Jun 16, 2012

memoQuickie: footnote, cross-reference & index entry segmentation in Microsoft Word files

If you have a Microsoft Word DOC file or RTF to translate, it is important to be aware of the different behaviors of the memoQ import filter options you can use. If there are footnotes, cross-references or index entries, it is far better to use the option to import the DOC or RTF file as DOCX.

The DOC file shown below has a footnote, a cross-reference and an index entry:


Adding it to a memoQ project with the default filter for Microsoft Word in memoQ 5


gives the following segmentation result:


Importing the same document with the DOCX option of the filter


yields much cleaner segmentation and better tags to work with:


Compare what some other programs do with this file:

WordFast Pro
DVX2 (DOC)
DVX2 (DOCX)

TagEditor salad (partial)

SDL Trados Studio 2009 segmentation

SDL Trados Studio 2011

There is room for improvement with most tools.


2 comments:

  1. Hi Kevin,

    Interesting comparisons as always. An interesting point to note is that with both TagEditor and Studio the tags are just placeholders (which can be autoreplaced as needed – so you will always get 100% matches for the main segment even if the content of the index entry changes) and the content of the index entry will always be in a separate segment after the paragraph they belong to. So you can always go back to the paragraph for context, and you get good reuse as the index entry text is put into an extra (short) segment which then can be leveraged against the TM.

    Thanks for adding the Studio 2011 images too.

    Regards

    Paul

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Kevin,

    Thanks for the clear overview.

    I wasn't aware that Studio had such a clear way of indicating what the tags actually are. memoQ inline tags would benefit from something like this. Perhaps Kilgray should add a third option to the show tags button:

    Show Short Inline Tags, Show Medium Inline Tags, Show Filtered Inline Tags, Show Long Inline Tags, Show Human Readable Tags?

    Michael

    ReplyDelete

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