Translation memory tools are not something that most people get excited about. Even most translators! And Termbases are worse. Termbases, or glossaries, are a much-neglected area in the high-tech world of translation memories (and with good reason, actually - terminology management tools have often been clunky and awkward to use. Make something awkward enough, and people will simply not use it!).

Today I was showing a translator how to use a new translation memory tool called MemoQ. And I have to say, their terminology management tool (or Termbase) impressed me. Two things in particular really impressed me:

• To add a new term to the termbase, I simply had to highlight the source term and highlight the target term. This makes life very easy, and I am astonished that some other vendors of translation memory systems do not offer this ease of use. Well done MemoQ. And I believe Star Transit also offers this. On the version of Trados that I use, I can't highlight terms in both the source and target windows, so I end up having to type either the source or target term (or do clunky things involving copy and paste).
• I was impressed to see that while I am working on translating a sentence, if I add a term from that sentence into the termbase, it shows up immediately in MemoQ. In real time. And gives me immediate benefit. Again, my experience with other TM tools is that the "terminology" hit only comes in the next time I open a segment containing that term. So again, this is an enhancement to usability, and enhancement to translator productivity, and therefore an incentive to add terms to the termbase (which, in turn, enhances quality). That's what they call "win-win".

I have always greatly admired people who have tattoos in a foreign language. Some friends of mine have tattoos in Chinese or Japanese. Now, although I am a linguist and a translator, I don't speak (or read) Chinese or Japanese. And neither do these friends. Which is why I admire their bravery.

The Max Planck Forschung, a German research body, were equally brave. They wanted an elegant Chinese poem to go on the cover of their learned journal. What did they actually end up printing? Let's just say there were red faces all round on their editorial board.

The moral? If you are going to use a translation for a tattoo on your body, for the front cover of a magazine, or for communicating with your clients, it is prudent to engage the services of skilled, qualified professional translators. Unless you feel brave....

So what do translators get up to on a Sunday? Read the second installment of Philippa Hammond's excellent review of the Translator as Strategic Partner conference, held in November 2008 in London.

Incidentally, Philippa makes the point that translating the sort of XML-based materials that are held in a Content Management System (or CMS) is still a specialised area for translators. I had 15 minutes to present on this at the conference, so it was a quick and high-level overview. But my underlying point is that this is becoming more common, and will continue to become even more normal. One translator friend (yes, translators have friends!) who specialises in translating tourist guides was recently surprised to find that all the copy for a book she was actually in XML, stored in a CMS.