There are several choices for organizing your TMs, and it is worth taking time to consider what is best for your situation. The central considerations are whether to use fewer and larger, or more and smaller TMs, and how to organize them thematically by, say, assignment, client, or subject matter (or a combination of these).

Concentrating your material in fewer, larger memories may produce more matches, but this should be balanced against factors such as an increased risk of data loss (for example, if a TM is accidentally deleted), possible confidentiality or terminology issues (such as when storing material from several clients in the same TM), and potentially slower searches (in the case of very big TMs).

An example (suggested by Jerzy Czopik, one of the technical reviewers of this book) is that of Microsoft and Apple terminology, where the same source segment may require a different translation depending on the version of the operating system. The word folder in English has had several different translations into Polish, depending on the Windows version. In this situation, putting all the content into a single TM with a mix of subjects and customers could cause problems further down the line.

The fact that you can use multiple TMs should also be taken into account, because it allows you simultaneously to use several TMs created for, say, particular clients or subject areas. Furthermore, the fact that you can control the update settings for each TM separately makes it easy to determine which of the active TMs will receive new content as you work.