Hi Marie, 

A TM can be very helpful if it's properly maintained and has all the right information, not only for providing TM matches, but to provide concordance and fragment matching as well.

In addition to the usefulness of a TM, literary translators can benefit from other Trados Studio features, such as AutoSuggest Dictionaries (generated from TMs), termbases and AutoText. All of these are AutoSuggest providers and can both help save time and maintain consistency.

To answer your question about recycling segments and generating fuzzy matches (look into fragment matches as well): yes, that's exactly what you can get from a good TM. If your alignment efforts are not paying off so far, or you don't want to invest the time needed to clean up the alignments, you can always try manually translating one of your novels to feed your TM, and then use the TM for future jobs. As the TM grows, it will become more and more useful.

Marie Maude Polychuck

Just to add a little interesting reading... this article from Rocío Serrano is worth a read:

https://vasoscomunicantes.ace-traductores.org/2020/09/11/traduccion-automatica-y-literatura-enemigas-intimas/

And maybe this one as it covers how to use paragraph segmentation to help with this kind of translation work:

https://multifarious.filkin.com/2013/01/10/translating-literature/

Absolutely. A CAT tool, and SDL Trados Studio for that matter, is the best friend and assistant for a literary translator. And no, "it does not limit the creativity" of the literary translator in any way, shape, or form. That reminds me of some writers who refused to use a "word processor" (that's how the software and the system were called back in the day) because of... (many whimsical reasons, I would guess). Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann wrote their monumental literary works using a typewriter, but that was many decades before the birth of the modern PC. García Márquez, at some point, started using a Mac computer to write his novels... But I'm digressing.

Just a reminder, a translation memory (TM) does not translate for you, it just suggests for you and above all, it helps you remember how you translated a particular sentence, idiom, or whatever quirkiness of the source language. Just try to reuse your translations by aligning SL and TL texts. Best of all, take advantage of SDL MultiTerm to manage terminology. SDL MultiTerm is the best terminology management system of all CAT tools in the market, in my view.

Great reads. Thanks for sharing, Paul.

Marie Maude Polychuck said:

I was hoping to streamline my process by incorporating this growing corpus into Trados.

Way to go. Once you get that corpus and those termbases you will never go back to any other way of doing translation work. I guarantee you that.

Thanks so much! I will definitely look into those features!

Thank you! I always love a good read :) 

Thank you! I am looking forward to that :) 

SDL's alignment tool is only one option, and definitely not the best one. Other aligners you could try include ABBYY Align, LF Aligner (sourceforge), TM-TOWN aligner, AlignFactory Light, HunAlign (github), and Stingray Document Aligner. Also, other CAT tools have their own aligners that might work better for you.

Thanks so much!