Project: FIN-CLARIAH
Grant agreement: Research Council of Finland no. 367751
Start date: 01-01-2026
Duration: 24 months
WP 2.3: Report on developing policies for processing and sharing translation memories
Date of reporting: 11-06-2026
Report authors: Mietta Lennes (University of Helsinki)
Deliverable location: https://www.kielipankki.fi/support/data-management/dela/
Keywords for the deliverable page: translation memory, machine translation
A translation memory is a bilingual or multilingual database of previous translations of text segments of varying size. In some cases, a translation memory (or a translation memory manager/system) can also refer to a language-technological tool that helps translators by suggesting translations on the basis of similar, previously translated segments of text. (For the definitions in Finnish, see https://tieteentermipankki.fi/wiki/Language_Technology:translation-memory.)
Professional translators use translation memories as part of their workflow. Translation memories help translators in maintaining consistent terminology across documents and make their work significantly faster. Translation memories are thus a valuable source for research in language technology, linguistics, terminology and translation studies. For example, by using machine learning techniques, translation memories could be used for analyzing specific types of translation solutions, for enriching and extending the existing data, or for extending the translation solutions to other languages. However, due to, e.g., copyright reasons, translation memories can often only be used and shared within a company or an organization. It can be difficult to share translation memories with a larger research community.
In case a translation memory is publicly available, or in case a deposition agreement can be reached with the rightholders about the appropriate restrictions of use regarding research purposes, it is possible to provide access to the data via the Language Bank of Finland. The translation memory database can be made available via the Language Bank of Finland as a downloadable package. It is also possible to consider different platforms for accessing and querying the content, e.g., as a parallel corpus via the Korp concordancer, or as a lexical resource via the Karp platform. Karp is currently not yet available in the Language Bank of Finland, but the Language Bank will discuss the possibilities of installing it (see the original Karp in Språkbanken, the Language Bank of Sweden). In case the translation memory includes very sensitive content that requires additional protection, it is also possible to use the secure SD Desktop environment for providing access to the data (cf., Deliverable 2.1.1 and the support page regarding sensitive data in the Language Bank).
The FIN-CLARIAH project has received funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU instrument and is funded by the Research Council of Finland under grant number 367751.
Last modified on 2026-06-11
