Translation memory is the single most valuable asset a working translator builds over a career. Get the workflow right — create, export, and import — and your TM becomes portable, shareable, and reusable across every project and every client.

Most translators discover translation memory the first time a CAT tool serves back a sentence they thought they’d translated for the first time. From that moment on, the questions multiply: how do I create a new TM cleanly? How do I move it between machines? How do I share one with a colleague, or import a TM a client has sent? Those questions matter even more when you’re juggling several clients and several language pairs in parallel.

Our Trados 2019 tutorial walks through the full cycle in Arabic — creating a brand-new translation memory, exporting it as a TMX file you can hand off, and importing one back into a different project or a different installation. It’s the practical knowledge that separates a hobbyist from a professional, taught in plain Arabic by Muhammad Shalabi.

Tip from the field: the Wearabize Facebook group has shared a free Arabic–English translation memory of the United Nations corpus — around 278,735 translation units, available in both Trados and memoQ formats. It’s a serious head start for anyone working on policy, legal, or international-organization content.