Searchable Translation Memories

In this paper we introduce a technique for creating searchable translation memories. Linear B’s searchable translation memories allow a translator to type in a phrase and retrieve a ranked list of possible translations for that phrase, which is ordered based on the likelihood of the translations. The searchable translation memories use translation models similar to those used in statistical machine translation. In this paper we first describe the technical details of how the TMs are indexed and how translations are assigned probabilities, and then evaluate a searchable TM using precision and recall metrics.