Translation is the rendering of the meaning in the source language into the target language to produce a text that is accurate in terms of the grammar rules of the target language, and that complies with the instructions received in the translation project assignment. The ‘source language’ is the language in which the original text (also called the ‘source text’) is written, and the ‘target language’ is the language into which the source text is translated. Documents are pre-processed to identify repetitive material and facilitate the re-use of content in the Centre’s translation memories (TMs) and to benefit from the use of machine translation (MT) engines, unless they fall under any of the following categories:

• very urgent documents
• urgent documents in specific formats which require special pre-processing operations

Translation requests that meet the right conditions for using the Centre’s custom machine translation engines are automatically pre-processed with these engines and benefit from reduced prices for the different turnaround times. Such pre-translated documents undergo a full post-editing by the Centre’s linguists to make sure that the final result is entirely comparable with the result obtained through traditional translation (i.e. by a translator who produces the translation using a translation memory tool combined with machine translation).