Translation memory - Default search settings

This article gives an overview of the default search and filter options available in the TM settings as accessed from a specific translation memory.

The default TM search settings will have an impact on the fuzzy match retrieval and consequently on word counting and invoicing.

In order to have the results refined per resource, you will need to play with the settings highlighted in each resource profile. 

The global settings for your platform will define how your segments will be handled in the whole system.


If you do not know how to access the TM settings of a specific resource, see the previous article: https://wordbee.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/WBT/pages/712197.

Default TM content filtering

After you have opened the Search settings of specific translation memory (or project memory, termbase), you can use the Content filtering options to define how this memory should behave with respect to other translation memories.

When you doubt the content quality of your resource, move the sliders of the pre-translation and penalty settings into the red area. Higher penalties will show only very similar results. Blue coloured values indicate default settings.

Expand the options below to learn more:

Here you can define if Wordbee Translator can use the translation memory for pre-translation or not. In the screenshot, you can see the slider is set in the middle of the blue area: Can use for pre-translation. This means that the selected TM will be used for pre-translation and that the linguists will receive fuzzy matches during translation.

The pre-translation settings also have an impact on word counting.

Here you can increase or decrease the penalty settings for text differences between the source segment and the match in the memory, for example, wording or spelling. The default settings are set to average.

Here you can increase or decrease the penalty settings for formatting differences between the source text and the match in the memory, for example, inline tags. The default settings are set to average.

When the system compares a segment with a match in memory, it calculates the degree of similarity. By default, any differences in whitespaces such as a tabulator in one segment and a space in the other, or, one space vs. two spaces result in a similarity below 100% (identical match). You can adjust whether a less strict mode shall apply for whitespace differences.

You can apply one of the different settings:

  1. Default settings - Whitespaces must match perfectly. Spaces, Tabs, Newlines etc. are all considered distinct characters. This is the recommended default.

  2. Spaces, Tabs, Newlines are considered equivalent. For examples, 3 tabs equal to 3 spaces, but 2 tabs are different from 1 tab. The whitespace sequences must be of the same length.

  3. Disregard any whitespace differences - This means that the system considers any single whitespace or sequences of whitespace as identical, for example, 3 tabs match 2 spaces at 100%.

  4. Japanese/Chinese/Korean mode - If you translate from these languages, you could select this setting if you want the normal-width (Ansi) and full-width spaces to be considered identical.

Placeables are dates, numeric values, decimals or similar elements. Differences in placeables between a memory hit and the searched text only slightly decrease the overall similarity. This setting specifies how much the similarity decreases.

You can apply one of the different settings:

  1. Default setting - Differences in placeables, such as 10-10-2010 and 12-01-2012, result in a small reduction of overall similarity by 1 or 2 percentage points.

  2. Zero penalty - The system assigns no penalty at all for placeable differences. This means that two texts containing distinct dates but are otherwise identical will be assigned 100% similarity.

  3. Disabled - Placeable identification is disabled. For example, a difference could be that dates will give the same decrease in similarity as if the dates were two distinct words.


Default translation filters

If you want to hide the default visibility of specific segments so you can guide users to better results available, you can customize the following filters:

Expand the options below to learn more:

Options like "Show translations identical to source" or "Show translations marked as erroneous (red status)" are available for all resource types: TMs, TBs, and Project Memory.


Learn more

Go back to the platform customization to learn about other settings that you can customize:

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