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Poll: Which is the largest TM you've ever worked with?
Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
ProZ.com Staff
ProZ.com Staff
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May 16, 2007

This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Which is the largest TM you've ever worked with?".

This poll was originally submitted by ryancolm

View the poll here

A forum topic will appear each time a new poll is run. For more information,
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Which is the largest TM you've ever worked with?".

This poll was originally submitted by ryancolm

View the poll here

A forum topic will appear each time a new poll is run. For more information, see: http://proz.com/topic/33629
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Aurora Humarán (X)
Aurora Humarán (X)  Identity Verified
Argentina
Local time: 01:43
English to Spanish
+ ...
Ok, I will ask (think what you may about this non-geek :-))) May 16, 2007

Should I know?

Auch! (your tomatoes!)

ps: I replied: N/A (i.e. information not available)


 
John Cutler
John Cutler  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 05:43
Spanish to English
+ ...
Thought I'd be in the lonely minority. May 16, 2007

I also replied N/A thinking I'd be in some miniscule minority. At this point, we seem to be the majority.

I like the variety of the quick polls. Some are silly, some practical and others educational. I'm sort of hoping, in spite of my N/A answer, that I'm going to learn something in this one


 
Nesrin
Nesrin  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 04:43
English to Arabic
+ ...
Same here, Aurora! May 16, 2007

If this is something we should know, please somebody explain why.

I replied "Other" though (I thought N/A applies more to people who don't use TM)

[Edited at 2007-05-16 17:29]


 
Steven Capsuto
Steven Capsuto  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 00:43
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
+ ...
Neat question May 16, 2007

When I had a staff position at a translation agency, I worked with some big TMs though I don't remember how big.

My largest TMs as a freelancer are probably around 40,000 segments each. (I'm not at home just now, so I can't check.)

[Edited at 2007-05-16 22:55]


 
Riccardo Schiaffino
Riccardo Schiaffino  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 22:43
Member (2003)
English to Italian
+ ...
500,000+ May 16, 2007

Several hundred thousand segments in Trados, when we were still working in the translation department of a big software company.

Now that we have our own company, I think that the largest memories we are handling are under 100,000 segments.

The largest translation memory I heard of (from the Trados support personnel) was over 2,000,000 TU. Apparently it worked well.


 
lexical
lexical  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 05:43
Portuguese to English
A call to ryancolm... May 16, 2007

I've asked this sort of question before and got myself chastised by the moderators - but what is the point of this poll? Would ryancolm please tell us?

I know these Quick Polls are supposed to be light-hearted and many are amusing and fun, I agree) but what are we supposed to do with the information that comes out of this?

If you can see any point to this, I would dearly like you to share it with those of us who are mystified. I, for one, have an extensive library of T
... See more
I've asked this sort of question before and got myself chastised by the moderators - but what is the point of this poll? Would ryancolm please tell us?

I know these Quick Polls are supposed to be light-hearted and many are amusing and fun, I agree) but what are we supposed to do with the information that comes out of this?

If you can see any point to this, I would dearly like you to share it with those of us who are mystified. I, for one, have an extensive library of TMs and haven't the faintest idea (or any interest in knowing) how big they are.
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neilmac
neilmac
Spain
Local time: 05:43
Spanish to English
+ ...
I answered "what's a TM" May 16, 2007

... but I know it stands for translation memory and is something to do with Trados. The people I know that use it swear by it as the industry standard, but tell me it takes time to learn how to use, which I simply do not have. I hear that Wordfast is cheaper and just as good as well as compatible, but the same applies, I am usually just to busy to download, install and learn how to use these things... at least up till now.
From what I can see, users of these things are translating huge am
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... but I know it stands for translation memory and is something to do with Trados. The people I know that use it swear by it as the industry standard, but tell me it takes time to learn how to use, which I simply do not have. I hear that Wordfast is cheaper and just as good as well as compatible, but the same applies, I am usually just to busy to download, install and learn how to use these things... at least up till now.
From what I can see, users of these things are translating huge amounts of text, so are probably making quite a bit more cash than I do, although I do manage to keep my head above water... at least so far.
What I do know is that once I outsourced some work, software strings, which the translator used some kind of translation program on (I usually do them manually), and the result was an unusable mess full of errors and strange symbols.
I'd like to find out more about how these things work, but will need to wait until high summer, the "quiet season" here in Spain, before I can even think about trying them out hands on...
BTW, doesn't N/A stand for "Not Applicable" ?

[Edited at 2007-05-16 19:23]
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Mark Nathan
Mark Nathan  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 05:43
Member (2002)
French to English
+ ...
Is big better? May 16, 2007

I am fairly new to TMs, but recently used a large TM and found that the usually very helpful concordance feature was much less so, because it returned so many hits every time I did a search, and I then spent rather too much time looking through them all, and often not finding anything helpful...
I guess the TM had become too "diluted".


 
Astrid Elke Witte
Astrid Elke Witte  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 05:43
Member (2002)
German to English
+ ...
In my case it appears to be 5,000 to 10,000 TUs May 16, 2007

I never get TMs from agencies, though. I have just looked up how many TUs my largest ongoing Court case TM has, and it says "5960".

Astrid


 
Vito Smolej
Vito Smolej
Germany
Local time: 05:43
Member (2004)
English to Slovenian
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
Poll: a suggestion for the future May 16, 2007

What is the biggest hard disk you've ever worked with? I'm dead serious;P - this will give everybody a chance to chip in.

Btw, is there anybody out there that can match my answer? Original IBM Winchester drives, size 1,5 feet across, half a foot in height.


 
Textklick
Textklick  Identity Verified
Local time: 04:43
German to English
+ ...
In memoriam
TUs or Megs? May 16, 2007

I might be mad, but I prefer to measure them in terms of how much bloody space they take up on my computer.

And remember - you can compress/defrag them, should you see a need to keep them.

Strange question, I think.

Baffled

P.S. Smo - if you owned one of those Winchester pump action pieces you must have been seriously rich!...
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I might be mad, but I prefer to measure them in terms of how much bloody space they take up on my computer.

And remember - you can compress/defrag them, should you see a need to keep them.

Strange question, I think.

Baffled

P.S. Smo - if you owned one of those Winchester pump action pieces you must have been seriously rich!

[Edited at 2007-05-16 21:57]
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Dan Marasescu
Dan Marasescu  Identity Verified
Romania
Local time: 05:43
Member (2003)
English to Romanian
+ ...
Bigger... better... May 16, 2007

I think the number of TUs can be important in some cases. I made a habit of checking how many TUs I have at the beginning of the translation. It can also be a safety check, because if the number is 0 and I know there should be something in there, there is obviously a mistake that I need to fix.

Is bigger better? Not necessarily, but TMs can be used in different ways. The biggest TM I used as working memory had about 42k TUs. The biggest TM I used for concordance search (reference me
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I think the number of TUs can be important in some cases. I made a habit of checking how many TUs I have at the beginning of the translation. It can also be a safety check, because if the number is 0 and I know there should be something in there, there is obviously a mistake that I need to fix.

Is bigger better? Not necessarily, but TMs can be used in different ways. The biggest TM I used as working memory had about 42k TUs. The biggest TM I used for concordance search (reference memory) has, I think, over 4 million TUs. It's the multilingual TM database of the EU institutions. It can be managed with the right tools. Anyway, even Trados can filter the results of the concordance search, so bigger is not necessarily worse either.
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Steven Capsuto
Steven Capsuto  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 00:43
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
+ ...
Actually, I've wondered about TM sizes myself May 16, 2007

lexical wrote:

What is the point of this poll?


It answers the very useful question of how scalable CAT software is. Personally, I find it reassuring to see that the software seems to function well with TMs in the 75K+ range, since some of mine are fast approaching a similar size.

[Edited at 2007-05-16 23:01]


 
Victor Dewsbery
Victor Dewsbery  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 05:43
German to English
+ ...
Much larger in DVX May 17, 2007

My "Big Mama" TM in DVX has 278,000 segments (just checked the statistics).
Hardly any of this is drawn from other sources - almost all of it is my own work (accumulated since 1999).

When I get external TMs (which is very rare), I create a separate database and attach it to the project as a "read only" additional TM.


 
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Poll: Which is the largest TM you've ever worked with?






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