What are the best practices for managing translation memory?

Navigating the plethora of TM tools can be daunting, but my approach is to align the choice with specific project needs, budget constraints, and personal preferences. I weigh factors like language and file type compatibility, user-friendliness, security features, and the availability of support. Leveraging my network for recommendations often provides invaluable insights, ensuring the tool not only meets Meta's rigorous standards but also supports our diverse and dynamic localization programs.

If you have multiple customers in the same field, make sure you have separate TMs for each, and have separate Project Definitions for each customer. You can still leverage your TMs from your other customers, but in the project definition apply a penalty to the TMs associated with other customers and set them to read only. There is another reason for doing this, namely to ensure that you do not give fuzzy match discounts to your customers based on work done for other customers. Similarly, the penalties also mean that while segments are propagated, they are not automatically confirmed, which can be useful for ensuring that you don't oversee divergent customer-specific terminology.

In order to optimize?your translation memories, it is essential to know how to maintain them. Understanding the use of filters, tags, meta tags, fields, and TM values, will greatly help you: ? maintain your translation memory by deleting all duplicates, unnecessary data, sensitive information, and more; ? extract a smaller TM from a bigger one, especially if you use a one-size-fits-all TM, which I do not personally recommend. ? extract terms that may be reused as termbases.

Maintaining consistency in the translation memory (TM) is crucial for ensuring the quality and coherence of translated materials. That means they should match the final version of your translation. Key terminology should be added to a glossary, which helps in keeping the language consistent across various documents and projects. This is especially important for specialized fields or when dealing with brand-specific language.