Every translator that doesn’t dedicate him/herself to literature will know that with time, little by little everything will sound the same.
And we are right in that often what we translate looks very much like what was translated before. This reaches a peak when we translate web pages or digital content, because most of them are just copy-pasted material from other pages.
To accelerate, and facilitate the translating process, there are many types of programs called “translation memories”. As their names indicate, these programs are capable of remembering what they have translated before and therefore re-typing is not necessary. They can also separate from the text anything that isn’t needed, like format codes, text marks, HTML code, etc… leaving only text that is segmented by phrases.
The market benchmark for these types of products is the brand SDL Trados, as a matter of fact it establishes the international standard. However, before attempting to work with such a powerful tool, we can begin with a much more affordable tool, OmegaT.
OmegaT is an open source program, which means it’s free. That’s why it’s ideal for a first time encounter. It includes an extensive user’s guide, and if you still have doubts, there is an infinite amount of tutorials on the internet. It possesses the most common and needed functions, such as: connection with automatic translators, TMX index creators, code error revision, etc…
It can be downloaded from here.
Once familiarized with the memory translating process, we can move forward to the next step: learning how to manage a translating project with several collaborators.