Moravia are the first adopters of the TM Repository.
The main problem with the TM repository so far was: “what is it, and what is it intended for?”
According to statistics, 80% of new software projects fail if there is no clear vision about the project. The TM Repository project has been put on hold for a certain period, but the company has resumed development now that there is such a vision.
Problem statements
TMs can be scattered in hundreds of tiny files.
Or, in a “big mama” type of approach, the TMs are managed by using filters and metadata. A project TM is a TM that only contains the segments (e.g. from a “big mama”) that are relevant to a specific project.
Including the reviewing process into the technology is essential. Some reviewers will refuse to use a translation environment to review a text (this has been solved by memoQ’s RTF columnar export).
TM contents need regular cleanup. What needs to be deleted/fixed: outdated entries, bad translations, “other” garbage.
In technical documentation, there is a lot of terminology that refers to concepts that get deprecated.
Cross-tool TMX transfer does not give good enough leverage. Attributes specified in one tool will often not be transferred to a different tool.
Context information: how can we transfer the context information (saved as hashes in Trados Studio TMs and as clear text in memoQ)? In short, we can’t. The hashing algorithm used in Idiom is patented. In other cases, it’s kept secret.
Features and workflows
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Single database with TMX import/export. At its current stage TM Repository can only receive TMX files.
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It accepts any sort of metadata (client, project number, dates, etc.), no matter which tool was used to create the TMX.
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The TM is extracted from TM Repository and can be modified in any translation tool. The TM then needs to get back into the TM Repository, which offers complex features for comparing the new TM to the current contents of the repository.
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You can import TMs containing one language pair and merge them into a multi-pair TM, then split it again in sub-pairs.
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Version control and rollbacks: entry history is included for every translation unit. If you make a mistake, you can always roll back to the previous version
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TM Repository is tool-agnostic. Every attribute is converted to an attribute system that is specified by the user for the TM Repository. Preconfigured mapping templates are available.
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Full-text (not fuzzy!) concordance search
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Search and replace in the repository
Next steps
- A beta version is available now
- A connector to memoQ Server is in the works. It will make import/exports from/to memoQ transparent through an integration API.
Specifications
Back-end database application with no direct connection to translation management systems (for now). Requires a dedicated server, as it’s resource-intensive.
In its current state, TM Repository will not allow you to upload a translatable project, run a fuzzy-match analysis, and extract the relevant translation units from the repository, regardless of the metadata. From my personal point of view this is a real show-stopper. I cannot see real potential in this product for a small LSP if it does not offer this kind of functionality.