I am often asked - "What is TM-Town? Is it a CAT tool? Is it an online translation agency? Is it a translation memory solution?"
The answer is that TM-Town is something new and it doesn't really fit into any of the above-mentioned categories. I like to describe TM-Town as a translation enablement platform.
In the simplest sense it is a platform that helps to facilitate translation. TM-Town has many different features that help to make translators and translation more efficient.
TM-Town's translation enablement platform is built on the guiding principle that the intersection of technology and specialization will lead to a better translation world.
For a deeper understanding of TM-Town, let's explore the various aspects of TM-Town's translation enablement platform:
One key distinguishing feature of TM-Town is that it incorporates a translator's actual work products in a novel way. TM-Town employs a patent-pending system to match the best translation specialist to an incoming translation job.
On TM-Town translators load their previous work into TM-Town's safe and secure system. When a client uploads a text for translation, TM-Town's system uses natural language processing and text mining technologies to compare that text against the texts that translators have loaded into the system. The result is that TM-Town's system is able to match the best translation specialist to the job. In translation, having a subject-matter expert not only helps to improve translation quality, but it also reduces the time needed for subject matter research.
On TM-Town translators can securely store their translation memories, translation documents, and glossaries. Additionally TM-Town provides a free alignment tool that makes it easy to convert translation documents into translation memory files.
TM-Town also makes it easy to convert files from one format to another format. Do you have a Wordfast text file that you would like to convert to a TMX file? On TM-Town it is as simple as a click of a button and the file can be downloaded in a different industry standard format.
The quote "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is often thrown around. While not always a truism, it can be very beneficial to measure your progress and productivity. TM-Town makes this easy by providing translators with various productivity charts and visualizations on the translation files they upload.
Terminology is at the heart of what translators do and TM-Town has various features related to terminology for translators (as well as more in the works).
On TM-Town it is easy to create a multilingual termbase from terms that are automatically extracted from an uploaded TM file or an aligned source and target document.
TM-Town also recently launched Terminology Repositories, a new section of the site where translators can easily search, browse and download relevant terminology files.
No matter what you choose to call it, TM-Town aims to be a platform which professional translators can utilize to become more efficient, produce higher quality translations, and find relevant translation work.
Are you a professional translator? It's free to get started on TM-Town. Register today and see for yourself how TM-Town's translation enablement platform can help you manage your translation life.
Kevin Dias
TM-Town Developer
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