State of the Art in Translation Memory Technology

Commercial Translation Memory systems (TM) have been available on the market for over two decades now. They have become the major language technology to support the translation and localization industries. The following paper will provide an overview of the state of the art in TM technology, explaining the major concepts and looking at recent trends in both commercial systems and research. The paper will start with a short overview of the history of TM systems and a description of their main components and types. It will then discuss the relation between TM and machine translation (MT) as well as ways of integrating the two types of translation technologies. After taking a closer look at data exchange standards relevant to TM environments the focus of the paper then shifts towards approaches to enhance the retrieval performance of TM systems looking at both non-linguistic and linguistic approaches.