Terminology collaboration with Google Docs: new twists

A few years ago, I put a notice in this blog about a colleague's interesting use of Google Docs to share terminology with faraway colleagues in a project. Earlier this year I enjoyed a similar collaboration with a Google Docs spreadsheet used to exchange and update terminology on a very time-critical annual report with translators using two different versions of Trados, memoQ and no CAT tools at all.

Sharing information via Google Docs was quite easy, and we were able to configure the access rights without a lot of trouble. But at the time I still had a bit of extra, annoying effort to get the data imported into my working environment for frequent updates.

Tonight another colleague contacted me with basically the same problem. Her client manages data in an Excel spreadsheet, which gets updated and sent out frequently. She already had the idea that this might work better in Google Docs, and I agreed.

But I kept thinking about that annoying update problem....

One can, of course, export Google Docs spreadsheet data in various formats:

I've marked a few of the export ("download") formats which are probably useful for a subsequent import into a translation environment too. But the downloaded data still won't be in the "perfect" format in many cases, and there will be extra steps involved in matching it up to the fields in your term base.

One way to simplify this problem is to create another online spreadsheet in Google Docs and link it to the original, shared spreadsheet. In this second spreadsheet, which is your "personal" copy for use in your favorite tool, you reformat the data so they will export in a form that makes your later import to your tool's termbase easier.

In my case, I use memoQ, so I created a Google Docs spreadsheet with the first row containing the default field names of interest from the CSV export of my memoQ termbase:

I linked the columns in my personal online spreadsheet with the shared spreadsheet using the ImportRange command. It has two arguments, both of which have to enclosed in quotes. The first one (argument #1 above) is the key for the online spreadsheet to be referenced; it is shown in the URL of the online spreadsheet (just look in the address bar of your browser and you will see it). The second one specifies the sheet and the range of cells to copy. I put this formula in one cell and it copied the entire column for me.

I could, if I wanted to, use conditional (IF) statements and other tricks to transform some data in columns of the other sheet and build the semicolon-delimited term properties list (Term_Info) that memoQ uses to keep track of gender, capitalization enforcement, forbidden status, etc. But none of that is needed for simple sharing of terms, definitions and examples for instance.

I simply export my personal Google Docs spreadshit as CSV, then import it into my desired termbase in memoQ. If I have IDs set for the term entries in the online spreadsheet, I could even choose ID-based updates of my local termbase when I do the import.

Those who use other tools, such as Trados, OmegaT or WordFast can set up their spreadsheets and do exports as best suits their needs.

This approach enables you to take source data in nearly any format in an online spreadsheet and rework it for the greatest convenience in the tool of your choice. Although not a "perfect" solution, it is perhaps a convenient one until better resources are commonly available for dynamic, cross-platform translation collaboration.

So what do I recommend my friend to try as a first step? Maybe take the client's latest spreadsheet, copy and paste it into Google Docs and share it with the client and others on the team. Then it's already "up there" for everyone's convenience (local XLSX copies can be downloaded any time), and she can get on with creating a convenient "view" of this shared data in her personal spreadsheet, which can be exported for local use any time. That personal sheet could also be shared (read only access recommended) with other team members using the same translation environment tool.

memoQuickie: migrating legacy TM data to memoQ (for beginners)

If you have worked with other translation environment tools before, you may have translation memory resources that you wish to migrate to memoQ. The best way to do this is to export the data from the old system in TMX format. Delimited text formats (such as WordFast TMs) can also be imported.

To bring the data into memoQ, first create a new translation memory with the appropriate language pair. This can be done via Tools > Resource console… > Translation memories > Create new or in a project via Project home > Translation memories > Create/use new. In most cases,  you will want to use the default TM settings.

Once the TM is created, select it and choose Import from TMX/CSV:

Importing a Wordfast translation memory as delimited text

Importing TMX data created by SDL Trados

After this, your translation memories are ready to use in memoQ.

Converting MARTIF to Excel

This afternoon I received an interesting project of a sort I don't see often - Star Transit. I avoided these like the plague for years, because I dislike Transit as a working environment, though I expect the latest version is probably an improvement over what I used to use. However, since Kilgray created an excellent import routine for Transit packages (PXF files), working on these projects is quite a simple matter. Except for terminology. The memoQ integration currently does not include the Transit terminology.

The client was kind enough to supply MARTIF exports from the Transit dictionaries, but unfortunately that's not an import format for memoQ, though really it should not be that difficult to deal with that XML format (I hope). So I went on the search for a solution and soon discovered a PrAdZ thread in which Czech translator Antonín Otáhal offered a VBA macro for converting the MTF files (MARTIF) to Excel.

The solution works nicely, though in my tests I found it necessary to open the MTF files in Notepad and re-save them as ANSI so the special characters in German would not get trashed. And I hate typing a full file path into the selection dialog, so I modified the code to include a proper file selection dialog. If anyone else can use such a tool, I've made it available here as an XSLM file (a macro-enabled Excel worksheet for MS Office 2010). Improvements are very welcome; I've been out of the programming game too long now to refine this much without investing more time than it is worth to me.

Nonetheless, I'm quite pleased that I can now save a tab-delimited or CSV text file from Excel and import this easily into memoQ or other translation environments. So moving term data from Star Transit to other tools is now a little easier.

To use the tool

1. Make a copy of the Excel file
2. Open your working copy of the Excel file
3. Press Alt+F8 to bring up the list of macros
4. Select the macro "mtf2excel"
   
   
   
   
5. Click the Run button. A file selection dialog will appear, and if everything is OK with the encoding, your term data should appear shortly in the columns of the Excel sheet.