The new Trados TTX preview in memoQ 6

When I heard some weeks ago that memoQ 6 would offer a preview of TTX files, I was curious what this would be and how it was possible. In my mind, I had a picture of the view of the original format, and I couldn't see how this could be reproduced from a Trados TTX. Of course it can't.

I made a little file with two sentences, one footnote and one comment in Microsoft Word.

Then I made a TTX from that using SDL Trados 2007 and imported it into memoQ:

The memoQ tags, can of course be displayed in a shorter form using toolbar options; I'm just showing the full tag text here for demonstration purposes. The preview of the TTX is shown below the translation grid. It is of course a preview of the tags one would see in the Trados TagEditor.

At first I thought this was rather useless, but then I realized it had value after all:

• The original tags are easier to understand than the tags in the memoQ grid, and the color differentiation between inline tags (green) and other tags (grey) is helpful.
• Unsegmented content is shown, giving you an indication of important content that may require attention like numbers or numeric dates. (I tested this with a different file.)

In the case of that second point, I would re-import the document and select the option to include the unsegmented content. Then use the X-translate function available with version management to pick up where you left off without losing much time. I always leave versioning active in my memoQ projects to allow for possibilities like this. It is also helpful that the new version 6 offers all the features of versioning previously available only in the Project Manager edition of memoQ, which makes comparisons and reporting easier.