Developing the Capabilities of MetaTexis Translation Memory Software and evaluating it in translating various texts from English into Persian

Abstract

Translation Memory (TM) is a way of collecting, storing and reusing translations. It is a computer tool with the aim of providing facilities to reuse the existing translations. In its simplest form it contains a database in which translator can store previous translations for future use and easy search. As the raw output of automatic Machine Translation (MT) systems are not very reliable in most areas, in recent years there seems to be an increasing tendency among the translators towards using computer assisted tools like TMs. In this study we tried to localize a TM system called MetaTexis to be applicable for translation from English into Persian. To examine the potential of this TM system, the required adjustments on the system were made and the performance of the system was evaluated through an experiment using five different text types, including literary, law, political, religious and technical texts. The results of the experiment show that this TM system works well on technical texts, while the highest rate of translation errors belongs to the literary texts. The total accuracy of the system performance for the English and Persian language pair achieved 90.78 percent which is encouraging for the pair.