Traducir por segmentos: estudio preliminar del impacto del uso de memorias de traducción en la manipulación textual de las traducciones

The progressive globalization of economies and rapid technological advances have brought profound changes in the translation industry, giving increasing prominence to translation memory systems (TM). While these have become part and parcel of standard professional practice, very little is known on their impact on translated texts (TTs). Research in this field tends to focus on the impact of TMs on the translation process and on issues related to productivity and/or quality, while little attention has been paid to the linguistic makeup of the resulting TTs. This article aims to lay the theoretical and methodological foundations for a study of the impact of TM use on TTs. After a literature review highligthing the impact of TM use on professional practice, on the cognitive processes involved in translation, and on the translation product itself, the article moves on to an analysis that compares the number and length of ST and TT segments in a corpus of Spanish into Italian translations done with TMs (TM) and one of Spanish into Italian translations done without TMs (MAN). Results show that TM translations favour segment joining, proving that professional translators develop strategies to overcome the displaying restrictions imposed by the software. Sentence length data, however, show that – while in both corpora TT segments tend to be shorter than their ST equivalents – TM translations show more “stability”, with more limited variation in sentence length and a marked preference for the standard practice of text contraction. In MAN translations, on the other hand, ST expansion seems to be more common (although not pevalent) and TT segments display more variation in length when compared with their corresponding ST segments. While more data and bigger corpora are needed, the more limited “variation” observed in TM translations can be interpreted as a result of the restrictions imposed by the software.