According to Hutchins (1998, 294), Peter Arthern (1979) is considered to have come up with the idea of ​​TM in a paper he submitted to the European Commission. Raising the problem that translators working for the European Commission were wasting valuable time translating already translated texts, Arthern suggested that all source texts and target texts be compiled into a computerized storage that translators would have access to so they could recover them very quickly. texts already translated for reuse (1979: 94). In 1980, a monumental idea was conceived by Martin Kay (1980/1997) in an article entitled "The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation", in which he called for a complete reassessment of the relationship between translators and computers. In this article, Kay encouraged a shift in research focus from TM to other software applications useful for translators; The tool he offers, Translator's Amanuensis, consisting of a text editor and a dictionary, embodies what we know today as the TM system. A year later, Melby (1981) suggested the use of computer-generated bilingual concordances as an aid to translators and developed the idea of ​​a translator's workstation, which is a set of tools for the translator in the translation process. As pointed out by Gow (2003), Melby's concept of alignment is an important element in the design of effective TM tools (11). Another important step towards the realization of modern TM technology was the bi-text conception of Harris (1988); that is, a pair of source and target text. A bi-text facilitates electronic search and retrieval of previous translations (Hutchins 1998, 301). Once text alignment tools made bilingual translation databases possible, the first commercial TM systems were released to the market in the early 1990s (Hutchins 1998, 303). The users were