Contexter - Wiki

Contexter is a translation memory application that supports the management of individual and personal translation memories. However, it also supports translation work in small companies.
Unlike an electronic dictionary, the translation memory usually contains individual sets of translation examples. They constitute the individual and domain-specific translation knowledge essential for your daily translation work when online translations and electronic dictionaries are not of much help.
From a different angle, a translation memory is a search engine operating on your translation examples. However, Contexter is more than just a search field where you enter some keywords and get a long list of related translations. We equipped with special features that make searching easier mainly by having a focus on the context your actual translation is dealing with. You won’t find many of Contexter’s features on any translation memory product available on the market.

Contexter as available here is a stand-alone application that helps you to manage your own translation memory and to learn about the management of your translation knowledge base.

The cultivation of your own knowledge base requires some necessary processes. Therefore, Contexter is not only one application but a suite of tools.

Distilling means the standardization of information that is not useful in the context of translation. In “65 percent of all participants”, for instance, the reference to “65 percent” is not an essential information for translation purposes. The same holds for many other expressions related to time, quantity, locations, etc.
Contexter’s Distiller enables you to define patterns of such non-information expressions, extracts these expressions and replaces them by general place holders. In this example here, it would be “percentage”.

Own translations are often a valuable source. They come as bilingual or multilingual texts that you just need to integrate into your translation memory. A translation example is one phrase from a text and its corresponding translation. Usually, there is a one-to-one equivalence between a phrase and its translation. However, in some cases one phrase is translated by two or even three phrases. Alignment deals with this equivalence and Contexter’s Aligner helps you in this integration task.

The meaning of every phrase and even the meaning of its words depends on the broader context surrounding phrase and words. Knowing this particular meaning is indispensable in translations. In many cases, the correct translation of a word is impossible without knowing the context that describes its meaning.

Knowing the context supports also the search for suitable translation examples. By fixing the context of search you can restrict the retrieved examples to the meaning of your actual translation work.
Contexter supports this consideration of context in your search. Contexter's ContextBuilder supports the construction of concept hierarchies. These context structures enable you to focus your search for suitable translations on the overall meaning of your translation work.

You get the translation memory application here:
Translation Memory

The three Contexter tools help you to optimally prepare your text base for your translation memory.

• Distiller
• Aligner
• ContextBuilder

Project Members:

• Contexter AKRA (admin)