Translation Memory: how it works
A Translation Memory (TM) is a database of every sentence-level translation your team has ever produced. Every time Taia's AI or a human linguist translates a segment, that segment pair (source + target) is saved. The next time a similar sentence appears, Taia retrieves the stored translation and suggests it automatically.
The core idea
Imagine you've translated your software UI into French. Six months later, you update the product and need to translate it again. Around 70% of the sentences are identical or nearly identical to last time. Without a TM, you'd pay to translate them again. With a TM, those 70% are applied automatically — you only pay full rate for the genuinely new content.
Match scores
Not every stored segment is a perfect match. Taia assigns a match score (0–100%) based on how similar the stored source text is to the current segment:
- 100% — Identical. The stored translation is applied as-is.
- 95–99% — Near-exact (punctuation or casing differs). Apply with a quick review.
- 75–94% — Fuzzy match. The words are similar but not identical. Use as a starting point.
- Below 75% — Too different; not suggested.
For Professional translation orders, higher match scores mean a lower per-word rate. See Understand match scores.
How TM fills up
A TM grows from two sources:
- Active translation — every segment a linguist confirms in the CAT editor is saved into the TM automatically.
- TMX import — you can upload existing translation memories from other tools in TMX format. See Import a TMX file.
TM and AI translation
When a TM is attached to a project, Taia's AI engine consults it before translating each segment. A 100% TM match is applied directly — the AI doesn't re-translate it. For fuzzy matches, the AI uses the stored translation as a reference, which improves consistency even in new content.
This is how your TM trains the AI to sound like your brand over time: the more your team has translated in a particular style, the more the AI draws on that context for future projects.
Multiple TMs
You can create multiple TMs — one per language pair, one per product, one per department — and attach multiple TMs to a single project. Taia queries all of them and uses the highest-scoring match.