What Is Fuzzy Matching?

Fuzzy matching is the art of finding a match between two fuzzy things. It's like matching a fuzz bear to a fuzzy bear. Matching a fuzzy cat with a fuzzy cat. This can only be possible when you have a pair of each but take this example with a pinch of salt but helps us get to the point we are trying to make. It's like a search engine that doesn't just look at whether you've typed in the exact words someone else has already used. It looks at how close your results are to what you want. This is important because sometimes people don't use the exact words every time, they talk about something, so when they do use the exact words, it means they're probably talking about the same thing. Sometimes, they use the actual words only. Sometimes they talk about something, so they might talk about other things when they use different words. Fuzzy matching lets us see both sides of that coin at once, we can gather all of these different versions of what people say into one place and then find out how similar those versions are to each other. Fuzzy matching is like searching for a needle in a haystack with a magnifying glass. You're looking for a word or phrase in your translation memory database and need help finding it. Instead of just giving up, fuzzy matching will look at the word or phrase you're searching for, then suggest other words or phrases that might be similar but not the same. That sounds good, but how does it work? Fuzzy matching searches through your translation memory database and finds other words with similar meanings and spellings to your search term. This search type works best when your database has many similar times. If few relevant results are returned by fuzzy matching, it's best to try something else!