'Fuzzy matching' may conjure up images of trying to pair angora sweater sets or reading subtitles without your glasses. To translators, it's the product of a computer-aided search for similar phrases or sentences. The globalization of industries across the board has made the demand for accurate translations a business imperative. "Fast, cost-effective translation has become mission-critical in the globalization of businesses," says Matthias Heyn, Vice President Asia-Pacific for TRADOS, the industry leader in translation tool technology or solution software. "For example, the product is ready to go but the documentation is late. If you look at software, it has a turnaround of one year or less; If you're stuck for three months because of late documentation you lose 1/3 or 1/4 or even your entire market to a competitor. It's becoming clearer that this timing has to be part of the strategic business decision making and it has to start at a very early point in the overall product generation." Understandably the IT industry has been most receptive to the need for this kind of implementation.

Going global
Based in Germany, TRADOS has 13 offices in ten different countries and provides translation expertise in 55 languages (and growing). Here in Japan, their Tokyo office provides an end-to-end translation solution spanning software, consulting, support, and training. Their products target companies or professional translators. "The number of documents that need translation is increasing rapidly, but the number of highly qualified technical translators is not catching up with the market," says Heyn. "We see it worldwide but especially here in Japan. Localization is the key to succeeding in a market--whether you're shipping product out of Japan or bringing product into the country. We were, in a sense, complemented into this market by clients who were doing business in Japan and Asia and needed translation solutions quickly."

Remembering translation memory
It's important to understand the difference between automatic translation and the sort of 'translation memory' product TRADOS is offering. Most professional translators quickly grow tired of repairing machine translation output. Equipped with a 32-bit translation memory, TRADOS' most popular product, Translator's Workbench, memorizes the translator's work. When words are translated for the first time, the software creates a translation memory from the words or segments of text and their corresponding translation. By compiling a linguistic database in the background, it automates redundant translation work and makes the already-translated text reusable. The software compares the current text with sentences and phrases from previous translations. If it identifies identical or similar source text, the match is displayed along with the memorized translation. The suggested text can be adopted, rejected, or edited by the user, who is generally a professional translator. Through the Internet or a corporate network, team members and anyone else authorized can gain access to each other's work and to the company translation database. This ensures consistency and makes the translation process more controllable.

Once a company has implemented the Translator's Workbench database, it can leverage legacy translations through another product, WinAlign. Translation material from previous projects can be aligned with new projects using similar terminology. WinAlign analyzes source and target language text to pinpoint sentence and paragraph pairs and then generates a file for reuse in Workbench. "Much of the terminology, corporate language, and technical terms stay the same from project to project," says Heyn. "It wastes time having to translate the same things again and again. An alignment program eliminates a lot of that repetition." Recycling this sort of terminology also makes for consistency in pamphlets, instruction books, corporate publications, etc. Both products integrate into Windows-based word processor programs allowing easy movement between word processing and translation memory.

Complementing the package is MultiTerm, an application designed as a research tool for translators and terminologists. Explains Heyn, "Using MultiTerm, translators can standardize in-house terminology by creating and also managing company dictionaries that everybody in the company can access. This is important for consistency and standardization of terms." Flexible features allow users to define fields specifically for their needs, including index fields, attributes, text, system fields, or graphics.

Localizing everywhere
The globalization of the Net has made the demand for accurate translation an even faster race. Corporate homepages reach out to a mix of cultures and languages. May 1999 saw the release of TRADOS TagEditor, a translation solution for HTML/SGML files and other tagged formats that works with the entire product suite along with S-Tagger, a conversion program for translating FrameMaker and Interleaf documents that retains and protects the formatting of the original file.

The TRADOS translation solution supports everything from basic desktop applications to extremely complex systems used to generate high volumes of documentation. There's even a product for presentations: T-Window for PowerPoint works as an interface linking Workbench and PowerPoint. It provides an editing field for translators to work in directly during presentations.

During the past five years translation technology has evolved from a standalone tool into an integral element of corporate IT. With ever decreasing product cycles, those fuzzy matches need to get crystal clear very quickly. "Japanese companies, compared to European or American companies, let's say, didn't implement technology quite as quickly. Now things are speeding up," says Heyn. "They are recognizing the need to implement these systems and the potential for Japan for translation tools should make them our second largest market after Europe."

TRADOS' top ten clients

* Institutions of the European Union
* Berlitz GlobalNet
* PeopleSoft
* Bowne Global Solutions
* SAP & Partners
* Microsoft & Partners
* ITP
* L&H Mendez
* Lionbridge Technologies
* Volkswagen Audi Group

TRADOS Japan K.K.
Akasaka Wing Bldg.4F, 6-6-15 Akasaka, Minato-Ku
107-0052 Tokyo
http://www.trados.com

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