What is it?

Concordancing is the functionality through which the user of a TM tool can see a word/phrase/segment in its context. The context is retrieved from the translation memory, assisting thus the translator in disambiguating the meaning of the sought item.

What is its purpose?

As well as seeing the sought word/phrase in context, performing concordances will also enable you to identify the translation choices that either you or other translators have made previously. Consequently, being able to use this functionality is a useful complement to having a TD, too: you can quickly identify translation equivalents which, for whatever reason, are not already stored in the TD.

The example which follows will give you an even deeper understanding of the simple principle behind, as well as usefulness of, using the concordancing functionality of TM tools.

For more information about concordancing, please refer to the Consulting corpora unit in the Corpus course , as well as to the resources developed by the eCoLoRe project.