The usefulness of a TM changes over time. When you change a translation memory (TM) or you add a TM to a TM sequence, you can also affect the usefulness of the TMs. Here are a few tips to make best use of your TMs.
Sometimes authors insert breaks for appearance — to format the text rather than to mark the end of a sentence. Do not use these breaks to mark end of segments. For example, usually it is best to specify that soft breaks are inline.
For example, in Studio, when you configure file type rules for HTML, specify that <br> is an inline tag, not a structure tag.
When handling HTML files, SDLX treated the <br> tag as a segment break tag. Later products, such as Studio, by default treat the <br> tag as an internal tag. This difference is reflected in the segmentation used to build the translation memories. If your goal is to maintain leverage when you use SDLX TMs, change the file type settings in Studio so that the <br> tag is a structure tag. However, note that if you do not need to maintain leverage with SDLX TMs, it is usually best to make the <br> tag an inline tag.
For many companies, TMs contain some segments that are out of date. This is because the language that a company uses changes as the market focus, authors, style guides, and the products themselves, all change.
One sensible approach is to apply a filter based on the Last used on field, so that translators use only those TUs that have been used in the last two years. If you have large TMs, you could also usefully reduce their size by archiving out TUs that have not been used for some time.
Usually you should use different TMs for each language style, for example one TM for marketing collateral and another for technical documentation. If you are translating software, have one TM for documentation and another for the UI. Scope your TMs in advance.
Use these TMs in sequence. Penalize the lower priority TMs to ensure that their translations will be manually validated.
Do not confirm translation of an incomplete segment.
The most important QA check you can do on TMs is the spelling check. Do a separate check on the target segments.
Do a QA check on the translation of numbers.