Feb 23, 2017

memoQuickie: version 8.0 begins public "beta" testing

At breakfast in the Social Media Cafe this morning:


You may have seen the hype behind the "memoQ Adriatic" rollout yesterday. AFAIK this is the first version of the software released without beta-testing, so the release is essentially a beta test. Beware.

The early reaction of one LSP project manager on the memoQ Facebook group makes many of the relevant points. The "new" features are mostly quite beside the point for most of us and are dealt with better elsewhere.

The choice of version "name" also strikes many as bizarre and out of touch. When Kilgray began to ape Microsoft and SDL by including years in the release designation, I said it was a bad idea. This apparent attempt to take cues from Apple's marketing is even worse.

I think this version can be ignored for the most part. Certainly for now in this dangerous beta (or perhaps alpha?) phase. Style is all very pretty, folks, but we need some real substance to address the challenges of translation technology today. Really.

For a "management summary" of new features it seems that the online Help file is your best bet.

9 comments:

  1. The one feature that really looks interesting is the track changes... I hope they implement it well: SDL has had it for years. The rest of the features I saw during the presentation looked more geared to translation companies than to translators.

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  2. There are a lot of new challenges since the last release and then this. A simple name change with no substance as you said. There are so many requests from the translator community how to enhance at least the existing features but it seems that nobody is listening anymore. The MemoQ years are over. We have to look somewhere else for innovation.

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  3. I was just trying and guessing the possible usefulness of this release and I decided to search for clues here: a great idea!
    thanks for information, I'll let it alone
    BTW, even if I still hate SDL, I'm starting to look back on it
    or maybe I'll come back on Wordfast
    what do you think about?

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    1. Well... I just spent about €400 on the SDL Trados Studio 2017 upgrade and I am thinking about writing a migration guide....

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  4. the problem is that I owned Trados eons ago, so I had no chance to upgrade and the full release cost a lot

    so I tested Wordfast Studio 3, loved it and bought it

    I'll still use memoQ for one customer that requires me working on their server, but luckily enough I work now 99% for an editing house and they don't use any CAT
    ;-)

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  5. Hi All,

    I think you are being too quick to rush to judgement here. I appreciate that we could have communicated this version in a much better way. However, I think you are missing the bigger story. If you look at the communication about memoQ 8 there was a commitment to have follow up with releases and to work with translators and LSPs on new functionality. That is what I understand by memoQ responsive evolution. To some extent we have already started this. Have a look at the change log for 7.8 https://www.memoq.com/en/news/change-log-update and https://www.memoq.com/en/news/change-log-update-and-a-new-feature.

    It is also not true that Kilgray have given up on innovation. In fact the opposite is true. Gábor Ugray, is now heading a team inside Kilgray which is focussed on innovation.

    As I said we are listening and appreciate your concerns. My email address is peter.reynolds@kilgray.com. You are welcome to contact me directly.

    Thanks,

    Peter.

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    1. OK, I looked at the change logs. And? Looks like a typical list of bug fixes that one would find in a minor version update. Calling it "responsive evolution" doesn't make it any more than that, and if that term is accepted, it might as well be applied to any software updates from most any company. As much as I like looking at such lists myself (mostly for the OMG-factor as I realize just how many bullets I managed to dodge with a previous version), I don't think the average user will be enlightened much.

      There is a very long laundry list of fairly critical consolidation and improvement that needs to happen to existing features, and the awareness of these has been high for a very long time. Updating LiveDocs - long overdue. Improvements to term mining features and terminology management in general (though the addition of hierarchy-specific keyboard shortcuts for termbases in mQ 2015 is a real godsend). Basic shit like being able to import more than one TMX at a time to a TM - SDL Trados is probably the most convenient way for memoQ users to do this, and for an OmegaT user with a zillion TMX files from the past, a migration to memoQ remains a nightmare. Sure, if you have a PM version and use the API that almost nobody is aware of you can write a script to do that in 5 minutes, but the ROW is kinda screwed there after years of begging. Light resource editing and management: "OMG". E mais.

      No matter how much lipstick SK tries to smear on this pig, it won't be ready for the prom. There's lots of low-hanging fruit on the user tree, but it seems it'll just rot there at this rate.

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    2. Regarding importing multiple TMX files into a memory...
      What I normally do (regardless of the CAT tool used for any specific project) is to use the Xbench "Export Items" feature: you can add any number of TMX files, memoQ files, SDL files and memories, tab-delimited text files, or, for that matter, any of the bilingual formats supported by Xbench, and then export them all to a single TMX memory, which can then be imported in whichever CAT tool one uses.

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  6. Xbench .... to merge anything it can metabolyze?
    interesting and thanks for this info Riccardo

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