Translation Memory Matching

Lilt allows users to upload Translation Memories (TM) to supplement its baseline Memory when providing translation suggestions through the interactive, adaptive engine. This article describes:

• How Lilt provides its suggestions
• TM Matching order of operations
• How TMs are used in Pretranslation
• Translating only with translation memory

How Lilt provides its suggestions

Lilt will automatically provide suggested translations the moment you select a segment in the CAT Editor. This suggestion is based on Lilt's baseline training data.

If you have uploaded a TM to the associated Memory, Lilt will scan the TM for segments that have similar words. If it finds segments with similar words and phrases that meet a 75% threshold (known as a Fuzzy Match), Lilt will display the TM's suggestion and describe it as such.

Lilt only shows one suggested phrase at a time. Users can open the Search Memory pane to view additional suggestions.

TM Matching order of operations

Lilt makes suggestions based on the following order of operations:

1. In-Context Exact Match, also known as an ICE Match (sometimes called a Guaranteed Match). Not only does the selected segment have the exact same words as a segment in the TM (an Exact Match), the segments before and after the selected segment are also identical as three consecutive segments in the TM. If there are multiple ICE Matches, the most recent is chosen.
2. Exact Matches. The selected segment has the exact same words as a segment in the TM. If there are multiple Exact Matches per a given source segment, the most recent is chosen. Note that Lilt does care about capitalization case sensitivity and punctuation differences.
3. Fuzzy Matches. The selected segment has a number of similar words and phrases as a segment in the TM (roughly 75%), but there are significant differences.
4. If no better matching exists, Lilt then defaults to its Machine Translation suggestion (MT).

If the Memory Search pane is open, Lilt will display all the suggestions it has available.

How TMs are used in Pretranslation

When running pretranslation on documents, Lilt will only populate target text for segments that are ICE or Exact Matches to the selected TM (unless the option to use Machine Translation is selected). Lilt will follow the same order of operations as above when encountering segments with multiple TM matches.

See this KB article on Pretranslation for details on Lilt and Pretranslation.

Translating only with translation memory

Some languages do not support MT translation, and in this case, it is possible to translate only with a translation memory. Translations in this situation rely solely on translation memory.