A translation memory (TM) is a database used to store translations as you translate in a program such as SDL Trados Studio. If the document that you are translating contains sentences or other discrete units of text (known as segments) that are the same as, or similar to those in the TM, SDL Trados Studio will signal that a match has been found, and offer you the opportunity to recycle and (if necessary) edit the content, thereby making the process of translating quicker and more efficient. This chapter shows you how to create a TM and select TMs to use when you open a document for translation. We start by discussing how to organize your document folders for maximum efficiency.
When you work with SDL Trados Studio to translate single documents as described in the following chapters, it is well worth taking the time to make an organized folder structure to store your files. For one thing, you will be creating more files than when you translate using only a program such as MS Word. Also, SDL Trados Studio will create some files automatically in the background. It is therefore essential that you know at all times where you are storing the files that you create, and where to find them when you need them.
Here, as an example, we have created a parent folder that will eventually contain all of the files used for this particular translation task. In the parent folder, we have created three subfolders to store our source files, target files, and TMs, as you can see in the following screenshot:
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to organize your material. The essential point is that you have an organized system that works for you. If you are working with a project rather than the Translate Single Document method referred to in this chapter, the folder structure is created automatically when you create the project. We will cover how to use SDL Trados Studio's project creation wizard later on in Chapter 7, Working with Projects.