Consistency - the solution


Among my clients are multinational corporations such as Siemens, Italtel, Cisco Systems, Alenia Sistemi (Finmeccanica), Sainco Tráfico (Grupo Abengoa), Bentley and Lamborghini (BMW AG Group), Opel/Vauxhall (Groupe PSA), General Motors; Honda, Caterpillar, Sécheron, ABB (Asea Brown Boveri); dynamic software houses such as Wordcraft International; and highly technological factory automation firms such as Fanuc and Mitsubishi Electric. Some final clients are: Mori Seiki, TetraPak, Nissan, Toyota, Ford, Seat, Fiat, Mitsubishi, Volvo, Flir,  CNH, Apple, HP, Fagor, Spiro International, Windy Boats and so on.

From the very beginning, I specialized in highly technical literature and e-learning as well as software localization. To handle the increasing workload and guarantee the best consistency ever, I've been using CAT tools since 1994. I chose to rely on Trados GmbH (as from 2005, SDL Trados), since its first Windows version, and my clients are pleased with it, as they know the importance and benefits of this value-added capital equipment investment.

The following is some basic explanation of the Computer-Assisted Translation  tools lingo. If you  are interested in this particular subject, you can, for example, browse this page or watch this video.

        bullet  CAT Tools
Exceptionally useful for technical translations, where internal and external document repetiton is high, CAT tools are the easiest way to reuse (leverage, as it is called now) existing materials. CAT means "Computer-Assisted Translation", referring not to machine translation, but to translation done by human translators with specialized software providing functions to increase workflow while providing better consistency, quality assurance, glossaries and other assistance.

          bullet  TM
TM (Translation Memory) tools are programs that store previous translations and, upon translating new texts, offer suggestions to the translator, based on material stored in a memory database.

          bullet  Memory database
In the context of TM, a memory database (also referred to as the translation memory) is the file or database where a tool stores previous translations, usually in aligned pairs of source and target language sentences.

          bullet  Terminology database
Terminology management tools store information in terminology databases (known as termbases). Almost all TM systems include terminology management databases, and use terminological information to improve the quality of fuzzy matches. A termbase allows for the systematic management of approved or verified terms and is a powerful tool for promoting consistency in terminology.

          bullet  Fuzzy matching
A technique used in computer-assisted translation as a special case of record linkage. It works with matches that may be less than 100% perfect when finding correspondences between segments of a text and entries in a database of previous translations.

          bullet  Bitext
In the field of translation studies a bitext is a merged document composed of both source- and target-language versions of a given text. Bitexts are generated by a piece of software called an alignment tool, or a bitext tool, which automatically aligns the original and translated versions of the same text. The tool generally matches these two texts sentence by sentence. A collection of bitexts is called a bitext database or a bilingual corpus, and can be consulted with a search tool.

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    • Technical translator, writer and e-Learning localizer. Specialized in automotive, telecom, engineering, electronic and hi-tech product and service literature and media.


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    • · English -> Italian
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