Whether you should activate the automation options for translation memories or not depends on the character of the documents translated and your general preferences. The keyword is "leverage ".
You have leverage effects during a translation when you can use "old" translations (already saved in a TM) for new translations, so that the effort and time needed for a translation can dramatically decrease. There are two kinds of leverage:
· Internal leverage:
Reuse of translations inside of the document currently being translated.
· External leverage:
Reuse of translations from other documents that were translated before and that are saved in the TM.
Of course, every translator wants to make use of both kinds of leverage. In MetaTexis, you can do this either manually or automatically. However, to make sure that the leverage will really work, you should activate the automation options.
When setting the automation options for transmission, you have the following possibilities as regards leverage effects:
· If you activate both automatic searching and saving, both the internal and the external leverage effect are active.
In most cases, this settings combination is the appropriate one. If you are not sure which setting is the best, activate both automation options.
· If you activate the automatic saving option only, MetaTexis will automatically save every translation unit in the specified TM when it is closed (if there is a translation!). In this case, no leverage effects are guaranteed because you have to search manually.
This combination of settings is appropriate when you want to make sure that the active document is saved in the main TM, but when you do not want to get "annoyed" by the automatic searches. This can be the case when you translate a text which is going to be revised at a later stage, while few internal leverage effects, if any, are expected.
· If you activate the automatic search option only, when a TU is opened MetaTexis will automatically look for similar segments in the TMs specified (if there is no translation present yet) and will present you with the TUs found (if any). In this case, external leverage is guaranteed, whereas internal leverage is not guaranteed because you have to save the TUs manually.
This combination of settings is the only one that does not make much sense, because if you want to benefit from external leverage effects, you will also want to benefit from internal ones.
· If you de-activate both automation options, any TM specified can only be accessed manually.
This combination of settings is appropriate when you translate the final version of documents characterized by a unique style and content, that is, mainly documents which are not technical, e.g. "texts of art" (novels), scientific texts, and journalistic texts. In these cases, a terminology database is often more important than a translation memory.