ESI Professional and Translation Memory
It has been pointed out to us that –sometimes- ESI will not accept the options selected by the User using the Translation Memory function. For
example: you select the ‘Verb’ part of speech for a particular word with your desired meaning and translation. Of course you expect that this specific word be translated always as a verb, along with your selected meaning and translation, each time the word appears in a text.
But this doesn’t work quite like that…
ESI’s Translation Memory system is designed to accept all the meanings and translations you select, but it cannot be made to predefine the Part of Speech of a particular word. A fixed selection would definitely ruin many other instances.
Take a look at the following example where you have a single command like:
“Clean”
This could be translated as a command (imperative verb) like,
(you) Clean → Limpie (cleanse),
or as an adjective,
Clean → Limpio (aseptic)
Suppose you wanted the word “clean” to be always translated as a verb. A sentence like
I have a clean table
would then be translated incorrectly as
Tengo uno asea mesa → I have one cleanse table. (x)
ESI’s Translation Memory System is designed in such a way that you can force the selection or a word’s meaning and first translation, but you cannot force a particular part of speech. You cannot force “clean” to be selected always as a verb.
However…
In our future version 5.0, you will be able to prefer the selection of a verb, an adjective or a noun when there is ambiguity, that is, when there is not enough information in the sentence for ESI to decide. This is the case of the example we mentioned above. When you write a single word like “Clean”, ESI does not have enough syntactic information to decide if it should be an adjective or an imperative (verb). This is where your Preference will come into effect.
This suggestion came from one of our Users. We, at Word Magic Software, are
always open to useful and practical suggestions.
We will deal more with Setting this Preference when we release Version 5.0, next Fall. Many new functions and surprising new features will be included in that version. In the meantime, we will only advance that Version 5.0 will be the single most significant release since Word Magic launched its first translator back in 1996.
Note: If you want to review how to use the Translation Memory function, please refer to our Weekly Tips # 4 & 5.
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