Project wrap-up time… for our team, it’s the final milestone of a project that follows the delivery to the client and precedes its archival.
At wrap-up, the exact content that we delivered to the client gets saved into the master translation memory, and any “working” translation memories are deleted.
It’s important to make a distinction between content that you actually delivered to the client and the previous versions of such content, with all its imperfections, ambiguities and inconsistencies. Also, any reference material sent in the form of translation memories by the client should be kept separate, in my opinion.
Are master TMs exempt from problems? In theory they should be, since the phrases they contain have been subjected to several forms of quality control. However, over time you may realize that a certain term may have a better translation, different from the one contained in the master TM, or the client’s preferences may have changed. So it’s time to do some careful maintenance on your master TM. More about this next time.