What is it?

Pre-translation (also called batch translation) refers to the process of comparing a complete source text to a Translation Memory (TM) and automatically inserting the translations of all exact and fuzzy matches found in the database.

The large majority of TM tools allow users to customise the fuzziness threshold (e.g. tell the application not to insert the translations of segments that are less than 75% similar to the source ones), or to specify whether they want only the translations of exact matches to be inserted.

What is its purpose?

One can extract relevant terminology together with its equivalents from pretranslated segments.

Companies can also choose to pretranslate files before sending them to freelance translators as an alternative to sending them their complete TMs.

For more information on pretranslation, please refer to the resources developed by the eCoLoRe project.