts to translate any
portions of the source text that have already been translated
previously, comparing the source text with all the material contained
in the TM and TermBase, proposing it to the user or inserting it in the
target text directly.
•Perfect or Exact Match occurs when a new source language segment
is completely identical including spelling, punctuation and inflections,
to the old segment found in the database (TM) .
•Full Matches occur when a new source segment differs from a stored
TM unit only in terms of so-called variable elements, which are
sometimes referred to as “placeables” or “named entities”. Variable
elements include numbers, dates, times, currencies, measurements,
and sometimes proper names. These elements typically require some
kind of special treatment in a text, conversion.
•Fuzzy Match occurs when an old and a new source language
segment are similar but not exactly identical. Even a very small
difference such as punctuation leads to a fuzzy match. The degree of
similarity in a fuzzy match can range from 1% to 99%
 100% Match – Repetitions - Context
Match
Trans Infopreneur a translation blog makes a difference between
100% Match – Repetitions - Context Match.
•Repetition - A segment that is repeated within the a document
being analyzed. It is not available in the TM. Repetitions (and no
matches) are the only types of matches that can be found when
analyzing the document against an empty translation memory.
•100% Match - A segment in the new document analyzed that is
identical to a segment in the TM (a TU) from a document that has
already previously been translated and confirmed in the TM.
•Context Match - To qualify as a context match, the TM segment
must be a 100% match for the document segment and both of
them must have been preceded by the same segment (in the TM
and the document). If there is no preceding segment, other
context information is stored, for example, the segment is a
document header.
CASE B
 2. HUMAN TRANSLATION PHASE
The degree of similarity (fuzziness) between the source text,
segments of it and the material stored in the TM and TermBase will
determine the volume of translation possible to be done in pre-translation
with CAT tools, the rest is translator’s task to edit, fill in left blanks.
Quality assurance tasks to be achieved:
Spell checks
Number and date checks, complying with conventions relating to the
decimal point and thousand separator for the given language
Omissions
Terminological consistency in the translation of terms
Adherence to project glossaries
Untranslatables
Capitalization check
Formatting check
Punctuation check
Incorrect or missing translations
Repetition check
 ECO TRANSLATION
Eco translation - a term that is supposedly borrowed from developmental
psychology fits perfectly in the case of CAT. Eco translatology has been
applied recently for this purpose with reference to the leading role of
translator and the principle of multi-dimensional transformation -
language, culture and communication transformation. All the elements
compose a whole eco-environment, in which the translator plays a key
role in selecting, making the right decision, adaptation so that to obtain a
high quality translation.
One of the concerns traced during the present study was the cognitive
aspect of distributive cognition and cognitive processes (memory,
decision making, inference, reasoning, learning), involved in the CAT.
Distributed cognition - according to many researchers means cognitive
processes that are distributed across the members of a social group.
Memory is treated as a socially distributed cognitive function: Durkheim,
asserts that memory could not even be coherently discussed as a
property of a single individual. Roberts considered that social
organization could be read as an architecture of cognition at the
community level. He characterized the cognitive properties of a society
(its memory capacity and ability to stock, manage and retrieve
information) by looking what information there is, where it is located and
how it can move in a society.
 CONSEQUENCES
Another important inference from cognitive
psychology and for instance from the theory of
Leo Vygotsky is the assumption that every high
level cognitive function appears twice, first as an
interpsychological process and then as an
intrapsychological process.
This hypothesis gives rise to the following
consequence in the macro-cultural context: the
patterns of activity that are repeatedly created
in cultural practices may lead to the
consolidation of functional assemblages, the
atrophy of agencies that are rarely used and the
hypertrophy of agencies that are frequently
employed. As a result what happens is either
individual or organizational learning or both of
them.
 THEORY OF SITUATED TRANSLATION
The Theory of Situated Translation assigns central
importance to the individual situational factors of the
translator and his working environment. Situated
Translation is based on the cognitive-scientific
paradigm of situated cognition, which claims that
humans and their environment form a cognitive
system, more precisely, a cognitive ecosystem,
meaning that human cognition is not isolated in the
human brain but emerges from the specific
relationship between humans and their environment
[Ralph Kruger p.4]
 THE COLOGNE MODEL OF
SITUATED TRANSLATOR
Kruger’s model is divided into two levels.
The lower level depicts the translation process as a sub-process of the
“process chain of specialized communication”. This process chain forms
the superordinate structure in which the translational ecosystem is
embedded.
The upper level of the model depicts the actual constituents of the
translational ecosystem: the situated translator and his working
environment. The relevant components of this working environment are
the translator’s cooperation partners, various social, physical and
psychological factors as well as different artefacts, assigned to specific
artefact groups.
The artefact group concerned with translation technology in a narrow
sense could also be called CAT tools. The artefacts listed in this group
are translation memory systems, terminology management systems,
alignment tools, machine translation (MT) systems and project
management (PM) components.
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CONCLUSIONS