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Chapter 1. Bilingual concordancers and translation memories 7Table 1. Fuzzy match retrieved from the TMSegment from newsource textFuzzy matchretrieved fromtranslation memoryThe specified operation was interrupted by the system.EN: The specified operation was interrupted by the system.FR: L’opération a été interrompue par l’application.not have a valid name’). Consequently, a translator cannot reasonably expect tofind many exact matches for complete segments in the TM. However, it is highlylikely that there will be segments in a new source text that are similar to, but not exactlythe same as, segments that are stored in the TM. For this reason, SDL Tradosalso employs a powerful feature known as fuzzy matching. As shown in Table 1, afuzzy match is able to locate segments in the TM that are an approximate or partialmatch for the segment in the new source text.If more than one potential match is found for any given segment, these areranked by the system according to the degree of similarity between the new segmentto be translated and the previously translated segment found in the database.Note that the similarity in question is a superficial similarity (e.g., the number/lengthof character strings that the two segments have in common) and nota semantic similarity (thus ‘gone’ and ‘went’ will not count as similar despite thesimilarity in meaning of the two words). The match that the system perceives asbeing most similar to the new source segment is automatically pasted into the newtarget text. The translator can accept this proposal as is, edit it as necessary, orreject it and ask to see other candidates (if any were found).SDL Trados also works in conjunction with terminology databases (ortermbases, for short); however, it is important to note that these need to be prestockedby translators with specialised terms and their equivalents. By searchingin the termbase – if one exists – SDL Trados can locate matches at the term leveland present them to the translator. Nevertheless, there is still a level of linguisticrepetition that falls between full sentences and specialised terms – repetition at thelevel of expression or phrase. This is in fact the level where linguistic repetition willoccur most often.Until recently, TMs permitted phrase or expression searching only though afeature that resembled a BC. In other words, a translator could manually select anexpression, and the TM system would search through the database of TUs to findexamples. In a recent version of SDL Trados, however, an auto-concordance functionhas been added, which, when activated will automatically go on to searchfor text fragments when no segment-level match is found. This has become amuch-praised feature and other TM products, such as Transit,havebeguntoincorporate similar features (Hallett 2006:9).