Keep your translation memory clean

The Do not permit as reference material command is extremely useful in order to avoid cluttering your translation memories up with unwanted segments.

The following example shows a typical case whereby a less than optimum layout (using hard line breaks to create a text block) leads to segmentation issues in the translation memory:

DEU: (a) Steuereinheit ist je (b) nach Einbausituation (c) an der Möbelwand (d) zu positionieren. 

ESP: (a) La unidad de control (b) debe posicionarse en la pared del mueble (c) en función (d) de su situación de montaje.

As a result of the line breaks, the German sentence is split into four segments. As the syntactical order of the translated sentence in Spanish is different, the consequence is that there is no correspondence between the four resulting segments in Spanish and the original four segments in German. To include these four segment pairs in the translation memory would invariably lead to pretranslation or fuzzy match errors in the future.

This is where the "Do not permit as reference material" command comes into play. As can be seen in the above screenshot, in order to exclude a segment from being used as reference material, click the right mouse button when in the corresponding segment in the target language window and select Do not permit as reference material.

Using this command has the following advantages:

• Segments marked in this way are not used for pretranslation or as reference material.
• Segments marked in this way count as translated. 
• Segments marked in this way can be filtered (see screenshot) and viewed separately (e.g., as part of the revision process).

Thank you for reading, we hope you like this shortcut. Please let us know what you think and stay tuned for our next helpful Transit Tips & Tricks post.