
Translation Memory Database Design: Storing Segments You Can Actually Reuse
A translation memory that only ever gives you exact matches is a lookup table. The value is entirely in the fuzzy matching, and that is the hard part to design.
Clear, useful guides for teams creating multilingual video, audio, and learning experiences.

A translation memory that only ever gives you exact matches is a lookup table. The value is entirely in the fuzzy matching, and that is the hard part to design.

Producing eight dubbed tracks is the easy half. Building a player that lets someone actually choose between them is the half that gets skipped.

Batch transcription returns an answer. Streaming transcription returns a sequence of guesses that keep changing, and your UI has to cope.

The API surface a vendor gives you is rarely the surface your application wants. The gap is where a wrapper earns its keep.

German to English is the rare direction where the text gets shorter. That creates a different problem, not an absence of one.

Punjabi is one language written in two scripts that run in opposite directions. Choosing wrongly makes your content unreadable.

Khmer does not put spaces between words. Every line break in your subtitles is therefore a linguistic decision.

Ethiopia keeps a different calendar and a different clock. Neither of those is a translation problem, and both will break your content.

Catalan has ten million speakers, a state language status, and a dubbing industry. It is not a regional variant of anything.

Icelandic coins its own words for new things rather than borrowing them. That policy is national, deliberate, and your terminology problem.