Vitamins naturally in food are not crystalline and never isolated. Vitamins found in any real food are chemically and structurally different from those commonly found in ‘natural vitamin’ formulas and are far superior to their synthetic counterparts. As vitamins, words, taken within their natural context, are more effective and useful. “Any time you touch a word, you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation…You didn’t break it. It’s just in a new position, and that new position can be just as beautiful”, says Erin Mac Kean in an epic TED Talk. That is, context beyond the words immediately surrounding a term is also relevant.
Vitamins in translations
How can you get maximum benefit from using words in their natural context in a translation project? By using concordance. The added value of using concordance is that they are not as “static” the way dictionary definitions are: concordance analyse different use of a single word, word frequency and phrases or idioms in their natural context. By using concordance, translators can identify terms in the most appropriate context and easily find the best equivalent terms in the target language.
Concordance search in MateCat
Concordances in MateCat work as manual lookup tools that enable translators to find linguistic matches on the subsegment level (that is, phrase, compound, or word). Concordance search in MateCat display all previously translated segments in the private TM associated with the project and in the public TM containing that word or phrase. A concordance search can be performed by entering or pasting the text to check in the Concordance tab on the Translation Editor page.
Basically, when the translation memory provides no direct match for a specific term, it is possible to select the part of the source sentence, e.g. a single word or phrase, and manually search on the integrated concordance for a more granular level checking.
Benefits of working with concordance in MateCat
Thanks to its massive resources available, MateCat never provides zero matches. One of the most important benefits is that the translator is no more forced to leave the Translation Editor page to look up on the internet. For instance, last week I was translating an article on fashion with a lot of fashion terms in it. Well, MateCat had corpora also on that subject. I realised that just by checking the concordance I didn’t need to go on the internet to look up the terms, and when I did, it was only to check that actually the provided results were good.
With such a huge resource available, the translation will be a lot more efficient, with less time spent on translating and looking up online and more time to focus on the essential, that is, a more accurate terminology and …healthier eating!
Read more about concordance search in MateCat Docs.