If purchase orders are sent, invoices are issued, and you believe that you are managing a healthy and meaningful business for everyone involved in what you do, there is still one key task that remains: translation memory management.

Project memories vs. Translation memories

In Wordbee Translator, there are two types of memories to maintain your database clean: project memories and translation memories.

A project memory is automatically created and filled as you start typing within a target segment. This is a convenience, no manual effort to go and create an empty TM on your own.

What will matter to a project manager the most (once a project is finished) is an up-to-date master memory (what we call translation memory in Wordbee Translator) that contains all key data regarding a domain, client, as you name and design it. What happens in a project stays in a project, yet a master memory will be your saviour when you receive a critical future project.

One Great Way to Easily Maintain Master Memories

Here is the scenario: You have a project TM that belongs to one single project and you believe that the content within this project TM might be very important for future work. Still, there might be certain content that is not 100% relevant to the domain/client for which you plan build a master TM.

If you would like to keep your translation memory fit and always ready for a long-distance business marathon, it is a very good idea to separate project memories from master TMs. Here is how:

Right within your project (which already saved and stored your project memory), you’ll find the consolidation option.

Remember, you can still do this periodically, let’s say once a week/month!

Don’t create trash, be selective. It is a wonderful idea to pre-filter your content before master TM consolidation.

You might want to exclude certain segments associated with certain categories. Two available categories here are “excluding texts with error status” and “excluding texts with red bookmarks”. Remember, errors and the colour of red doesn’t really suit the phrase “master memory”.

Conclusion

Translation memories (master memories) are vital. Throwing all your project memories into translation memories and displaying too many translation hits during the actual translation process, at the end of the end, only confuses your linguists. Maintain translation memories separately. While consolidating project memories into translation memories, use relevant filters to select the content you trust and find indispensable.