DO YOU SPEAK L10N?

the concise CAT dictionary

—
What’s it all about

I wrote this glossary (initially on my blog) mostly for my own

delight, but also to help peers who are trying to cut their way
through the translation industry jargon. I encourage you to
take everything here with a generous pinch of salt. I did my
best to stay tool-agnostic and included the least possible
amount of memoQ jargon, but I consciously did not include
jargon from any other tools. I simply feel I have neither the
knowledge nor the authority to do that, and anyways, thata-
way be dragons.

Gábor Ugray
memoQ founder

the concise CAT dictionary | 3

{A}
[activation]
A short communication between an installed program and
the manufacturer’s website. The program sends your serial
number and a few anonymous details about your computer.
The website checks that you own a license or that you are
just starting a free trial, and returns a code to authorize the
program to run on your computer.
» See also CAL license

[alignment]
Often, when you get a document to translate, you receive a
set of previously translated documents along with it, or you
can find matching pages on websites. Those may contain a

a
whole lot of translations you could use either as TM match-
es or through concordancing. Problem is, the TM needs
segments, and you have whole documents. Alignment means
splitting source and target documents into segments, and al-
gorithmically finding out which target segment corresponds
to which source segment. Not a straightforward thing to do!
Advanced CAT tools have a function to automate the bulk of
the work and help you correct the rest.
» See also LiveAlign

[analysis]
Before you accept a job, you need to know how much text
there is to translate. But you already have TMs with past
translations, so you also want to know how much new text
there is, and how many fuzzy or exact matches you can ex-
pect. That’s what analysis does it compares your text against
your TMs and corpora, and gives you a neat breakdown ex-
pressed in segment, word and character counts.Analysis is
sometimes used interchangeably with statistics, which has
absolutely no fancy scientific meaning in this context.

a
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[API; application programming interface]
A nerdy term to say that a program allows other programs to
use its functions, just as if a human was clicking its buttons. If
a program has no API, then it’s impossible to integrate it with
other systems, and humans end up with tendonitis from lots
of completely unnecessary clicking. It is particularly impor-
tant to make sure a cloud-based tool you’re considering has
an API. If it does not, you may get locked in, with no easy way
to retrieve your data if you want to switch.

[auto save on server]

When you’re working in a memoQ online project, your trans-
lations are initially saved only on your computer. You can
choose to synchronize a few times a day, but if you enable
auto save, your translations are sent to the server immedi-
ately, without holding you up. This way others can see your
work *almost* as if you were editing a Google doc in real time.
What better way to stay consistent?

a
 [automatic concordance]
If you want to see how an expression has been translated,
concordance gives you exactly that. But a good CAT tool can
do more by looking at the source segment it can find the
parts that occur in a lot of other segments, and point you to
them. That’s effectively saying, “Hey! These phrases seem to
be all over the place, it’s probably a good idea to concordance
them right now!” And if you’re very lucky, those phrases also
occur as entire source segments, and the TM or corpus will
give you their translation right away.

There are over 200 artificial lan-

guages that have been invented
for books, television, and movies.

a
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[AutoPick]
I don’t know about you, but I hate to type numbers as I’m
translating, and I also hate to lose the flow to select, copy
and paste something over from the source. In addition to
numbers, source segments also contain other things that
can go straight into your translation tags, non-translatables,
terms. If you just press and release Ctrl (in memoQ), AutoPick
highlights all the special entities in your source,lets you cycle
through them with the arrow keys, and insert the next one
with a single keystroke. It also re-formats numbers to match
your target language’s conventions.

[auto-propagation]
Almost every text you translate has repetitions segments
that occur multiple times. With some technical texts these
may even make up the majority. One responsibility of TMs
is to pick these up, but CAT tools can do even better. If you
enable auto-propagation, then as soon as you confirm a seg-
ment, the tool immediately populates all the other occurrenc-
es in the document and marks them as confirmed.

a
 [auto-translatables]
Most texts (particularly technical, legal and financial) have
recurring entities that follow some pattern. Think of a date
05/27/1978, to be “translated” as 27.5.1978. Auto-translation
rules allow you to create regular expressions that recognize
and transform such patterns in an incredibly flexible way.

The word  Mamihlapinatapai  is

derived from the  Yaghan lan-
guage of Tierra del Fuego, listed
in  The Guinness Book of World
Records  as the “most succinct
word”, and is considered one of
the hardest words to translate. It
allegedly refers to “a look shared
by two people, each wishing that
the other would initiate some-
thing that they both desire but
which neither wants to begin.”

a
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{B}
[BiDi]
Short for bidirectional text, i.e., the right-to-left scripts used to
write languages like Arabic, Hebrew or Farsi. It’s bidirectional
because numbers and some proper names in Latin letters
are written from the left within the overall right-to-left text
flow.

[bilingual Excel]
» See multilingual Excel
 [bilingual RTF]
A specially formatted Word document that contains a trans-
lation’s source and target segments, and often also com-
ments and other information. This way, a translator can share
work in progress with a client or a domain expert who has
no CAT tool, only a word processor. CAT tools, in turn, can
read an edited bilingual RTF with changes and comments,
and bring the updates back into the translation environment.
Some old formats relied on hidden text and were very easy to
ruin with a single misplaced edit. These days it’s more com-
mon to see a table with three or more columns.

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{C}
[CAL license]
CAL is short for “concurrent access license.” While individual
licenses allow a single person to use a program, an organiza-
tion can purchase CAL licenses instead, which can be handed
out to any end user on an on-demand basis. The limitation is
how many people can use the tool at the same time; it doesn’t
matter who they are or where they work from.

[CAT; Computer Aided Translation]

Software that helps translators and reviewers work more ef-
ficiently and in good quality, even if the work involves many
people working simultaneously on the same large text. Some-
times the name is reduced to “TM tool” because TMs were
the first function that CAT tools focused on. Jost Zetzsche
prefers translation environment tools, or TEnT; I tend to agree.
Translation Management System (TMS) is often used
synonymously because the border, really, is quite blurry.

[CCJK]
Stands for the three East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese
and Korean. There are two Cs because Chinese can be writ-
ten either with simplified characters (PRC and Singapore) or
traditional ones (Hong Kong and Taiwan).

[check out]
When a translator or reviewer checks out an online project
in memoQ, the tool downloads the assigned documents and
sets up a correctly configured working environment. This
eliminates saving email attachments and going through an
error-prone series of steps, saving time and ensuring all pro-
ject participants work with the right resources and settings.

the concise CAT dictionary | 13

[CMS; content management system]
Software used to edit, organize and publish large amounts of
content. A CMS typically tracks who is responsible for what
content, whether it is approved or obsolete, what the content
applies to, and much more. Often, CMSes break down con-
tent into smaller chunks, which are reused in several relat-
ed documents. CMSes are important because an incredible
amount of text that gets translated comes from them, typi-
cally as small chunks of XML and often in the DITA format.

[comment]
In a CAT tool you can mark entire documents, source or tar-
get segments, or just a short part within a segment. You can
add a remark, or use the function to simply highlight some-
thing. This way you can communicate with other translators,
reviewers or even clients, or just bookmark something for
yourself to return to later. You can keep comments private,
or choose to export them as part of the finished translation.
 [concordance]
A function of translation memories and LiveDocs corpora
that allows you to search for a word or expression, retrieving
all translated segments where it occurs. This is nothing short
of a small wonder, allowing you to “Google” existing transla-
tions. memoQ also highlights the expression’s most probable
translation within the target segments, just like Linguee, but
from your own private data.

[confirmed]
» See segment status

[context ID]
Usually a short machine-readable text that identifies a string
that belongs to a specific place in an app or a game. It’s cru-
cial to distinguish between, say, “Open” on a label (translated
into German as “Offen”) or on a button (translated as “Öff-
nen”). The TM stores the ID and returns a context match if
the same text occurs with the same ID later.

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 CONCORDANCE

ANNO 1230 It’s in passages

on pages...
Where does “misericordia”
occur in the Bible?

ANNO 2017 I found these segments:

Where does
“liner regression” occur in my
translation memory? & How
was it translated?
TRANSLATION
MEMORY
 CONCORDANCE GIVES YOU

All sentences where an

expression occurred

+Metadata: when they were

translated, by whom, for
wich client,...

YOU CAN
Search for words or expressions

Use wildcards

bat* finds bat and batman

*bat finds bat and acrobat
*bat* finds bat, acrobat, batman and
sabbatical

Search source text or translations

CONCORDANCE IS AWESOME
Because it lets you “Google” past translations. You don’t need to
research the same expression again
[context match]
» See TM match types

[CSV; comma-separated values]

A seemingly simple text-based format that stores several
values in each line, separated by commas. It’s still widely used
to exchange glossaries, and sometimes even for translata-
ble content. In spite of its apparent simplicity it’s very easy to
mess up; the most common problem is using the wrong code
page instead of Unicode.

[custom fields]
» See metadata

The language with the largest

alphabet in the world belongs to
the Cambodian language Khmer
and is 74 characters long. The
shortest alphabet is 12 charac-
ters long, and belongs to Rotokas.
 {D} [deliver]
The translator or reviewer’s action to signal that they are fin-
ished with their task. In memoQ, delivery is not a symbolic
step, as it usually triggers a series of actions like automated
QA checks or emailing the finished translation back to the
end client.

[dictation]
Technology that allows you dictate text, instead of typing it
on a keyboard. Dictation is preferred by a minority of trans-
lators; they, however, report a productivity boost of 50% or
more over typists.

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[dicto]
A neologism derived from typo. It means an error by the dic-
tation software. Unlike typos, which are nonsensical on an
elementary level, dictos are insidious because they are valid
phrases that sound like what was intended, but mean some-
thing completely different, like an immature middle school
joke.

[DITA]
Short for Document Information Typing Architecture, DITA
is exactly as unsexy as it sounds, but tremendously useful.
It is an open standard that defines how to structure and
reuse content in CMS systems. The format is based on
XML, and if your CAT tool supports it, you can deal with a
huge share of the content coming from several different
CMSes.
 [DTP; desktop publishing]
DTP tools include the likes of FrameMaker and InDesign, used
to produce professionally typeset printed documents. In the
industry DTP typically means an activity after translation and
review. Translated text looks really bad in the original format
unless you adjust the typesetting to accommodate longer
paragraphs, different special characters, or even a complete
left/right directional swap.

Every two weeks, another lan-

guage dies. Or, perhaps, a dialect.
By the next century nearly half
of the roughly 7000 languages
spoken on Earth will likely disap-
pear, as communities abandon
native tongues in favor of Eng-
lish, Mandarin, or Spanish.

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{E}
[edit distance]
A number that expresses how different one text is from an-
other, usually derived from the number of insertions, deletions
and swaps needed to get from here to there. While similar TM
matches are qualified by fuzzy match rates, edit distance is
sometimes used to measure the extent of a reviewer’s changes.

[ELM license]
» See CAL license

[exact match]
» See TM match types

[export]
» See file format filter
 {F}
[file format filter]
One key benefit of CAT tools is that you always translate in
the same familiar editor, regardless of the file format your
text came in. That means CAT tools must somehow extract
the text from all the different file formats. The component
that does this is called a file format filter it “filters” text from
all the other stuff in the file. Bringing the text into the CAT
tool is called importing a file; retrieving the translation in the
original format is called exporting it.
Every filter comes with its own options that affect how it
works (“Do you want to extract the hidden text from this
Word file?”), and for some formats, notably XML, these set-
tings make an enormous difference.

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 IMPORT • EXPORT
FILTERS
HTML
DOC XLSX XML MIF
RTF JSON ODT IDML

DITA PPTX RESX

All these file formats OMG!

How am I supposed to translate them??!

Some weird
file

Don’t worry!
I have a FILTER
for all of them!

TRANSLATE BEAUTIFUL
ME! CLEAN
TEXT
When you IMPORT a file, you use a FILTER in your
translation tool to extract the SOURCE TEXT.

Ok-kay... But I have an Excel sheet and I’m

supposed to ignore pink cells!

Easy. Filters know all about file formats

and you can tell them what to do through
IMPORT OPTIONS.

WHEN YOU’RE DONE TRANSLATING

Some weird
YOUR
EXPORT TRANSLATION file*

*looks just like the original, but

has your translations in it

Files also have a lot of These produce

important stuff that’s <TAGS>
NOT text. when you import
a file
formatting, images,
references, ...
[find/replace listing]
In memoQ, the Find function has an option that puts all oc-
currences on a separate list, instead of walking through them
one by one from the pop-up window. The outcome is the find/
replace listing, where you can review each segment comfort-
ably and decide where to replace and where to leave as is.

[font substitution]
Many file formats, particularly from DTP tools, tend to use
fonts that look really good, but cannot draw a lot of special
characters. If your target language happens to have a lot of
these, the translated file will look ugly, or skip letters outright.
Font substitution is a function of file format filters that tweaks
the file, replacing the original font with one that has the right
glyphs for your target language.
 [fragment assembly]
If there is no exact or fuzzy match for a segment in your TMs
or corpora, a lot of the segment’s parts may still have a match
from a term base, non-translatables or auto-translatables.
Fragment assembly takes all of these and just replaces them
with their target equivalents, giving you a patchwork segment
that might still take a lot less work to brush up than translat-
ing it from scratch.

[fuzzy]
First impressions are correct here this is one of the fuzzi-
est words in the entire industry jargon. Initially a fuzzy match
was used in contrast to an exact match from a TM you get
a translation that is fully legit, except it’s the translation of
something more or less different from your current source
segment. Just how different is expressed by the fuzzy match
rate. Eventually fuzzy matching was also extended to termi-
nology, where it can be pretty useful if your language is in the
habit of changing letters in the middle of words.
» See also TM match types

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{G}
[global find & replace]
In the olden days, the find function only worked if you first
opened a document. Global find & replace searches through
all documents in your project a massive difference if, for
instance, your job entails hundreds of tiny XML files from a
CMS.

[glossary]
» See term base

Java, one of the most popular

language for programming, was
originally called Oak and de-
signed for interactive TV.
 {H} [highlight]
» See comment

[homogeneity]
A garden-variety analysis tells you how much of your text has
fuzzy or exact matches from your existing TMs and corpora.
But even if you start with an empty TM, as you progress in
a document, you will start getting matches from your own
new translations! The homogeneity function quantifies these
“internal” matches as part of the analysis, going beyond the
mere detection of repetitions.

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[horizontal layout]
A two-column grid layout where you see source on the left
and target on the right has engulfed CAT tools like a flash
flood washing away a hapless creekside camper’s stock of
ABC soup. But many translators still prefer to see their target
text below the source. The horizontal layout option reshuffles
the active segment’s dominos, so source and target show up
one below the other.

Hungarian is a very productive

language: one standard noun
could, in theory, generate tens of
thousands of forms via various
forms of compounding. Hungar-
ians therefore like to brag about
their impossibly long words like
megszentségteleníthetetlensé-
geitekért - that ultimately have
absolutely no use in an everyday
conversation.
 {I} [import]
» See file format filter

[internationalization; #i18n]
Localizing a product entails more than just translation it in-
cludes things like showing dates in the right format, displaying
temperatures in Celsius vs. Fahrenheit, writing first name last
or vice versa, and the like. It requires extra effort to enable a
product to do all this; that effort is called internationalization.

[interoperability]
The ability of CAT tools to understand each other’s formats
and APIs, and to support standard formats well, so that peo-
ple using software from different manufacturers can work
together without drama, tears and major tragedies.

the concise CAT dictionary | 31

{J}
[join segments]
» See segments

{K}
[KWIC; keyword in context]
A layout for concordance results where the search term is
in the middle, with preceding and following text on both sides,
row after row.
 {L} [leverage]
To “leverage” past translations is fancy talk for the tool gives
me what I already translated, I don’t need to do it again. “Lev-
erage” as a noun is fancy talk for the extent that happens if a
tool promises to enhance leverage, you should expect to type
fewer new characters while translating the same text.

[light resources]
This is memoQ lingo for things like non-translatables,
segmentation rules, and a lot more. As opposed to heavy
resources, which mean TMs, LiveDocs corpora and Muses,
light resource have much less data. But while in many other
tools they are “settings,” in memoQ they are resources they
have a name; they can be exported and imported; you can re-
use them in different projects; and they can be shared online
through memoQ server.

the concise CAT dictionary | 33

[linguist]
This term is probably the single biggest crime of the transla-
tion industry against proper English usage. For every educat-
ed person, a linguist means someone like Noam Chomsky,
William Labov, Daniel Everett, or Arrival’s Amy Adams a sci-
entist studying language in the mind, or language in society.
In the translation industry, “linguist” is sloppy shorthand for
translator or reviewer.

[LiveAlign]
memoQ’s approach to alignment, where you simply throw
a bag of source and target documents at the tool, and start
translating. The tool aligns fist the documents, then their seg-
ments, and indexes them in the background so they immedi-
ately give you lookup results in the editor. There will inevitably
be errors, but you only spend time fixing those that actually
give you matches.
 [LiveDocs corpus]
memoQ’s alternative to TMs. While a TM holds a homoge-
nous mass of translated segments in no particular order, a
LiveDocs corpus preserves entire translated documents, but
gives you the same kinds of matches. If you want to check
the context of a past translation, you can jump directly to
the full document from the translation editor. TMs have one
big advantage they only store every translation once. If your
content has a lot of repetitions, LiveDocs can become cum-
bersome.

[localization; #l10n]
Sometimes used as a synonym for translation, localization
entails a bit more it includes showing dates in the right for-
mat, money in the right currency, and the like. In order to lo-
calize a product, it must first enable doing all this, which is
called internationalization.

the concise CAT dictionary | 35

[localization engineer]
A person who knows the ins and outs of CAT tools, nasty file
formats, regular expressions and other arcana. Many are
not shy to code either. They make sure that before a complex
project is launched, all the content is imported correctly, the
segmentation is right, untouchable segments are locked,
and a lot more. Without localization engineers, complex pro-
jects would never be finished on time and budget, and trans-
lators would tear out their hair and move to a farm to raise
pigs.

[lock segments in different languages]

One thing that no CAT tool copes with well is mixed languag-
es in a source document. In memoQ there is a well-hidden
feature in the mundane function to lock segments. This
inconspicuous option will algorithmically detect each seg-
ment’s language, and if it’s different from your document’s
source language, lock it.
 [locked]
In practically every CAT tool segments have a status like
new, pre-translated or confirmed. Independently from this,
segments can also be locked, which makes them read-only.
If a localization engineer has populated some segments
with translations approved (and mandated) by the client, then
locking makes sure these do not get changed accidentally.
Locked segments are also easy to exclude from the word
count during analysis.

IKEA kitchen accessories are

named after fishes, mushrooms
and descriptive words, while chil-
dren’s products after Mammals,
birds and descriptive words.

the concise CAT dictionary | 37

[LQA; linguistic quality assurance]
In addition to merely reviewing and correcting translations,
human reviewers can also mark every error they find, indicat-
ing the error’s type from a pre-defined list; the error’s severity;
and possibly other details. This information can later be eval-
uated to assess quality objectively. LQA is the function that
facilitates this in CAT tools.

[LSC]
» See automatic concordance

[LSP; language service provider]

A business that sells translation services to its clients.

The size of the language technol-

ogy industry in 2016 is estimated
at €29 billion.
 {M}
[MT; machine translation]
A computer system that transforms a sequence of characters
into a different sequence of characters that is recognizable,
to a human, as text in another language, with relevant clues
about the information in the original text. MT systems come in
three main flavors. In rules-based (RBMT) systems, humans
hand-craft grammatical rules. In statistical (SMT), a statistical
system is trained on large amounts of human-translated text.
Neural (NMT) systems are also trained on human-translated
data, but they need a lot more computation, and have been
reported to produce superior results.
Tools like Google MT are generic. In the translation industry
it is more common to train specialized systems that do really
well on a single type of content. This needs MT experts and a
body of relevant, high-quality human translations for the train-
ing data. »

the concise CAT dictionary | 39

 One way in which MT is used is human post-editing the MT
system produces a rough translation that is often incorrect
and ungrammatical, but is cheaper/faster to fix by humans
than to translate from scratch. Another way is interactive MT,
where the human translator receives suggestions from the
MT system while she is translating text in a CAT tool.

[machine translation post-editing]

One way to utilize machine translation, where the MT sys-
tem produces a rough “translation” that is often incorrect and
ungrammatical, and is then post-edited by a human to re-
move major errors and improve fluency.

[master TM]
» See working, master and reference TM

[match rate]
» See TM match types
 [MatchPatch]
A memoQ function that improves fuzzy matches from a
TM or a corpus by replacing the phrases that are different,
relying on term base matches, auto-translatables and
non-translatables.

[metadata; metainformation]
Additional details about a piece of stored information, like
“who translated this, when, and for what client” in the case of
a translation unit, or “what source did this come from and
did the client approve it” for a term base entry. CAT tools
usually support a set of standard fields like the ones above,
but also allow users to define their own custom fields and
categories for more detail.

[mobile or floating license]

» See CAL license

the concise CAT dictionary | 41

[monolingual review]
A function where you export your translation into its original
format, make changes outside the CAT tool, and can then
bring those changes back into the translation environment
from the edited target-language file. It is particularly useful
when you need to send your work for client review but even a
Word-based bilingual file is “too complicated.”

Why do you want to bring such changes back into the CAT
tool? To make sure your TM contains only final, approved
translations. Otherwise you may end up with trash in, trash
out.

[MQXLIFF]
An XLIFF file than contains additional, non-standard infor-
mation specific to memoQ, such as segment statuses, QA
warnings, LQA errors, comments etc.
 [multilingual Excel]
An Excel file with source text, translations, comments and
other information. Sometimes it’s a small, innocuous file with
two columns for source and target text, but we have reliable
eyewitness reports of files out there with 50,000 rows and 25
columns for different languages. Such monstrous files often
come from computer games.

[MultiTrans XML]
The XML-based format used by SDL MultiTrans to export
and import terminology. Although not an official standard, it
is widely used for terminology exchange even between com-
pletely different systems.

[Muse]
One of the resources powering predictive typing in memoQ. A
Muse is built by analyzing existing TMs and corpora, with the aim
of extracting words and phrases that correspond to each other
in the two languages. When you translate a new source segment,
the Muse looks at the phrases in it and gives you a list of sugges-
tions that might be the translation of a phrase in the source text.

the concise CAT dictionary | 43

{N}
[NMT; neural machine translation]
» See machine translation

[non-breaking space]
A special character that looks like a normal space but acts
differently because it doesn’t allow a line break to intervene
between the word on its left and right. A non-breaking space
is a must before a colon in French (you don’t want “ ” to start a
line), and between a number and a unit of measurement (you
don’t want “cm” to start a line either). In most word proces-
sors you can type it by pressing Ctrl+Space.
 [non-printing characters]
Spaces, non-breaking spaces, tabs, and newlines. Also, a few
other invisible characters used in bidirectional text. The point
is, they are all blanks and you normally don’t see them. Just
like Word, CAT tools have an option to show them, so that you
don’t accidentally type two spaces, or a normal space where a
non-breaking one is warranted.

[non-translatables]
Somewhat similar to terms, except that they are identical in
all languages. Most often they are brand names that are to
be left alone.

Pisan zapra, a Malay noun trans-

lates as the time needed to eat
a banana.

the concise CAT dictionary | 45

{O}
[OCR; optical character recognition]
Software whose original function is to turn an image (e.g., a
scanned page) into editable text, usually a Word document.
In translation OCR is used to turn documents in the one-way
PDF format into a Word document that you can edit or import
into a CAT tool.

[online project]
A memoQ project that stores documents in a server, allowing
multiple people to simultaneously translate and review them,
working together in real time. Online projects also make it
really simple to assign work because they eliminate sending
files around in email, and they prevent trivial errors because
they make sure everyone in the project uses the right settings
and resources.
 [online TM]
A translation memory shared through a server or in the cloud.
They allow organizations to store their translations central-
ly (and always find them when they are needed). They also
make sure that translators working together in real time on
different parts of a project get to see each other’s translations
instantly, ensuring their work will be consistent.

[on-the-fly filter]
A function present in all advanced CAT tools (though usually
called differently) that allows you to filter the segments of the
document you’re working in. It is “find” on steroids you can
quickly skim segments that contain a particular word or ex-
pression, and make changes if you changed you mind about a
translation. It’s also useful to eliminate, say, segments that are
already confirmed so you can just focus on what needs work.

the concise CAT dictionary | 47

{P}
[PDF]
Portable document format by its maiden name, it is meant
to make sure a document looks exactly the same no matter
where you view or print it. The price of that consistency is that
it’s extremely hard (nigh-impossible) to change the text inside
it. In other words, it’s a one-way format, which makes it one
of the biggest nuisances for the translation industry. Apart
from a few innovative solutions like TransPDF, your best bet
is to convert a PDF into a Word file with an OCR tool, then
translate that. Or, if you have the chance, to get the source
(InDesign, FrameMaker or similar DTP file) from your client
and work on that.
 [PEMT; post-edited machine translation]
» See machine translation post-editing

[penalty]
Some translations are to be trusted less than others. They
may be too old, coming from the wrong translator, or applica-
ble to a different client or domain. A penalty means reducing
the translation’s natural match rate so it gets ranked lower
than others.

[perpetual license]
A license that allows you to use a piece of software you have
purchased forever. Perpetual licenses typically belong to a
specific version of the software to make sure the developer
stays in business, it needs to finance its work by charging an
upgrade fee for new versions.

the concise CAT dictionary | 49

[plugin]
A small module in a larger piece of software that performs a
specific task. The point, usually, is that anyone can develop a
plugin without the need to involve the main software’s devel-
oper. A typical example in CAT tools is machine translation
plugins the providers of the machine translation make their
service available through plugins for the CAT tools used by
translators, LSPs or companies. Whatever the purpose, you
can create plugins if the CAT tool’s developer opened up a
part of their application by creating and publishing an SDK.

[populate number-only segments]

Quite often a source document has lots of segments that all
contain only numbers – think financial reports. Numbers are
funny. They don’t need translation in the traditional sense, but
they also cannot go straight into the translated text the target
language’s conventions for decimal separators and the like
are different. This function processesall the segments with
numbers in one go, adjusting their format along the way.
 [predictive typing]
One of CAT tools’ most sexy functions with the least sexy
name. Predictive typing makes you both faster (by eliminat-
ing keystrokes) and more consistent (by offering the right
things to type). It looks at the characters that you have typed
so far and offers a list of continuations from the current seg-
ment’s term base matches, auto-translatables, non-translat-
ables, Muse hints and other such sources.

[pre-translated]
» See segment status and pre-translation

[pre-translation]
A function that processes every segment in a document and
automatically inserts the best translation from the project’s
TMs and corpora.

the concise CAT dictionary | 51

 PRE-TRANSLATION
m m..
hm .
Can you translate this file by
tomorrow?
by tomorrow?

Say yes! Most of it is the same as last week’s

file! I remember those segments.

TRANSLATION
MEMORY

LATER THAT DAY...

“Bla bla bla” “Bla bla bla”
Got that! Got that!
Translation: [...] Translation: [...]

“Bla bla bla” “Bla bla bla”

Got that! Got that!
Translation: [...] Translation: [...]

this is taking waay too long if we go one

segment at a time!!!
 COME ON IN!!!
I HAVE A HAT TRICK CALLED
PRE-TRANSLATION
PRE-TRANSLATION

A single click?
1 Put documents in hat
On a hat?
2 Click pre-translate
3 Check documents

If a segment has a fuzzy

or exact match, it is now
inserted. Everywhere!

You can do this...even for hundreds of documents

for 10 segments IT’S FAST

or 10 thousand
YOUR TEXT AFTER
PRE-TRANSLATION Each segment’s status
Yodda 101% shows if it was pre-trans-
Bla Bla 100% lated

Badaboom -- You can see

Dada 12 78% the match rate

Hoopla 100% DON’T FORGET TO

SOURCE TARGET S TA T U S FIX FUZZY MATCHES!
[preview]
A screen area in your CAT tool that shows the document in its
original format, or a close approximation. A premise of CAT
tools is to rip text to segments and let you translate these in
the same efficient environment, regardless of the original file
format. But one thing is lost through this visual context. The
solution to this self-inflicted pain is the preview, which mag-
icks visual context right back into your environment.

[Project home]
The screen in memoQ where you can add or remove docu-
ments to translate, pick TMs, term bases, Muses and other
resources, and fiddle with your working environment in count-
less other ways, whenever you have an urge to procrastinate.

[project management system]

Software that keeps track of jobs, prices, customers, vendors,
deadlines, invoices, and a host of other things that you need
to run a translation business or department.
 [project templates]
If you get recurring or at least similar translation jobs (and
you do), you are forced to do the same things over and over
again pick the right TMs, term bases, light resources, settings,
people etc., and also perform the same actions like analysis,
pre-translation and the like. Project templates define rules for
all of these and a lot more, so you don’t make embarrassing
mistakes, don’t get tendonitis from incessant clicking, and
have a fighting chance to stay sane in the midst of it all. Also,
project templates allow you to reuse the work of experts like
localization engineers and make it a lot simpler for new hires
to get up to speed.

[pseudo-translation]
Translation is the fun part, but if you’re dealing with complex
file formats from esoteric systems, you need to make sure
your work will also make it back to the original system at the
end and not crash your client’s multimillion-dollar flagship
app right before the deadline. Pseudo-translation allows you
to test the whole process without actually translating an-
ything. It replaces source text with funny characters, words
spelled backwards, and made-up stuff to inflate strings.

the concise CAT dictionary | 55

[PTA; post-translation analysis]
PTA for short, it is similar to analysis, but is performed once
the translation is finished, not up front. Every large text will
yield a lot of “internal” TMmatches, both fuzzy and exact.
When two or more translators work together, there’s no way
to say in advance who will translate a segment from scratch,
and who will get a match because someone else was there
first. memoQ keeps track of this in its online projects, and
gives a precise and fair breakdown when all the work is done.
Incidentally, the numbers in the pre-translation analysis
match very closely those from homogeneity. The difference
is that PTA’s breakdown shows who got how many of the in-
ternal matches that homogeneity predicted at the start.

Nine languages don’t have words

for colour - they only differenti-
ate between black and white.
 {Q}
[QA; quality assurance; automatic QA]
Machines cannot even come close to humans in crafting a
message that resonates, but humans are really bad at getting
numbers and other boring and repetitive things right. Quality
assurance checks come to the rescue they verify that you got
your numbers right, that you didn’t type two spaces, that you
used MegaCorp Ltd’s official terminology, that you translat-
ed the same thing the same way throughout the text, that you
didn’t forget a mission-critical tag, and a lot more. And if the
dumb machine didn’t get it right, you always have the option
to ignore (suppress) individual QA warnings.

the concise CAT dictionary | 57

{R}
[reference TM]
» See working, master and reference TM

[regular expressions; regex]

Even texts written by humans are full of patterns that have
well-defined moving parts. Think dates Number(1-12)/Num-
ber(1-31)/Number(four digits) is a date in the US. For Ger-
man, you have the same numbers in there, you just need to
rearrange them and use dots instead. Regular expressions
are a super counter-intuitive but super-useful way to describe
exactly these kinds of patterns. No wonder CAT tools sup-
port them across the board, from defining file format filters
through auto-translatables to find/replace. You can get
half a localization engineer’s career just out of knowing
your regex.
 [rejected]
» See segment status

[repetition]
Any segment that occurs at least twice in your source text
is a repetition. They are a delight because usually you need
to translate the same thing only once. That’s how repetitions
gave rise to auto-propagation and exact matches. And for
the cases where the same thing must be translated different-
ly, you have context IDs to differentiate.

[RTL; right-to-left]
» See BiDi

If you want to be an astronaut,

you have to learn Russian.

the concise CAT dictionary | 59

{S}
SDK; software development kit]
A set of tools and documentation that allows developers to
build their own module to work together with a different piece
of software. SDKs are what allows third parties to develop
plugins for CAT tools, for instance.

[segment]
When we translate text, we almost always proceed sentence
by sentence. If you try to get to the bottom of it, however,
nobody really knows what a sentence precisely is. Also, when
you translate a single word in a bullet-point list, is that a sen-
tence? CAT tools decided to sidestep this can of worms alto-
gether, so we speak about segments instead.
Generally (though not always), a segment is the essential unit
of translation you proceed segment by segment in the editor,
and you store the translation of segments in the TM. Your
TM and corpus matches also refer to the segment you are
translating at the moment.
Segments are born with the active cooperation of regular
expressions, in a special incarnation called segmentation
rules. As all regex, they look gibberish to the uninitiated eye,
but they basically elaborate a single theme “If you find sen-
tence-final punctuation like a period followed by one or more
spaces followed by a capital letter, start a new segment right
there. Except if the last word before the period is a known ab-
breviation.” Segmentation normally happens quietly, behind
the scenes, when your CAT tool’s file format filter imports a
source document.
No matter how elaborate, segmentation rules will inevitably
get it wrong from time to time. To help get around this, CAT
tools have a function to join neighboring segments, and to
split a single segment into two.

the concise CAT dictionary | 61

[segment status]
From the moment you import a document into your CAT
tool all through the steps of translation, review, client review,
proofreading after a good night’s sleep, and additional review
by your pet, up to the point of exporting it for delivery to your
client, the text lives in the form of segments. In this form,
there’s a whole lot to know about segments beside the text
itself does the target come from a TM, or from you? Have
you confirmed it already? Was it rejected by a reviewer? Is it
halfway edited but not quite finished yet? That is the kind of
information that you can see in the form of colors and icons
within the translation environment. For several years after
they arrived, my friends from Mars were convinced transla-
tors were in the business of turning empty (grey) segments
into confirmed (green) ones, and they thought this was a ter-
ribly appealing job. By now they know they were wrong, but
they still think the job is awesome.

[segmentation]
» See segment
 [simultaneous translation and review]
A function of online collaborative CAT tools that allows sev-
eral people to edit the same document together in real time.
You can think of this as Google Docs on steroids, customized
for the two-column, source-and-target world of translation.

SMA;
support & maintenance agreement
While a license agreement entitles you to use a piece of soft-
ware, the SMA that usually goes along with it grants you ac-
cess to support from a human and to new versions of the
software. Normally, perpetual licenses have a one-off fee;
SMA, in contrast, is charged on an annual basis.

[SMT; statistical machine translation]

» See machine translation

the concise CAT dictionary | 63

 SEGMENTATION

Yodda, Yabada? Hoolla, ragga filmwork etc. Dada

A paragraph can be a lot of text.

You want to focus on shorter chunks:

SENTENCES SEGMENTS

PRE-TRANSLATION
WHY THE WEIRD NAME?
COMPUTER
what is a
“sentence” even? DUNNO

PROFESSOR

DUNNO

Let’s just split text whenever I see .!? followed by a

CAPITAL letter That will be a segment
 WELL IT’S A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED

etc. ca.
ABBREVIATIONS
Dr. Dec.

NUMBERS ‘stop! 2 to go!

GERMAN All those Capitalized Nouns...

Don’t worry!

1 You can add new abbreviations

2 You can split & join segments if I mess up
3 You can tweak segmentation rules using

REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
[split segment]
» See segment

[SRX; Segmentation Rules eXchange]

An XML-based standard that allows different CAT tools to
read each other’s segmentation rules.

[subsegment leverage]
This is a strong contender for the industry’s most fuzzy word,
right there after fuzzy itself. When a CAT tool vendor uses it,
they basically want to say, “We’re doing something extremely
advanced and useful here.” In prosaic terms it means lookup
results and suggestions (aka leverage) that refer to a short-
er bit of the source segment. In all earnestness, often the
machinery that generates such matches really is pretty ad-
vanced, extrapolating knowledge from past translations in
ways that are far from obvious.

[statistics]
» See analysis
 [string]
In developer-talk, a string is a sequence of characters. When
you translate the user interface of a software application or a
game, all the chunks of text that appear in different places are
called “strings.” Typically, a string shows up as a single seg-
ment, and it has an associated context ID to disambiguate it.

[structural tags]
» See tags

[synchronize]
When you work in a memoQ online project, you have the
option not to save every translated segment in the server
immediately, but instead gather a lot of changes locally, and
exchange news with the server in one go. That action is called
synchronizing the project.

the concise CAT dictionary | 67

{T}
[table RTF]
» See bilingual RTF

[tag error]
Some inline tags are optional maybe that bold formatting in
the source text is not needed in your translation at all. Others,
however, are mission-critical if they represent N in the sen-
tence “You have N enemies left”, then if you omit the tag, the
translated game will crash and the outrage of gamers will put
your client out of business. To avoid such an outcome, the QA
module of CAT tools gives you a tag error right in the editor,
and won’t let you deliveryour translation until you fix it.
 [tag insertion mode]
Tags can be a real nuisance as you translate you need to
think about where they must go, you need special shortcuts
to insert them, and generally, they throw you out of the flow.
So in memoQ you can just focus on translating a segment’s
text first, then activate tag insertion mode and sprinkle your
target segment with tags in the right places.

[tag soup]
An unfortunate but all too frequent situation when a docu-
ment that you have just imported is chock full of tags that
are unexpected, pointless, or both. This most often happens
with Word documents that an OCR tool produced from a PDF
because it wanted to make sure everything is shown exactly
in the right place, down to a hundredth of a millimeter. You
can make things better by tweaking the OCR tool’s settings,
running a cleanup macro like Dave Turner’s CodeZapper, or
pestering your CAT tool’s developers to do something about
it. Only the first two have been conclusively shown to work.

the concise CAT dictionary | 69

[tags]
The content we need to translate consists mostly of text – but
not exclusively. One oddity is formatting changes how do you
represent a change of text color in the middle of a sentence?
The other oddity is a consequence of structured content, where
text is intertwined with markup like hyperlinks, cross-referenc-
es, or placeholders that will be substituted with, say, a number
when a piece of software runs. CAT tools cope with all this by
introducing tags symbols inside your segments that act like
a character in the editor, but look completely different. These
creatures are called inline or internal tags.
Then you have formats like XML or HTML that have tags wo-
ven into their own DNA. Some of these tags define structure
(“this is a headword”, “this is a caption”), always enclosing text
from the outside. These are called structural or external tags,
and should never show up in your segments. They only do if
the XML filter was not configured properly before the import.
You can fix that by hiring a good localization engineer.
The analysis output of well-behaved CAT tools has a sepa-
rate section that shows how many tags the text contains in
addition to good old-fashioned characters. This is important,
because tags can be a lot of work and really slow you down
as you translate.
 [TB]
» See term base

[TBX; TermBase eXchange]

An XML-based standard that allows CAT tools and other soft-
ware to exchange terminology.

[TC match]
A bit of a schizophrenic creature that cannot completely
make up its mind whether it’s a match rate or a segment sta-
tus. It rears its head in the complicated scenario when you
need to translate a source segment that contains tracked
changes, which you need to reproduce in the translation too.
A TC match is basically an exact match for the original form
of the source segment, pretending those tracked changes
were never put in there.
» See also track changes

the concise CAT dictionary | 71

[TEP; translation-editing-proofreading]
A widely used workflow that involves a translator and two dif-
ferent people subsequently reviewing her work, with the aim
of ensuring a high-quality translation, and giving feedback for
the translator to improve.

[term base]
A “database” or a component of CAT tools that allows users
to store important words/expressions and their equivalents. It
saves the hassle of researching the same term twice. It also
helps translators adhere to terminology mandated by their
clients, or at least stay consistent with themselves. In fact, it’s
indispensable for consistency if different people are translat-
ing the same large text simultaneously, collaborating online
from different locations.
Often used interchangeably with glossary, but they’re not
quite the same. A glossary is usually just a word list in two
languages, while term bases have structure and metadata
too.
 [term extraction]
A function of advanced CAT tools that looks at new source
text or a body of existing translations and extracts important
words and expressions. The output typically contains a lot of
“false positives,” but it allows a translator to research impor-
tant terms before starting to translate, include them in a term
base, and make sure they are then translated both correctly
and consistently.

[terminology database]
» See term base

[TM; translation memory]

The idea that initially gave rise to commercial translation
technology. Why translate the same sentence twice? The
TM is a “database” of segments and their translations. TMs
quickly evolved to give a hint also for segments that are
only similar (see TM match types), to allow concordance
searches, and to support subsegment leverage.

the concise CAT dictionary | 73

[TM match types]
Translation memories are big bags full of source segments
and their translations. When a new segment comes along,
CAT tools rack these bags for segments that were translated
before, and return these as matches. If the same sentence is
there in the bag, that’s an exact match, whose match rate is
100%. It can get even better if there’s a translation of not only
the same segment, but the same segment from the exact
same context, that’s a context match (aka “ICE” for in-con-
text exact). If the best there is is the translation of something
similar but not identical, that’s a fuzzy match with a match
rate below 100%. Often, high fuzzies are distinguished these
matches only differ in punctuation, capitalization or numbers,
and are therefore easier to fix.

Trepverter is the Yiddish way to

refer to a witty riposte or come-
back you think of only when it is
too late to use. Literally, “stair-
case words.”
 [TM-driven segmentation]
An advanced function of memoQ that dynamically splits
or joins segments during pre-translation to get better TM
matches. It’s a simple idea. What if a translator joined two
segments before storing the translation in the TM, and now
the same two segments show up again? By recognizing this
on the spot, the two segments can be joined in the current
document too for a perfect match, without human interven-
tion.

[TMS; translation management system]

Software that helps you manage translations and organize
resources. Re manage, think “these 1500 files must be trans-
lated into 25 languages, with 6 translators and 2 reviewers
working in parallel for each, making sure that nobody over-
rides approved translations from the past, and ready by next
Monday, with real-time visibility into the project’s progress
until then.” Re organize, think “I must find the right translation
memories and term bases from among the 2000 resources
I have around for various clients and language pairs.”

the concise CAT dictionary | 75

 TERMINOLOGY

1 That feeling when...

I know I researched
this before...

2 Yes! It’s right there in your terminology database

Is there anything else

I’m forgetting?

3 No need to ask!
Your glossaries are
I’ve highlighted all these
your most valuable
other terms for you
ASSET already!
 A TERM BASE IS WAY MORE THAN AN EXCEL
SHEET!

1 METADATA
Just a fancy way of saying:
For each term, you know which client it is for, where you found
it, etc.

2 SPEED
CAT tools have auto-complete. If you’ve stored a term, you
never need to type it out again.

3 SUGGESTIONS
No need to remember and search.
Your CAT tool finds and highlights every term in the sentence
you are translating.

4 VALUE
You can share it with your customer. They will love it and hire
you again!
[TMX; Translation Memory eXchange]
An XML-based format to, well, exchange translation memo-
ries. The adoption of this standard was a crucial step in the
industry towards interoperability, and at this point virtually
all tools support it.

[track changes]
Many regulated industries (like pharma) are required by law
to track every change they make to crucial documents, such
as the usage instructions and side effects of a medicament.
Not only that, but when they sell to multiple markets, they
must reproduce all these changes in translated materials too.
As a translator or LSP, the only way to achieve this without
losing your sanity and/or getting sued out of your profits
is if your CAT tool has special functions to both cope with
change-tracked documents and preserve the benefits of
TMs, term bases, QA and everything else.
» See also TC match
 [translation unit]
In a CAT tool, you translate documents segment by seg-
ment. Once you store the translation of a source segment
in your TM, the two together, plus some metadata like “who
translated this and when,” are bundled up and transmogrified
into a translation unit.

[trash in, trash out]

Imagine you store a nonsense translation in your TM. When
you receive an updated document, pre-translation picks it up
as a perfect match, and you don’t even get to see it. If you train
an MT engine with this data, it will produce nonsense trans-
lations. Once trash gets into the system, it perpetuates itself.
How do you avoid that? Through QA, through TEP, through
separating working and master TMs, and other similar efforts.
All of which are only possible if you use a CAT tool that allows
you centralize your resources, define the right processes, and
eliminate error-prone manual steps.

[two-column Excel]
» See multilingual Excel

the concise CAT dictionary | 79

{U}
[Unicode]
According to Wikipedia, Unicode is a computing industry
standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and
handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing sys-
tems. According to me, Unicode is the best thing that has
happened since sliced bread. It means if you write a text with
your own language’s special characters, that text can be read
by people anywhere in the world, using any gadget with a CPU
and a display. Even (usually) in Excel. Nonetheless, to prove
that our world is not the best of all possible worlds, you must
keep in mind that while Unicode doesn’t support Klingon, it
does have a character for the handgun emoji.

[UTF-8]
» See Unicode
 {V} [vendor]
In our industry, a person or a business that offers translation
services to other persons or businesses.

[view]
Since CAT tools are apparently great fans of deconstructiv-
ism and start their day by tearing text into chunks called seg-
ments, you might as well max this out by slicing and dicing the
living daylight out of those poor segments. As in “I have just
turned this User Guide into 1300 segments and pre-trans-
lated them. Now give me those segments that have no TM
match, occur at least twice, and have the words ‘squinting
squirrels’ in them. Also, show me each segment only once,
and order them alphabetically.” That is the kind of thing that
views allow you to do.

the concise CAT dictionary | 81

 WHAT IS
A TRANSLATION
MEMORY?

1 SENTENCES KEEP REPEATING

a few pages later

or a few months later

You don’t want to translate

2 them differently

You don’t want to translate

them twice

The translation memory remembers everything you

3 translate

TRANSLATION
MEMORY
 4 THE NEXT TIME

H e ll o ! TRANSLATION
MEMORY

BUT WAIT IT
GETS BETTER
The translation memory also gives you
sentences that are only similar FUZZY
and shows you all occurrences of a MATCHES
particular expression

CONCORDANCE
{W}
[web editor]
A component of CAT tools that allows translators and re-
viewers in an online project to work from a browser, without
installing software on their own computer. A web editor is to
traditional desktop tools as Google Docs is to Word, except
advanced CAT tools offer both options (even within the same
project) and don’t force you to choose between two incom-
patible companies.

[word count]
» See analysis
 [working, master and reference TM]
Keeping stuff organized is an age-old challenge. If you don’t
get it right, you end up with trash in, trash out. One way to
stay on top of data within a translation project is to desig-
nate one TM as the master (translations coming from there
get precedence over others); another one as the working TM
(new, as-yet unrevised translations get stored there, keeping
the master pristine); and the rest as reference (to fill in the
gaps that the master does not cover).

According to Urban Dictionary,

“Going there was a complete
WOMBAT” should be understood
as reference to wasted money,
brains and time.

the concise CAT dictionary | 85

{X}
[XLIFF]
Short for XML Localization Interchange File Format, a stand-
ard maintained by OASIS. In practice, it is a file format that al-
lows translatable text to be passed between tools in a source/
target, bilingual form.

[XML; eXtensible Markup Language]

An extremely versatile format for storing structured informa-
tion in files that are readable by machines and not complete-
ly unreadable by humans. A tremendous amount of content
that gets translated comes from XML files, particularly if the
content’s source is a CMS system. You generally don’t need
to understand the dirty details unless you are a localization
engineer, in which case you are a wizard who knows all about
file format filters and don’t need this glossary anyway.
 [X-translate]
So you’re half done translating a file, with tons of comments
in there and segments in all imaginable statuses. At this point
your client calls you and says, “Hey, our editors have been
busy, we have a revised source file, we actually need you
translate that instead of the one from last week.” If your CAT
tool has X-translate, this is not a problem. The function com-
pares the original source document with the updated source
document, going segment by segment, and recreates your
work, including comments, ignored QA warnings, segment
statuses and all the rest. Whatever changed in the source text
is left empty, so you can catch up with the changes and con-
tinue where you left off.

The letters “ough” can be pro-

nounced 9 different ways in
English.

the concise CAT dictionary | 87

SOURCE: www.jealousmarkup.xyz/texts/cat-tool-glossary
EDITOR: Ágnes Gazsó
DESIGN AND PRODUCTION: 823 studio kft. & Gelbert ECO Print Kft.
© Gábor Ugray

a
the concise CAT dictionary | 3