Substack in #xl8 & #l10n

 As related in my last post, I've been testing the Substack platform as an alternative means for distributing and managing the kind of information I've published for many years now on this blog, professional sites and social media, course authoring platforms, YouTube, Xitter, Mastodon and probably a few other channels I've forgotten. And I'm quite surprised to find any expectations I had to be exceeded at this point. On the whole I can do a better job of creating accessible tutorials and other reference information there, and there is far less effort involved with maintenance, style sheet fiddling and whatnot.

All my various projects there can be found here on my profile page.

Currently, these are the

• Translation Tribulations Substack, a general blog for the language services sector and the
• memoQuickies Substack, with content related to the memoQ TMS platform in one way or another.

Other plans include The Diary and Letters of Charles Berry Senior, a US Civil War veteran from Yorkshire, England, who participated in Sherman's march to the sea and who is my great-great grandfather. Some of his records exist in very deteriorated form in a university archive in the United States and can be found online, but much is missing, and I am in possession of the complete transcript prepared by one of the man's daughters more than 100 years ago when the family feared the information would be lost to the forces of material decay. I'll be preparing clean text from her handwritten record (the typescript done by a cousin about 50 years ago was lost and probably contains more errors) and probably an audio reading. There's some hard stuff there, as well as some surprises and interesting lessons in how our world has changed in the past 160 years.

And at some point I'll probably share some of my culinary obsessions as well as what life was like traveling on the other side of the Iron Curtain sans papers or in dingy Paris bookshops and refugee hotels 40 years ago and more.

This past week, I've done a big blitz on memoQ LiveDocs, for which there are still another dozen or so drafts to be finished, and a lot of stuff from my CAT tools resource online class from last year should be appearing there in updated form in due course. There isn't a lot of translation-related activity that I've found on Substack, at least not for the technical side of things, but a lot of historians and authors I follow are very present there, so I'm hoping the better half of my translation technologist friends will join the Substack party at some point.

Most of my new text, video and teaching content will appear on those Substack channels. It's simply far easier to manage, and there you won't have the same RSS headaches you might have here. And the damned editor of Google Blogger just keeps accumulating bugs I don't have to cope with in Substack. And don't get me started on bloody Wordpress!

I hope to see you in my Substack channels soon! I think there will be something like a memoQ QA course there before the summer is over....

A change of platform?

 

As some readers of this blog may already know, recently I have begun to use the Substack platform for some of my writing. But why?

This blog and my YouTube channel have become, over the course of about 16 years now, leading sources of information for a variety of technology topics related to translation and localization, not all of them having to do with memoQ. As well as a venue for other personal and professional expression. I've also got a presence on a few e-learning platforms and sporadic participation in several microblogging platforms.

The online professional landscape for language services has evolved so much in the past two decades that it is often rather difficult to determine the best messaging venues for educational content for working professionals, Quersteiger aspirants and students. To a large and unfortunate extent, a lot of the relevant discussions take place on commercial platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, where the content is quickly buried in the infamous, often preposterous noise of those spaces. There is also the problem of curation, which was one of the reasons this blog was founded back in 2008 after Proz dot comjob lost its value as a professional space with the imposition of extreme censorship and expulsion of its most experienced and helpful community members, many of them former moderators.

Because of this fragmentation of the translation information space, I often find myself spending too much time digging up old (free) information for people with limited search skills or motivation, and in doing so I recognize time and again how much user interfaces for my professional tools have changed over the years, which also poses navigation problems for those who wish to apply the lessons. Menus are now ribbons, many functions have been renamed or moved to other places in the application, or new features have made some of the old solutions less relevant except for those still using very old software (and there are still many of these, which is why I am careful about "updates").

And several times in the past year, I've been contacted by blog readers who had difficulties getting an RSS feed for this blog, which is apparently a rather oldtimey thing now.

So... in the past few years, I noticed that several authors whom I follow use the Substack platform (the historians Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson, also professor Marco Neves at Universidade Nova de Lisboa FCSH, whom I think of as a "Portuguese John McWhorter", and John McWhorter himself). A brief investigation on my part revealed several advantages to this, including fairly painless ways to organize a mix of free and paid content. So I decided to experiment.

After a month now, I would say I am largely pleased as a user of the website and iPhone app. I am still learning the best practices for using insertable buttons and unexpected features like "Notes" and "Threads", probably making more mistakes than I realize, but this does appear to be a good platform for tying together the rather scattered educational content I've been producing for more than two decades now and adding updates to these summaries. And perhaps the venue will prove more useful for discussions, more so than social media where they are quickly buried in platform noise.

I'm not abandoning this blog nor YouTube. There will still be content posted on both which may never appear in any form on the Translation Tribulations Substack. But that's probably the best place to look for now if you need current overviews of language service technology topics or you want a peek at some of my course content tests or textbook-related projects. I may post occasional pointers here on the blog to content on Substack, but the (free) subscription mechanism there is really a much better way (than RSS here, for example) to keep up to date.

So won't you join me?

English for Ukraine!

 

Recently I discovered an online volunteer opportunity that is worth sharing. The war in Ukraine is in its tenth year now, with the escalation of a full-scale orcish invasion now in the third year. The current phase of the conflict is particularly worrisome, with Putin's agents in the US Congress successfully holding up needed assistance for six months now. Ultimately, Ukraine will prevail despite the cowardice and complicity of the criminally insane and terminally stupid in a number of governments that should be solidly allied with the defenders. 

There are many things that ordinary citizens can do to support the sovereignty and democracy of our Ukrainian friends. If you're into direct support of the military response to ruZZian aggression, Estonian blogger Artur Rehi has done good things with fundraising for vehicles and drones, which you can learn about on his website. For those concerned with the morale and psychological health of children, British children's author and illustrator Debbie Howard has an ongoing program to put books in the hands of kids to help them deal with the disturbing experiences of war, and support for that effort is very welcome. These are just a few of the options on my personal readar, and there are many more.

There are many narratives in the Ukrainian defense against imperialist aggression from the orcs of Putin's cesspit and from the growth of a democratic, multicultural civil society in Ukraine, but the ones that matter most are those from the Ukrainians themselves. The voices there matter and should be heard, and to facilitate that, I am pleased for the opportunity to support individual Ukrainians, children and adults, to improve their communication skills in the international language English so they can become ever more a part of our circles of culture, trade and friendship.

For years now, the ENGin volunteer program has coordinated the pairing of "language buddies" to improve the English conversation skills of people in Ukraine to help their academic and professional development and support them in talking to their many friends and future friends abroad. Recently, the program has also expanded to include assistance for civil servants in Ukraine, which is the particular effort for which I have recently become a volunteer.

When I underwent training for this volunteer effort, I saw people from many countries, continents and native language backgrounds who were committed to helping Ukraine speak to the world. Won't you join us?

#IAPTI2024 Call for presentation proposals for the conference in Bursa, Turkey

The 7th International Conference for the International Association of Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) will be held on September 28-29, 2024, in Bursa, Türkiye. The Call for Papers is still open and we will continue with the proposals selection process until April 30, 2024.

Abstracts submitted should be a maximum of 200 words and be sent to the Organizing Committee at bursaconference@iapti.org. Priority will be given to new topics not presented before at other conferences. 

Please include a title and description, a short bio (up to 100 words) and a profile photo with your proposal. Speakers will have 45-50 minutes for their presentations and 10 minutes for Q&A. 

The Organizing Committee reserves the right to accept or reject proposals and will notify applicants accordingly. The conference fee is waived for speakers (1 per presentation) and no other monetary compensation or reimbursement is offered. 

For more information, please contact the Organizing Committee at the e-mail address above. We look forward to welcoming you at another outstanding IAPTI event. See you in September! 

Resources for learning European Portuguese (A1-B2)

When I first moved to Portugal eleven years ago, I resolved to avoid the difficulties I had experienced as an exchange student in Germany many years before, where my northern German accent and academic style of speaking caused bartenders and salespeople in the Saarland to refuse service shortly after my arrival. So in Évora, I decided to learn the language "of the street" from neighbors, shopkeepers and daily tasks. It was a slow process to be sure, but I soon learned that other options were hardly available in the interior; even the local university offered essentially nothing except an A1-level course for Erasmus students, which was poorly attended (and often canceled) due to the lack of coordination among the faculty. In that city and in the border town I moved to a few years later, there were also neither language schools nor established, reliable tutors available. The few who could be found had issues with low business volumes and soon ceased their registered commercial activities.

In the heavily populated coastal regions with a large number of immigrants or tourists with money, there are a number of good programs at universities or private institutions, but the time commitments for these (typically weeks or months of full-time attendance) were not really compatible with my lifestyle and work schedule, and the most highly recommended programs cost thousands of euros that I needed for other things.

When it came time to take the CIPLE exam to certify A2-level competence for my permanent residence (which is also required for citizenship for those not married to a Portuguese citizen), I enrolled in online courses offered by the Camões Institute in Lisbon. These had three options: an entirely self-guided program, and two programs with some level of interaction with an assigned tutor for 30 minute sessions each or every other week. I opted for the latter, and the excellent tutors (who in my case were usually native Portuguese enrolled in some graduate program in Spain) were probably the main reason I was able to pass the exam and get my título da residência permanente. The actual exercises in the online courses weren't very good (except for the writing assignments), and I found a lot of functional errors in some of them. Plain sloppy programming, which is really shameful in a country that hosts the Web Summit every year.

My early explorations of apps available for language learning a decade ago were not very satisfying. Flashcard programs like Anki or Memrise are really too limited for achieving any kind of functional competence, and at the time I found nothing with any kind of systematic structure for acquiring basic grammar and conversational skills. I could open and read an entirely Portuguese grammar book and understand the content without difficulty because the concepts were largely familiar to me from other language study, but without some systematic practice or more social opportunities in the country, the grammar books were of little real use.

One hears that "immersion is critical", and when I moved to Portugal, I assumed that my learning curve would be even faster than it was years before for German, Russian and Japanese, but there's immersion in the shallow end of a language, with simple, comprehensible input to build a foundation of basics, and then there is immersion in the fast river of daily adult life with bills to pay and neighbors and authorities of all kinds to deal with, where in the comfortable slumber of a language novice, it is more likely that "human voices wake us, and we drown".

For a long time, the only "comprehensible input" (in Krashen's sense) that I could find to help improve my Portuguese was the podcast "Portuguese with Leo", which is intermediate level, about right for me by the time I discovered it, but still lacking the content I needed to patch up gaps in my competence.

Duolingo, allegedly the world's most popular language learning app, while helpful for basic Spanish, simply sucks whale dork when it comes to learning Portuguese for Europe or Africa. People have no idea how bad and useless its teaching of Brazilian Portuguese is for a visit to Portugal until they get here and realize that what they hear sounds nothing like what they learned. There's nothing wrong with Brazilian, and if I were planning to visit Brazil or spend a lot of time with people from there, I would certainly spend time mastering the quirks of pronunciation and the great differences in vocabulary and grammar in informal speech particularly, but for Portugal all that is simply unhelpful in the extreme. The differences are far greater than between ordinary speech in the UK and the US, for example, and on my first visit to London in 1977, I understood almost nothing of the directions people gave me on the street. In what was supposed to be my native language. So don't expect to get far with Brazilian in Portugal. Even if you are a native speaker from Brazil, the pace and manner of speech here may make you feel like a victim of a traffic accident.

But meanwhile, there are a few good apps and sites that focus on European Portuguese and may help you prepare for holidays or life in Portugal. The best of these I've found are described below.

I didn't realize until someone in a Facebook language learner's group mentioned the Practice Portuguese app that I had actually discovered and subscribed to their YouTube channel some time ago. But I didn't pay enough attention to the YouTube content to realize that there was something more on offer and that this something was, to a large extent, something useful for me, even after eleven years of living in Portugal and a competence level that allows me to conduct daily business and socialize in my hunting club without a lot of difficulty.

I'm currently working my way through the A1 level of the Practice Portuguese iOS app and website, though I also skip ahead and enjoy a lot of the B1/B2-level content in lessons, videos, podcasts, etc. After a few days of looking at the free content, I decided to subscribe (the best deal here is via the web site, not the online app stores for phones and tablets), and I am finding a lot of useful material to fill basic knowledge gaps even at the simplest level. I'm also impressed by the well-considered and somewhat original options for review, including the recently introduced "audio review" option.

One of the things that distinguishes the content of Practice Portuguese from Duolingo, for example, is that the voices used in the app are real ones (sometimes with shitty audio and a lot of background noise, but there is always a button to click and hear the same expression in a clear, noise-free native speaker's voice). The use of a large number of different speakers is helpful, I think, to recognize some of the different pronunciation one might encounter, and this is often dealt with explicitly in the lessons. Not differences between Brazil and Portugal but rather how one might here something in Lisbon as opposed to Beja or Braga.

Another resource I found recently is "Conversa Portuguese". It uses the Learnworlds platform (similar to Teachable, which I use sometimes to offer online CAT tool instruction for memoQ) and has what looks like a well-structured program for those needing Portuguese competence for countries other than Brazil. The platform also offers quite a number of useful, free resources for practice. I've looked at these resources, and I like them, but I haven't tried the commercial instruction program (yet) for lack of time. I hope to do so later this year and offer an in-depth report on what I find.

***

Some may wonder how it is that I can still find useful learning opportunities for European Portuguese with programs like Practice Portuguese or Conversa Portuguese, given that I've lived in the country for so long, I have a Portuguese partner with whom I share a farm and a life, and I've had a lifelong reputation of being "gifted" with languages (said reputation being largely unearned and taken seriously mostly by monolinguals). Well, I ask myself that too sometimes, but it is what it is, and "fluency" is really context-dependent, and depending on one's needs and commitments may differ greatly between individuals. It all really comes down to comprehensible input, I think, and that depends a lot on interests and background. Within a few weeks of coming to Portugal, I could grab an organic chemistry textbook in the library and read it, understanding everything in Portuguese (even though I could pronounce none of it). But it was probably a year before I could reliably order a pizza or tell the butcher just what I wanted.

For my friends and colleagues and others who plan to visit Portugal for a holiday or a professional conference or who may consider living here at some point, the options I have described in this article should give you a good foundation for coping with the variety of Portuguese you'll encounter here and perhaps make the culture of the country a bit more accessible. Portugal is not the Paradise some claim it to be, but of all the places I've lived in my life, I find it the least problematic for the things that matter most to me. Your mileage may differ, but equipped with some basic language skills, you'll be more fit for the journey.

Adventures in Language Learning

 

In 2021, feeling more than a little claustrophobic from the ongoing restrictions of life in pandemic times, I enrolled for a time in an online masters course, Português Lingua Não Materna, at Portugal's Universidade Aberta. The course itself was a mistake, or at least the language acquisition unit was, being taught by an insecure older professor who demanded perfection in writing from the course's students while being unable to write a page herself that I can remember not being full of errors (most, but not all being an inability to come to grips with the current orthographic convention), engaging in bizarre linguistic harassment like forbidding me to use Portuguese adjectives ending with -avel (WTF?) and existing in a state of imperviousness to modern research and theory.

The semester of academic involvement did me a world of good, however, leading me back to reading in a field I greatly enjoyed as a young exchange student in Max Mangold's linguistics and dialect courses at Universität des Saarlandes in the early 1980s. In particular, the work of Stephen Krashen was a welcome discovery, as it put many of Mangold's recommendations for language learning into a more effective context. For example, Prof. Mangold often recommended listening to radio or other audio sources (such as tapes) as a means of acquiring a new language, but when I tried this years later with over 100 hours of French on a long train commute to work, it got me exactly nowhere. I was getting plenty of input in French, but as I had no background whatsoever in languages derived from Latin, none of that was comprehensible input. Things might have gone quite differently with the French language had I bothered to learn Spanish in high school, for example.

The following Spring I was in Lisbon for a Covid superspreader conference of colleagues, when someone introduced me to the Duolingo language app, which he was using to review Russian for keeping up with the news on Russia's criminal aggressions against Ukraine. I tried the app myself to review my mostly forgotten Russian from the 1980s and found that my comprehension returned quickly and I could soon follow commentaries online with some effort. However, after a few months of Russian practice, my companheira announced that she had booked a holiday in Spain for my birthday four months later. So I started using Duolingo to learn Spanish, doing parallel courses for learning Spanish from English, German, Russian and Portuguese. My idea, I suppose, was that connecting the Spanish to my other languages of use might reinforce what I learned better and avoid the kind of interference I would occasionally experience many years ago when trying to speak Japanese and finding only Russian words in my head. It sort of worked.

After several months of practice with Duolingo, I discovered interest groups for that app on Facebook, the most interesting one for me at the time being Duolingo Spanish Learners. I skipped right over the idiotic discussions with fools demanding that the language somehow conform to their flawed concept of its "rules" and found a wealth of interesting recommendations for supplemental and alternative learning resources. These included books, YouTube channels (among the best for comprehensible input at many levels was Dreaming Spanish), tutorials and conversation opportunities and more.

After about a year of Spanish practice, including several months of intense conversation practice on Baselang (referral link here), I actually found myself more comfortable conversing in Spanish than in Portuguese, despite having lived in Portugal for a decade. Access to good quality comprehensible input at the beginning and intermediate levels in Spanish was the key here, and my frustration with the lack of such resources for European Portuguese grew as my proficiency in Spanish increased. I have since found some good options for Portuguese, which I will share in later posts, but since I live in a border town just across the river from Badajoz, the capital of the Spanish state Extremadura, I can usually fall back on Spanish if I'm at a loss for words in Portuguese, and I do most of my major shopping over in Spain anyway.

In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time with language learning apps and other resources not just for Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, but also for other languages I do not know but for which I have had occasion to develop special resources for translation and quality assurance in memoQ. These included Ukrainian, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic. Using the apps to learn the alphabets for these languages has made it easier to deal with sample texts in testing and to understand some of the challenges presented by colleagues and clients in need of assistance with regular expressions in languages that most technical gurus can't do anything with.

So henceforth this blog will include information and tips gleaned from my personal and occasionally professional forays into languages and alphabets for any purpose that fits my fancy. And if you, the reader, have interesting things to share in these regards, please do so in the comments.

Best memoQ Translator Pro deal ever — until March 28th, 2024

In the fifteen years I've been using memoQ, I have never seen a discount this good on new perpetual licenses for the desktop translator version of memoQ: 50% off the retail price. For those whose service and maintenance agreements have been lapsed for three years or more, this is also the best price you'll see for getting up to date with the latest version and a new SMA covering any releases in the 365 days following your purchase. The current version of memoQ is 10.5.

Now lately I've heard some people claim that there have been no worthwhile improvements for individual translators since memoQ 205 (version 7.8) or so. Nonsense. Have a look at the "What am I missing?" page to see what changes have occurred since the version you currently use and whether and upgrade is worthwhile for you. If your version is older than 8.0, all you'll see on that page is changes since that version, but there are a lot of good ones to benefit individuals. memoQ server revenue may comprise the vast majority of profits for the company, but the rest of the user base has hardly been neglected. (What has been neglected is good teaching and reference tools for the most part, but that applies to server customers too.)

In the versions 8.x, major improvements were made to term bases that I personally begged to see for years, and a lot has been done to upgrade the user-friendliness of LiveDocs corpora, backup processes for projects and entire memoQ installations, improved regex handling with a special library tool that allows us to focus on getting work done, not idiotic syntax to drive mere mortals mad... and more. These are just a few of the many things that have confirmed time and again that my friends at memoQ Ltd. really are top class and well ahead of the pack.

So take the plunge if you need the latest features, and tell others not to miss a chance they aren't likely to see again anytime soon.

Last chance: memoQ project management. And the translator training course.

Note: This post has been updated to reflect a planning change. The five-day trainer training course has been replaced with a two-day (eight hour) course for translators to master key memoQ features.

 

The CETAPS institute at Universidade Nova de Lisboa FCSH has planned a week-long (20-hour) memoQ online project management training course and a two day (8-hour) course on memoQ mastery for translators in the latter part of January 2024 which might be of interest. 

The first course (from January 22nd to 26th) will be for those in project management roles or similar functions using memoQ TMS servers; it will begin with a day of intense review and instructional guidance for memoQ basics in online projects from a translator and reviewer perspective and proceed from there to topics such as online project creation and administration, rights and resource management, template use, optimal preparation workflows, mid-project updates and more as well as participant-specific issues. The cost is €480.

The second course (from January 29th to 30th) is aimed at translators and reviewers, who want to better understand and handle project workflows for both their own projects and agency-created ones. This will include resource customization, project management, project templates, file import filters, and project navigation, including some regular expressions magic. The cost is €90.

Further information on the course and an enrollment form can be found HERE. The registration period has been extended and enrollments will be accepted through January 5th. Questions regarding the program and enrollment can be directed to Prof. Marco Neves (e-mail: mfneves@fcsh.unl.pt).

Certificates will be issued to all participants completing the courses. Course availability is subject to sufficient enrollment.

Translation & Interpreting in the Movies: an Introduction (webinar)

 

February 26, 2024 @ 2 p.m. UTC. To book your seat, please send an email to info.request@iapti.org

Interpreters and translators are not depicted often in cinema. Here we'll take stock of some cases where they are, and how they are haunted by themes of credibility and betrayal (the two sides of the coin called trust). An atmosphere of mistrust seems to transform actors in these roles into fragile creatures, vulnerable to blame by those who rely on their communicative skills. Persistent dangers remind us too well of the old adage about "killing the messenger" as the professional linguists work against the clock, alone and misunderstood, essential but distrusted, striving to defuse the ticking bomb of looming conflict in hostile circumstances.

The film scenes selected for this presentation will underscore the value of these challenging roles and the importance of professional action in difficult situations, something that will never be reliably given by digital automation.

The webinar is free to IAPTI members and costs USD 15 for non-members.

Javier Rey (host)
Javier was born in Buenos Aires, where he studied and completed his degree in journalism. For more than a decade he engaged in many roles and topics: politics, sports, film reviews, even paranormal events. When conditions for journalists devolved to a role without dignity, he took a new path in sales. He has published 3 books: El guapo en su final (2010), La niña con las manos detrás de la espalda (2019) and Superclásico (2022). He recently co-founded Ciempiés Talleres, where he facilitates a movie club and teaches cinema, creative writing workshops and seminars.

memoQ term base "roundup" chat

 

The last of the planned office hour discussions for the self-guided online course "memoQuickies Resource Camp" will be held on November 27th at 17:00 CET (8:00 PST). For those not already registered for the Zoom chats, the link to do that is HERE. If you have done so previously, the access URL is the same. The chat is open to everyone, regardless of whether they are registered or not in the online course.

We'll begin with open Q&A time on any of the course sections in the term base unit or any other presentations of the subject matter by me on this blog or my YouTube channel. Afterward, I will show my general method for editing or updating term base content via Microsoft Excel exports brought in to the memoQ working grid, which facilitates certain kinds of changes or actions involving regular expression use. This goes beyond the possibilities of the integrated memoQ term base editor, which will also be presented briefly.

A recording of the talk will be made available later in the course structure.

In December the course will move on to discussions of QA profiles and other aspects of quality assurance in memoQ, with some live discussion possibilities to be announced. All course material will remain online for access until the end of March. More information on the memoQuickies Resource Camp can be found HERE.

Book review: "Terminology Extraction for Translation and Interpretation Made Easy"

A few months ago, I received a pre-release copy of this book as a courtesy from the author, terminologist Uwe Muegge, with a request to give a quick language check to the English used by its native German author. As I expected, there wasn't much to complain about, because he has lived in the US for a long time and taught at university there as well as been involved in important corporate roles. I was particularly pleased by his disciplined style of writing, the plain, consistent English of the text and the overall clarity of the presentation. Anyone with good basic English skills should have no difficulty understanding and applying the material.

At the time I read the draft, I was completely focused on language use and style, but I found his approach and suggestions interesting, so I looked forward to "field testing" and direct comparisons with my usual approach to terminology mining with that feature in memoQ. About a day's worth of tests shows very interesting potential for applying the ChatGPT section of the book and also made the context and relevance of the other two sections clearer, I will discuss those sections first before getting to the part that interests me the most.

Uwe presents three approaches:

• ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/)
• OneClick Terms (https://terms.sketchengine.eu/)
• Wordlist (https://www.webcorp.org.uk/live/wdlist.jsp)

I wouldn't really call these three approaches alternatives as the book does, because all three operate in very different ways and are fit for different purposes. That didn't register fully in my mind when I was in "editor mode", although the first part of the book made the differences, advantages and disadvantages clear enough, but as soon as I began using each of the sites, the differences were quite apparent as were the similarities to more familiar tools like memoQ's term extraction module.

Wordlist from Webcorp is functionally similar to Laurence Anthony's AntConc or memoQ's term extraction. It's essentially useful for getting frequency lists of words, but the inability to use my own stopword lists for filtering out uninteresting common vocabulary makes me prefer my accustomed desktop tools. However, the barriers to first acquaintance or use are lower than for AntConc or memoQ, so this would probably be a better classroom tool for introducing concepts of word frequencies and identifying possible useful terminology on that basis.

OneClick Terms was interesting to me mostly because friends and acquaintances in academia talk about Sketch Engine a lot. The results were similar to what I get with memoQ, including similar multiword "trash terms". I found the feature for term extraction from bilingual texts particularly interesting, and the fact that it can work well on the TMX files distributed by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) of the European Commission suggests that it could be an efficient tool for building glossaries to support translation referencing EU legislation, for example, though I expect only slight advantages over my usual routine with memoQ. These advantages are not worth the monthly subscription fee to me. However, for purposes of teaching and comparison, the inclusion of this platform in the book is helpful. I see more value for academic institutions and those rare large volume translation companies that do a lot of work with EU resources. 

ChatGPT was an interesting surprise. I have a very low opinion of its use as a writing tool (mediocre on its best day, clumsy and boring in nearly all its output) or for regex composition (hopelessly incompetent for what I need, and anything it does right for regex is newbie stuff for which I need no support). However, as a terminology research tool I have found excellent potential, though formatting the results can be problematic.

My testing was done with ChatGPT 3.5, not a Professional subscription with access to version 4.0. However, I am sorely tempted to try the subscription version to see if it is able to handle some formatting instructions (avoiding unnecessary capitalization) more efficiently. No matter how carefully I try to stipulate no default capitalization of the first letter of every expression, I inevitably have to repeat the instruction after a list of improperly capitalized candidate terms is created.

I keep an e-book copy of Uwe's book in the Kindle app on my laptop, so I can simply copy and paste his suggested prompts, then add whatever additional instructions I want.

The prompt

Please examine the text below carefully and list words or expressions which may be difficult to translate, but when writing the list, do not capitalize any words or expressions which don't require capitalization.

is too long, and only the part marked red is executed correctly, but this follow-up prompt will fix the capitalization in the list:

Please re-examine that text and this time when writing the list, do not capitalize any words or expressions which do not require capitalization.

Further tests involved suggesting translations for the expressions, with or without a translated text and building tables with example sentences:

Other prompt variations, for example to write terms bold in the example sentences, worked without complications.

What about the quality of the selections? Well, I used memoQ's term extraction module on the same text I submitted to ChatGPT for term extraction in order to compare something with which I am quite familiar with this new process. 

memoQ identified a few terms based on frequency, which ChatGPT ignored, but these were arguably terms that a qualified specialist would have known anyway. And ChatGPT did a superior job of selecting multi-word expressions with no "noise". It also selected some very relevant single-occurrence phrases which might be expected to arise more in later, similar texts.

Split screen review of memoQ extraction vs. ChatGPT results

The split-screenshot is an intermediate result from one of my many tests. The overlayed red box was intended to show a conversation partner the limits of ChatGPT's "alphabetizing skill", and the capitalization of the German is not correct after a prompt to correct the capitalization of adjectives misfired. It is not always trivial to get formatting exactly as I want it. However, looking at the results of each program side-by-side like this showed me that ChatGPT had in fact identified the nearly all the most relevant single words and phrases in my text. And for other texts with dates or citation formats, these were also collected by ChatGPT as "relevant terms", giving me an indication of what legislation I might want to use as reference documents and what auto-translation rules might also be helpful.

I also found that the split view as above helped me to work my way through the noise in the memoQ term candidate list much faster and make decisions about which terms to accept. The terms of interest found in memoQ but not selected by ChatGPT were few enough that I am not at all tempted to suggest people follow my traditional approach with the memoQ term extraction module and skip the work with ChatGPT.

My preferred approach would be to do a quick screening in ChatGPT, import the results into a provisional (?) term base and then, as time permits, use that resource in a memoQ term extraction to populate the target fields in the extraction grid. With those populated terms in place, I think the review of the remaining candidates would proceed much more efficiently.

All in all, I found Uwe's book to be a useful reference for teaching and for my personal work; it is one of the few texts I have seen on LLM use which is sober and modest enough in its claims that I was inspired to test them. The sale price is also well within anyone's means: about $10 for the e-book and $16 for the paperback on Amazon. For the "term curious" without access to professional grade tools, it's a great place to get started building better glossaries and for more seasoned wordworkers it offers interesting, probably useful suggestions.

The book is available HERE from Amazon.

An Unfiltered Look at memoQ Filters (webinar, 19 October 2023, 15:00 CET)

 

This presentation and discussion covered some of the challenges and opportunities to improve memoQ project workflows through correct filter choice and design. There are many different aspects to filters in memoQ, and the right choices for a given translatable file or project are not always clear, or different options may offer particular advantages in your situation.

Cascading filters - an important feature for dealing with complex source texts - are also part of the talk, not just the basics but also examples of going beyond what visible memoQ features allow, to do "the impossible". This session is part of the weekly open office hours for the course "memoQuickies Resource Camp", but everyone is welcome to attend these talks regardless of enrollment status. Those interested in full access to all the course resources and teaching may enroll until the end of January 2024.

To join sessions for the October and November office hours, register here.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. 

Here is an edited recording of the October 19th session, with a time-coded index available on YouTube in the Description field:

What's wrong with my segmentation (in translation)?

The fifth open office hours session for the self-guided online course "memoQuickies Resource Camp" discussed segmentation problems with documents imported to translation environments such as memoQ, Trados Studio, Phrase, Cafetran Espresso, etc. and various ways that these issues might be identified so that they can be corrected.

Segmentation problems waste enormous amounts of time, and bad segmentation rules are a plague on the translation and localization service community. Unfortunately, nearly all the rules I have seen, for all working environments, simply suck sewage. memoQ's rules usually suck less, but still....

This week's talk presented, among other things, some methods for identifying segmentation trouble spots quickly and easily with the use of special regular expressions describing common patterns followed by texts with troubled segmentation. And a Regex Assistant library has been provided (and will be updated during the course period) to help with all of this.

The video and related course pages will remain completely open to the public, with downloads available, at least through the end of 2023. After that the pages and resources may be taken down for updates and reorganization in other courses.

The video recording of the lecture "What's wrong with my segmentation?" can be accessed on YouTube (embedded below) or course participants can access the page to download it by clicking the "segmentation rules" icon at the top of this article.

An important part of checking the performance of your segmentation rules and possibly improving them is to have a good sampling of test data. One of my favorite sources for this are the European Community archives at the DGT, where EU legislation and other important information is available in a parallel corpus of all the official languages of the Community.

I have downloaded part of the 2022 DGT distribution and prepared a number of monolingual and bilingual corpora (about 2.6 million words, approximately 150,000 TUs) in EU languages and translation pairs. Moreover, information on my method has been published so that others can reproduce it for the languages that interest them.

Bring the lightning.

Quality is a slippery notion, especially when discussing it with those whose ethical approaches to providing services are even slipperier. According to one well-known figure in the trashlation sector, "Quality doesn't matter". Knowing that individual as I do, I know that this utterance was intended as a provocation, and that it is likely backed by some almost-persuasive sleight-of-hand involving differing definitions and whatnot. Given the variability in the human emotional perception of quality (as with obscenity, I cannot define quality, but I know it when I experience it), all of the attempts one sees to quantify it in language services seem all the more absurd.

All the myriad process definitions, ISO certifications, stamps and seals of sinlessness, diplomata, grants of honoris causa et cetera cannot transform the humble lightning bug into a Bolt of Zeus.

Nor are Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of such linguistic transubstantiation, but rather the opposite. The predictive practices at their core could take a training feed of all the world's great literature (and likely already have), and yet the output would be nothing more than an insipid averaging of the basest mediocrities. Only the basest of the mediocre could mistake such text for objectively good quality.

Were we to plot the degree of enthusiasm for AI as the "future" of trashlation against the degree of actual understanding and competence for good language, the graph would look something like this:

But a recent article in The Economist suggests a better way. Curiously, it is a process I resort to myself when the greatest subtlety and balance are needed in a work, for example in the translation of good poetry, or a letter of condolence occasioned by the loss of a belovèd child.

Back to pen on paper. Where the pressure of the nib is an expression in itself, as the sweeping flourish of a final letter or a well-executed ligature.

"But that's ABSURD!!!" some might protest, glancing nervously at their smartphone timers counting down to the next due delivery of linguistic sausage. Much too slow some might think. But is it? Really?

"But you need to run QA and you can't do that with a sheet of scribbles on paper!" some might suggest, more reasonably. Ah, but I can, merely dictate the text I will have read aloud already time and again as I refined the words and their rhythm, and then, in good electronic form, all the slings and arrows of outrageous regex are my quality arsenal.

We have a slow food movement. Perhaps if we want more delicious, digestible, properly communicative words in our translated lives, we should slow the fuck down and let them crystallize, with exquisite subconscious fractal creativity, to form bolts of emotion and understanding that pierce the veil between this world and others as they flash across a page.

As the morlocks cower in their caves and hovels, tapping tiny tablets in their claws, prompting their artificial gods to take this terror of meaning from their shriveled world.

Grog and grub with me mateys in Cascais

I got my personal introduction to NFTs last night over pizza in Portugal. WTF? I'm still not sure what to do with this thing I minted, nor even how to download it (if this is possible), but it was a fun bit of madness in the second (or maybe third, I'll know better when the hangover clears) of these gatherings I've attended.

They say you should keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Well, from one perspective that makes LocLunch the perfect social opportunity for our strange times in the language service professions. I had excellent chats with someone well placed in a company that is too often the epitome of Evil Trashlation... and her Russian friend, of course. And Brazilians galore, oh my, those awful people who come to Portugal to steal all the good Catholic men and women from their sanctioned wedlocks and -chains. And I saw that the tradition of German intrigue in Portugal is alive and well maintained by the organizer of last night's event, the energetic entrepreneur Jan Hinrichs, who recently moved his family and headquarters from Madrid (where the Spanish government has lost its business plot) to this, Nossa Senhora's sacred country. Who further undermined our moral defenses with the suggestion that we all get some ice cream nearby before dispersing to our scattered night shelters.

I am thoroughly compromised by those two scoops of mango and third scoop of maracuja. And by the kindness of the Russian fellow who saved me from a dodgy midnight train connection and got me home safely to Benfica.

And though the table was well occupied by those who make their own rules and view the conventional trashlation sector "wisdom" with a jaundiced eye, they followed the the LocLunch Basic Rules very well. This is a social thing, not a fucking sales event. Damn. I had my elevator speech all prepared....

Where'er ye may dwell, whate'ever seas ye may sail, matey, whene'er in port or Porto, join the motley crew of LocLunch for some fine grog and grub with all cutlasses sleeping peacefuçlly in thar scabbards.

 

Flirting with a Fiverr & more

If you always want to get paid...

Payment practices are a perpetual pain in Trashlation World. What professional translator or interpreter has not, at some point, faced difficulty getting paid for work delivered. Or in my case, consultant, independent solution developer and instructor, since I retired from translation three months ago and no longer accept such tasks in the increasingly thankless environment where they are requested.

Net never has become the modus operandi of too many wankers in the NMT-AI-MOUSE Fanboy and -gurl Klub, and when B of A, Barclays, Santander of some other clan of thieves fails to provide the desired credit for the Incredible Journey to Ruin, there will always be those AI Artists Formerly Known as Trashlators who understand that in matter of money, all that really matters is mindset.

Fuck you. Pay me. Well, imagine getting paid! Isn't that exciting? Fuck you. Pay me. I'm more excited by the structure of your fucking kneecaps and how fragile it is... SET YOUR MIND TO PAY ME.

But wait, Paulie, there may be a better way!

A perpetually solvent friend who owns a couple of German service companies once shared his secret: when in doubt, demand payment in advance. When there is no doubt, demand double. But what if the prospect just walks away? Offer them a peck on the check and hold the door for them in gratitude for the grief they are about to save you.

Times are hard. But payment practices are, alas, too often limp. Like a little mushroom past its sell-by date and full of mold and other things best not named.

I'm personally fortunate not to deal with many deadbeats; avoiding business with Italian and American companies certainly helps. Well, I have a soft spot for the Portuguese, but let's not go there.

I have another problem. I had administrative work even more than I hate not getting paid, and since I acquired a retired surgeon as a billing assistant and, at about the same time, took on a new role as a trainer for incoherent billing software like SAGE, not getting paid has been a source of surprising pleasure. But our five dogs still demand food, and if it does come in bags and come on time, well... there is that extra weight I'm carrying, the Portuguese pit bull is fond of reminding me.

And I am sure that many clients and friends and friends with the misfortune to be clients keep a special dartboard with my face on it for those times I get around to writing the bill after a year of so.

Fuck you. Pay me. Well fuck you. Write the fucking bill. Yeah, right, you tell me again how all that works here in Portugal where the tax laws are so screwy that almost none of the invoicing tools typically used by translators, companies involved with language services (regardless of whether they actually provide any) in other countries are compliant with Portuguese tax law, so I often feel myself well and truly fucked.

Enter the performance platforms such as Fiverr, which I am beginning to consider for certain recurring requests where I have asked Dios for a better intake process in which people tell me exactly what they need, provide the means of doing that, including the money to pay for the electricity to drive the tools I use to reach their goal and, well, just let me get on with it and make something nice and bless them for a change.

I started toying with platformed pre-payment about four years ago, when I started using Teachable as a way to demonstrate to memoQ and others how professional tools instruction could be improved and content could be shaped in more useful ways. I may not have been successful in convincing others to Do the Right Thing, but now that I have more time on my hands and have resigned myself to take a shot at that myself and maybe actually charge for all that knowledge that so many people mint money with, I am really, really glad that the Portuguese tax mysteries are handled in a way that does not involve me at all and is completely correct. No more constant special requests for special invoices for special people in special countries and special claims on my non-existent admin time.

So, that's the news, I guess. Next time you need a training video, a dash of regex for your project soup, a magical mysterious import filter for Formats Unknown or the like, there's a process. And it's not "fuck you". That's between consenting buyers and the platforms from which they draw their services....

Say something, I'm using memoQ!

It's a reasonable approximation of reality to say that no good deed goes unpunished, and that can certainly be said for the team of software artists formerly known as Kilgray. The groundlings have little idea of how very concerned the machine is to deliver the right god in communion for our times. No sausage from the golden Trados calf, no. no. The right Phrase is everything, and to delve the source of Memory for this revelation is Our Life's Work.

The ways of the Great CAT who art in Hungary are a mystery, and those lacking Faith are taken aback at a lack of transparency. But I, faithful in my productivity pilgrimage, brought my offering to the High Priest in the temple. 

It was the Time of Offerings, of intelligence sacrificed to artificialities, offerings burnt before an MT God. Ours is a Merciful One, and yea though I walk slowly, very slowly through the Valley of Technical Debt I fear no loss of data, for I am not a user of Trados nor of Wordfast. In Orange Ecstasy I linger, savoring the gentle crush of bugs between my gnashing teeth.

Initiated in the Mysteries I am, the Nine to One of the mighty dollars, flowing like a river of corporate honey or puddling as piss in a petty pool on the commons. 

But our Holy Ground needs a good charge of urea to grow the next best thing, so pay all ye faithful for your SMA renewal before the end of September, when there shall be Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth as the price of memoQ and its servicre and maintenance contract increase by a modest 20% for the nifty Translator Pro version.

And fear not, for I am with you. My rod and staff are needed in the garden to prop up an apple tree, but I can offer this at least: if you blow the deadline and have to pay an extra €20 or so for the SMA renewal this year after October 1st, evidence of that in the form of a purchase invoice or somesuch which reaches me by the end of 2023 on the hidden paths of e-mail or social media will receive as a blessing a discount "coupon" worth twice and half again that for a stay at the memoQuickies Resource Camp until March 2024.

Or if the high priest ever gets back to me as he said he would, maybe there will be an alternative route. You are all nonetheless blessed that you have in your professional hands a tool, which for all its shortcomings, beats the competition to death if you know how to unlock its power (which few really do).

All the myriad GUILTY

If I were really the sort who needed someone to blame for life's tribulations, I would blame Max, though it took me forty-two years to realize that. It was that tempting little seminar he offered on Stuttgarter Schwäbisch in autumn of 1981 that drew me into the dark world of espionage and deceit and episodic madness. But really?

Perhaps I should blame my father instead for his love of books, which he so cruelly imposed on me. How dare he! A book was a sacred object, not to be defaced, and never to be stepped on. How traumatic it was then to see fellow students marking up their textbooks at university, with highlighters, pencils, four-color pens or, o horror, dog-earing the pages instead of using proper bookmarks. But as university does tend to have a corrupting influence on one's character, I was seduced by the perceived utility of the practice, and years later when I learned the term marginalia and found that it was a thing with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other literary heroes of mine, well....

In Xanadu did Kevin Scott
A stinging margin note decree....

Damn old Sam. I blame him too. The derelict toxicodependente, bumming books and free room and board off his too-tolerant friends. Not as bad as that bloody Arab who fancied himself a Frenchie and swiped his host's suits. Oh no, I'm better than that, surely....

Oh, blame there is for all, in full measure, my friends. Form a queue, please, and wait patiently for your personal portion.

What have we here? Faith, here's an English teacher come hither, for stealing out of a French hose: come in, Janssen; here you may roast your goose.

And you, Somtow, what have you to say? Quam tauri merda.

Round about that cauldron go, in the guilty parties throw....

But as the light fades from my dying professional eyes I see at last that I bear all the guilt in mine own Temple of Sin. For I have seen darkly, but face to face now with the social engineering Instagurus of Translation I know and confess: it is my bad mindset. And my failure to practice yoga. Mea maxima culpa.

The memoQ Regex Assistant Revisited at 15:00 CET on 21 September 2023!

 

Eleven months ago I was supposed to talk about terminology in a three-hour evening class taught by one of my friends at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, but I was so excited about the progress of the quality team I was training at one of my agency clients in Portugal that I twisted what was expected to be my usual straightforward 90 minute lecture on term base best practices in memoQ into an unusual take on the role regular expressions might play in terminology management.

That was a weird one, for sure, but the potential I saw was very real. I was defining "terminology" in rather broad terms to include not only more efficient term base management based on problem patterns but also translation memory clean-up, better filtering and find/replace operations in the working grid and QA.

"What the heck has all that got to do with scary ol' REGEX?" you're probably thinking.

Well, all this was triggered by memoQ's recent release of the One Ring Thing we've been needing to unify our memoQ management processes for the routine use of regex by The Rest of Us. The Regex Assistant. The Nazgul of Trados World are surely jealous.

That quality team I was training, my friends at Linguaemundi. is headed by Inês Lucas, about whom I had heard many good things for years from her enthusiastic professors at university but whom I hadn't actually met until she was hired by the agency a few years ago. At the recent memoQ Fest in Budapest, she explained how changing the approach to regex mastery from the struggles of syntax to organizing and applying packaged solutions in well-engineered processes significantly upgraded their work capacities and reduced stress levels. When you cut the nerdy crap and focus on understanding what solutions are called for particular tasks, everything gets much easier.

I was so amazed to see people who had struggled for years to learn regex well enough for simple tasks suddenly become solution powerhouses that I put together (rather spontaneously) a series of three online 90-minute workshops, which were repeated a month later. And new refinements to these methods come each time the ideas are presented.

The raw recordings of those six workshops are included in the current online course ("memoQuickies Resource Camp"), but one - the first of six - is publicly available on YouTube, where you can have a look.

However in the memoQuickies Resource Camp, a self-guided course that is serving as a platform for me to organize and distribute the best resources from my 14 years as a memoQ user, solution provider and trainer before I retire, I'll be taking another more streamlined pass at teaching some of the best possibilities for using memoQ Regex Assistant resource libraries. The webinars offered in most weeks of the course are simply an overview of the current topic emphasized in the course and also serve as a Q&A platform and a means of offering some different perspectives on information from the self-guided units. Recordings are always added to the course for later viewing.

This coming Thursday at 15:00 Central European Time, I'll give a brief overview of the Regex Assistant much like the public YouTube video does and answer any questions that attendees might have. Further information and an event notice can be found here on LinkedIn.

You can join the webinar with this link. The meeting ID is 878 3540 2561, and the passcode is 385434

Save the date: IAPTI2023, 11-12 November 2023 in Timișoara, Romania

After all the chaotic Covid-induced delays, it's finally happening this year from November 11th to 12th:

Registration is now open for #IAPTI2023 in Timisoara, Romania! Network with experienced #translators and #interpreters from around the world as they share their professional insights in this amazing city.

The International Association of Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) promotes professional ethics and best practice on every continent and is noted for speaking out on "controversial" issues when human rights and the health and professional stability of individual language service providers are at stake. 

Since I became a member in 2014, I have always enjoyed the company of some of the finest colleagues in the translation and interpreting sectors and learned so many surprising and fascinating things about specialties I would otherwise never have known. IAPTI has very often been the first to support the development of professional organizations in developing countries and for disadvantaged populations. 

Join this year's gathering in one of Romania's most beautiful cities and get with the program....

All you need to know about this year's schedule, speakers and registration policies is here:

https://www.iapti.org/TMconference/