Translation memory systems: An analysis of translators' attitudes and opinions

Translation memory (TM) systems are among the most aggressively marketed and widely used computer-aided translation tools. Previous studies have focused on when and how TMs are used, but there is significantly less information available relating to translators' perceptions of and attitudes towards them. The goal of this thesis is to explore translators' unprompted opinions of the issues related to TM system usage. After analyzing postings on translators' discussion boards, I propose to compare current assumptions about TM systems and their use with what translators are expressing in their unprompted opinions. I believe that with a better understanding of different perspectives and attitudes, translators can evaluate and potentially adjust their own perceptions in light of others' experience, developers and vendors can respond more accurately to users' needs, clients can better comprehend translators' concerns, and researchers and trainers can properly address the issues currently surrounding TM system usage. This thesis is organized into three chapters. Following a general introduction, Chapter 1 explains the functioning of TM systems and the issues surrounding their use, and then explores what is known about the use of TM systems and attitudes towards them as these are expressed in scholarly research, vendor promotional materials, surveys of practicing translators, and analyses of mailing lists. Chapter 2 provides a description of the methodology used in this project to select a primary resource, extract TM-related information, and classify the data. Chapter 3 presents a summary and analysis of the data found in the corpus. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the findings of this research and their implications for translators, vendors, clients/agencies, translator trainers, and researchers, addresses areas requiring further investigation and research, and evaluates the methodology of the project.