Introduction
Saving raw Machine Translation (MT) matches in the TM in the XTM Cloud UI is fairly common. It is typically performed in fully automated workflows, which usually consist of leveraging an entire project with MT matches and then finishing jobs automatically.
Before you read the contents of this article, make sure you first have a good understanding of how to set up an automated workflow in XTM Cloud. We recommend you read this article: How to Set Up a Project to Start and Finish Automatically.
Problem description
By default, XTM Cloud does not save raw MT to the TM. However, leaving automated workflows aside, there are two frequent mistakes made by clients who are trying to save raw MT matches:
Lack of Linguist’s manual input in the segments → raw MT matches must be approved by the Linguist, manually. If not , these MT matches are not saved to the TM. You can easily determine whether or not the Linguist has performed any manual action by looking at the Statistics tab for a particular project:
Using the Approve TM for this project option from the project’s context menu → Contrary to many clients' belief, you cannot use this option to save MT matches to the TM. The main reason for this is that the Approve TM for this project option only works for existing TM entries. Since raw MT matches are not saved to the TM yet, this option will not do anything, let alone approving the TM. On the other hand, the Approve TM auto-step goes through the segments in XTM Workbench and saves them to the TM.
Different ways to save Raw MT matches to the TM
There are a couple of ways in which you can easily save raw MT matches to the TM, in XTM Cloud:
Using the Approve TM auto-step (described in detail here)
This depends on the approve TM criteria, which by default are segment status set to done, changed target text and/or ICE/Leveraged match exists. Accordingly, segments that either have the status set as Done OR changed target text (which means source != target) will be saved to the TM.
Matching raw MT in XTM Workbench and populating it automatically
When a Linguist enters XTM Workbench in edit mode, MT matches will be propagated automatically. As long as no other matches, e.g. ICE/Leveraged, etc., have already been populated, the MT matches will be saved to the TM straightaway.
Changing match status from Incomplete to Completed automatically
The most usual way for raw MT matches to be saved to the TM is to open XTM Workbench and change segment statuses from Incomplete to Completed manually (if the raw MT matches have already propagated to the target segments). Naturally, you do not necessarily have to change the status of each segment separately. To speed the process up, you use the Change segment status option (File → Change status). That change the statuses of all segments in a particular file at once.
