We give our customers discounts on words that we’ve already translated or that are repeated.
As our customers don’t work with localisation industry tools, we’re often asked – what exactly is a translation memory discount (TM discount) and how is it calculated? Let’s break it down: When intercontact receives a piece of text to be translated or to submit an offer, we import the text into our translation programme (SDL Trados Studio). The translation programme automatically compares the text with the translation memory we’ve set up for the customer, and can see if we’ve already translated some of the words, sentences or entire passages – these are called matches – and if there are any repetitions in the text. This generates an analysis, which allocates the text’s word count as new words, matches and repetitions. The words marked as either repetitions or matches are then given a translation memory discount (TM discount). Depending on the type of text, this amounts to 20-70% off the price of a new word. So, the more we translate for a customer over time, the more text is available in the translation memory, which can then be deducted from the overall calculation. When pieces of text to be translated are already aligned with this process, i.e. if the same facts are always formulated in the same way, this reduces the translation costs significantly.