A Building Blocks Approach to Translation Memory

Traditional Translation Memory systems that find the best match between an SL input sentence and SL sentences in a database of previously translated sentences are not ideal. Studies in the cognitive processes underlying human translation reveal that translators very rarely process SL text at the level of the sentence. The units with which translators work are usually much smaller, i.e. word, syntactic unit, clause or group of meaningful words. A building blocks approach (a term borrowed from the theoretical framework discussed in Lange et al. (1997)), is advantageous in that it extracts fragments of text, from a traditional TM database, that more closely represent those with which a human translator works. The text fragments are combined with the intention of producing TL translations that are more accurate, thus requiring less post-editing on the part of the translator.