Working with Language Variants

AnyTM allows for two ways of working with mismatching languages.

Working with multiple language-specific TMs

One way of working is to keep a separate TM for every specific source and target language. In that case, you would always use the TM with the matching languages as the main TM in your project, to which you add any new translations you create in those languages. In addition to this, you would use AnyTM to add one or more TMs in other languages as reference to the project, with the Update checkbox unchecked, to ensure that you only leverage from those TMs, but not update them with mismatching content.

Working with one multi-language-variant TM

If you are working with multiple variants of the same main language, either in the source or target language, you may prefer to only maintain one TM for every main source-target language combination, instead of having separate TMs for every specific language variant. In this case, you would add this TM as the main TM in your project and check the Update flag, regardless of which language variants the project is in.

Add any file-based TM

To add any file-based TM with mismatching languages to a project:

1. On the Translation Memory and Automated Translation page, click the Add > AnyTM: any file-based TM... menu item.
2. Select the TM you want to use. You can select any TM, regardless of whether its languages match the project languages. For example, the project languages are English (United Kingdom) > German (Switzerland). The selected TM is English (United Kingdom) > German (Germany). If you add the TM as the first in the list, you will see that the Update checkbox is checked by default. This will result in your TM being updated with content in different languages than the TM was originally created for. If this is not what you want, make sure to uncheck the Update checkbox.

If you now open a file from this project in the translation editor, you will see that matches from the TM are being found. You can of course assign a penalty to the TM with mismatching languages if you do not want any translations from non-matching TMs to be autoconfirmed.

Related topics

Reversing Language Directions

Translating Mixed-Source Language Documents