Organize your translation resources

Smartcat offers numerous translation resources, or, linguistic assets, to help ensure quality and consistency in your translations.

Smartcat supports multilingual translation memories, which makes creating and managing translation memories easy!

To create a translation memory, you need to follow these steps:

1. Click on Linguistic Assets from your Smartcat workspace:

2. Make sure you have chosen Translation Memories from the drop-down menu:

3. Select “Create TM.”

Quick note : One of the less obvious advantages of multilingual TMs is that you can create a new TM where the source language is one of the target languages of the original TM. This can be convenient if you work in mixed language pairs.

4. Fill in the fields:

5. You can upload external translation memories in the following file formats: TMX, SDLTM or XLSX file. Or, you can also add new terms one-by-one, or as you go along.

Once you have created several TMs, your list might look like this:

You can now use the same approach to organize your terminology databases, which are called glossaries in Smartcat.

To do this, go to Linguistic Assets → Glossaries. You can create a glossary using the same client and project group labels:

Here we have replicated the same structure as the one for translation memories.

Just like TMs, glossaries are multilingual in Smartcat. Unlike TMs, though, they don’t have a strictly set source language — you can use a glossary in projects where any two of its languages are present as the source or the target.

With both TMs and glossaries, you can go with a high level organization structure with one resource per customer, or do something similar to what we described above. Our suggestion is to mix both on a case by case basis:

• For clients with a complex corporate structure, it is a good idea to match that structure with the resources.

• For smaller clients, a single terminology database will take less time to configure and will be easier to maintain.

If you want to go hardcore, you can create a new TM for every project, while making sure to properly choose the client and project group for each. Smartcat will still fetch these “micro-resources” for subsequent projects, as described in the next section.

Note: While creating a new TM with each project might help with data segregation, it might also create a lot of TM duplication that could reduce translator productivity.

Now, whenever you create a project and choose a client/project group, Smartcat will automatically fetch the translation memories and glossaries associated with them:

This ensures that you leverage every possible resource related to said client and project group, eliminates many potential project creation errors that lead to unnecessary work, and just saves time.

Organizing your data properly from the get-go increases the productivity of your project managers, who will no longer spend time looking for matching resources. This will also make things easier for your translation team, who will benefit from optimized TM leveraging and consistent terminology. Ultimately, this will increase your translation throughput, profit, and quality alike.

This article was created in partnership with Braahmam .