The Importance Of Proper Maintenance Of Translation Memory Databases

As a key feature of computer-aided translation(CAT),translation memory is a database designed for maximum content reuse and consistency in group projects to speed up the translation process with higher efficiency and quality.Therefore,it is increasingly and widely used in translation tasks.Although the benefits of translation memory are well understood,the importance of its maintenance is commonly overlooked;therefore,the main purpose of this paper is to provide supporting reasons and several improvement strategies for the proper maintenance of translation memory.This paper first gives a general introduction to the application of translation memory and its benefits in translation practices.Then,based on the examples drawn from the English-Chinese translation project of Dior's promotional documents,it exemplifies the negative impacts of using an unmaintained translation memory database,namely,misleading caused by wrong or inconsistent translation,inefficiency resulting from choosing between numerous versions of translation and wrongly segmented sentences,and limitation of translation.Targeting the negative effects,it then offers suggestions for the proper maintenance of translation memory databases,namely,constantly revising and updating the translation units,indicating the source documents for each sentence,setting up smaller translation memory databases categorized by the fields,and recruiting professional personnel to be fully in charge of the maintenance of every translation memory database.