memoQuickie: keyboard shortcuts for migrants (updated)

(PM - Pro - 2013R2 - 2013 - 6.2 - 6.0 - 5.0)

You can adapt memoQ keyboard shortcuts to your personal preferences or to be ergonomically compatible with other translation environments tools you use frequently for better productivity and reduced risk of errors.

Although keyboard shortcuts can be managed in the Resource Console, it is more useful to do so under Tools > Options… > Keyboard shortcuts, because that is the only place where a given set of keyboard shortcuts can be selected for use. Marking the checkbox for a list in the dialog shown above will make it the active one.

Look carefully at the keyboard shortcuts available in memoQ. Not all of these commands are found in menus (for example, the shortcut for quick search with selected text in a translation grid, Ctrl+Shift+F by default). To examine a set of keyboard shortcuts, select it and click Edit to show the list.

To change a keyboard shortcut, select the value in the Shortcut key column of the editing dialog and press the new key combination.

memoQ AutoCorrect: mysteries revealed

Actually, AutoCorrect isn't that mysterious to those familiar with it. Many Microsoft Office users love it or hate it. I usually love it when I type English, but when I switch between languages in the same document, strange mutations occur in my words and I often wonder how I could possibly have typed some of the things I seem to have typed and of course did not.

Last December when I started the research to update my book of memoQ tips (which is still in progress, because the software is a fast-moving target to describe), I found a way to migrate the AutoCorrect lists from Microsoft Word to memoQ (and vice versa). This was a happy day for me, as a Dutch partner had been asking for exactly that for a very long time, and Kilgray's Support had not been able to offer a solution. I never did get around to blogging my findings, but a few months later, a similar solution was published in the Kilgray Knowledgebase. It states that it's perhaps only for migrating AutoCorrect lists from MS Word 2003, but I used an old macro from MS Word 98 when I worked out the problem, and if that still functions for MS Word 2010, then I'm sure Kilgray's posted solution must be fine for new versions. (Just be careful to use UTF-8 as the code page of text files you transfer or there may be trouble.)

But the best solution was actually published a few years earlier by Val Ivonica. In Portuguese. She included the macro code, and I like her macro (or the one she got from someplace) better. For some strange reason, the only really good information available on memoQ AutoCorrect up to now that I could find is in Portuguese. There are some nice examples of useful AutoCorrect shortcuts for periods of a year from William Cassemiro on the Janela Tradutória blog.

I was quite surprised to learn that many users of memoQ have no idea what AutoCorrect is; Déjà Vu offers the same feature, but I think it's missing in the various Trados versions, possibly because of the history of Trados Workbench as an application used primarily in the MS Word environment. The Kilgray documentation I could find was rather skimpy and seemed entirely focused on typing shortcuts. The idea of correcting spelling or vocabulary differences between language variants wasn't anywhere I could find it.

So I put together this "little" overview of how AutoCorrect works in memoQ and how and where to manage the AutoCorrect list resources there. It's a start... perhaps Kilgray or someone else can fill in the missing bits.

Time  Description
0:38  Activating AutoCorrect in an open project
1:47  AutoCorrect in action while typing
3:30  How the "primary" AutoCorrect list "rules"
3:55  Slide show: overview of AutoCorrect
4:59  Slide show: Three places to manage AutoCorrect

Translating embedded objects in Microsoft Office documents

Yesterday a colleague sent me a note to say he had been searching my blog for information about translating compound Microsoft Office documents (that is documents with embedded objects) in memoQ and couldn't find any. I presume he was referring to the article about how often one CAT tool is not enough - combined workflows with other tools can frequently help solve many tricky translation problems, and DVX2 or STAR TRANSIT are definitely useful options for preparing compound Microsoft Office documents for translation in memoQ. Some time ago I recommended using STAR TRANSIT as a pre-processing tool to one of my agency friends, and he carried out a very large, complex project successfully using memoQ's excellent integration features for STAR TRANSIT projects.

There is, of course, another simple way to translate the embedded objects in a Microsoft Office document that does not involve purchasing other software licenses. I don't usually talk about it, because there are a few limitations, and until recently I had not figured out how to avoid corrupting the files when I tried to do things the "easy" way. This approach is not limited to memoQ and will actually work with most CAT tools - so SDL Trados Studio users can do this as well, for example.

It is useful to know that the Microsoft Office 2007/2010 file formats (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) are really just ZIP files containing XML and a bunch of other stuff. That stuff includes a folder with the embedded objects in formats that can be dealt with directly.

If you have an older, binary MS Office document (DOC, PPT, XLS) with embedded objects, convert it to a 2007/2010 format.

If you rename the file extension DOCX, PPTX or XSLX to ZIP and unpack the ZIP file, inside the folder you will find a folder called "embeddings". The files in that folder can be copied elsewhere and usually handled directly in your CAT tool. But problems usually arise when you put them back, rezip the folder and change back to the original extension. The compression gets screwed up, and the Microsoft Office file is corrupted and won't open.

The only reliable method I have found for avoiding this is to use the Windows Explorer (under Windows 7) to open the ZIP file:

Here's what the "guts" of one DOCX file with a bunch of embedded Excel tables looks like:

Inside the word folder you'll find the embeddings folder:

The contents of the embeddings folder look like this:

Simply copy the embeddings folder somewhere safe, translate its contents, then copy them back to the ZIP file using Windows Explorer. Then rename the ZIP extension to the original extension for the file.

If you open the file and look at it, you'll get a shock. When you see all the objects in their original language, you might think something went wrong. Nothing bad has happened; you merely need to refresh the objects. This can be done by opening each briefly to edit or using a macro to open each object and close it again quickly. In a job with dozens of embedded objects in a long file, this macro is a helpful shortcut.

Given how easily accessible this embedded content actually is, one has to wonder why other major CAT tool providers like SDL and Kilgray have failed to offer the option of importing embedded content in their filters up to now. Let's hope they do soon. In the meantime, this workaround should enable many people to deal with this complex and irritating file format challenge.

Here's a summary of the procedure once again:

1. Rename the *.???x file to *.zip 
2. Under Windows 7, right-click on the ZIP file and open it using the Windows Explorer. Using ZIP tools of any kind risks corruption by changing the compression ratios. 
3. Find the embeddings folder inside the ZIP structure. Copy this elsewhere and use it as the source for translation. It will contain all the embedded objects as single files. 
4. Copy the translated content back into the embeddings folder in the ZIP structure.
5. Rename the ZIP file to its original extension. 
6. Open the file and refresh each embedded object (which will initially appear not to have been translated) by right-clicking and opening it from the context menu or running a macro to do that.

Translating "foreign" bilingual tables in memoQ

--- In memoQ@yahoogroups.com, Liset Nyland wrote:
> A client has sent me a 2-column rtf-file export from DVX.
> It looks similar to the MemoQ export but not quite.
>
> The target column is full of fuzzy matches, so I need to recover these.
...
> ... do you know if there's a bilingual format exported from DVX that can
> be loaded and translated directly in MemoQ?

There is one way to deal more-or-less directly with the DVX bilingual RTF tables - or any others being introduced by other providers or bilingual tables that some customers are fond of using to store translation strings or other content. I would love to see a general import routine from Kilgray that allows selection of source and target columns of various file types in a dialog, but until then...

1. Get a copy of the PlusToyZ macros by German/English to Ukrainian/Russian translator Arkady Vysotsky.
2. Copy the source and column targets into a separate RTF or MS Word file.
3. Run the PlusToyZ macro to convert that to a Trados-like bilingual (the old Wordfast/Trados RTF/DOC bilingual)
4. Import the converted file to memoQ using the default filter, which is intelligent enough to recognize that you are dealing with Trados-compatible bilingual DOC/RTF.
5. Translate, edit, feed the TM, etc.
6. Export the processed file.
7. Use the appropriate conversion macro in PlusToyZ to turn the data back into a table.
8. Paste the data back into the original bilingual table from DVX or whatever tool it came from.

This is the preferred method to use when your bilingual table is partially pretranslated, or you have a translated table you want to edit while having a better look at the source text. This would also be a useful method for jobs I've had where customers have string or terminology lists in Excel to translate that are in some cases incomplete.

Once you get to Step 3, you can translate that bilingual format in any tool which works with the old Trados RTF/Word segmentation, such as WordFast Classic.I think that was actually the reason Arkady wrote those macros in the first place.

If you want to protect the DVX codes (or similar structures, including placeholders) or store them in the TM as proper tags, run the Regex tagger or use a cascading filter a described in my other blog post about regular expressions for DVX external table translation in memoQ. Of course, for content other than DVX tags, a different regular expression will be needed.

RegEx for translating DVX external view tables in memoQ

Atril's Dejà Vu was the first translation environment tool I am aware of to offer a means of exchanging translation content for review, correction and translation using an ordinary word processor. These "external views" were the original inspiration for memoQ's RTF bilingual tables, which are used in many interoperable workflows not only with people using a word processor but with many other CAT tools as well.

As with memoQ RTF bilinguals, the content in the "external view" which is not to be translated can be selected and hidden with a word processor, leaving only a target column into which the source text has been copied. But these steps alone with the standard RTF filter pose a problem:

The DVX "codes" (tags), which are represented by curly brackets enclosing a number, are not protected. Erasing parts of them can damage the content. It is also not possible to perform a tag check using the memoQ QA functions.

The solution is to use the Regex tagger in memoQ. There are two ways to do this.

If the document has already been imported,

the tagger can be run from the Format menu.

Enter the appropriate regular expression to convert the DVX code to a protected tag: \{(\d+)\}

This expression describes the pattern of the text to protect: a curly bracket (with a backslash in front of it to indicate that this is to be interpreted literally as a character, not as a bracket for grouping something), one or more digits (\d indicates a digit as opposed to d, which is just the letter d, and the plus sign means one or more) and a closing curly bracket ("escaped" with a backslash so it is understood literally as the bracket character in the DVX code.)

Click Add to put the rule in the list, then click Run tagger now.

The result is protected tags in the translation grid of memoQ. These can also be verified with a QA tag check after the translation is completed.

Your regular expression rules can be saved in the dialog above and re-used, or exported from the list under Tools > Resource console... > Filter configurations and shared with others.

The regular expression tagger can also be used as a cascading filter when the RTF file for the external view is imported:

Here the configuration can also be saved or another one loaded.

Sometimes one CAT tool is not enough

Not long ago, a colleague in New Zealand expressed her frustration about the limits of interoperability for common translation environment tools and her sense of unfulfilled promises:

In the case she was concerned with, she was quite right. There are workarounds for complex MS Word documents with footnotes, but none of these are really optimal for a team working simultaneously in several different CAT tools. In the case of memoQ 5 (which was part of the mix) the lack of support for footnotes in RTF/DOC bilinguals made it impossible to review an uncleaned translation done in WordFast Classic (not a problem for simpler files), and the use of a bilingual DOC export from memoQ used the "simple" format of one segment per line, thus losing the format for the working translator. I hope that will be dealt with in time by Kilgray's developers.

But fortunately, interoperability really does work - it is "the art of compromise" as one industry guru put it, but there are many acceptable compromise strategies that allow productive collaboration, and memoQ excels in this regard more than any other tool I know. But as I have said so often, we need a broad palette of tools to enable us to handle any job efficiently, and last week's project here was a good example of this.

No good deed goes unpunished, and my punishment for an almost miraculous rescue of the editing and harmonization of a large, complex financial report done in a hurry by several translators, some of whom don't use CAT tools at all, was that I got to do the update of that text and see all the little stuff we missed the first time around when the client CEO and I traded sleep for coffee and Excel spreadsheets. Actually, I loved that job, and I was proud of what we could accomplish in 48 hours that should have taken a week or more of overtime. All of it possible only thanks to memoQ LiveDocs and the QA module. And lots and lots of coffee.

In this round, however, I was determined to avoid some of the pain caused last time by file format problem. The Notes to the annual report contained about 30 embedded Excel tables in a Word document. "So what?" says the user of Star Transit or DVX2. "Uh oh!" say the Trados and memoQ users. This is where interoperability saved me hours of bother.

I'm no longer comfortable doing routine work in my former preferred tool, Déjà Vu. The working environment of memoQ is more ergonomic for me, and although I still miss a number of very useful features in DVX, on the balance, the features I gained in memoQ allow me to do many more things better (or even at all). Nonetheless, this time Atril had the clear advantage.

I translated the main text of the Notes in memoQ, making full use of my translation memories, glossaries and QA settings there. I enjoyed the previews of the embedded Excel documents, which gave me necessary context for some of my work, but the actual content of those tables was untouchable in memoQ. Then I exported the translation, which was an English document with embedded tables in German.

This compound document was then imported to DVX2 together with my TM. I copied the source to target, locked all the English content (it was helpful that the content extracted from the Excel tables was at the end of the translation scroll) and pretranslated what remained from the TM. Less than an hour later I exported the completely finished translation - and saved a lot of fiddly work exporting and importing those stupid tables like I had to do before. I really do hope that memoQ's filters for MS Office documents will be updated to handle embedded objects soon - it's not uncommon that I have Excel, Visio or PowerPoint objects stuck in my Word documents.

After delivering the text, I then turned to the next task: exporting my terminology. Once again, interoperability came to my rescue here. This customer places a lot of importance on the correct use of IFRS and their own terminology. One of the ways we coordinate this is to exchange glossary information in a format that this customer, who doesn't know a CAT tool from a Persian feline, can cope with. A nicely formatted DOCX or PDF dictionary does the trick. But I can't do that with memoQ.

I've been advocating the addition of XSL script selection to memoQ's XML term export for some time now. My own efforts to create good scripts for my purposes are hampered by the fact that I haven't done much programming for a decade now and I've lost most of my skills. So until I sort that problem out, I take the terms in XML from memoQ and import them to SDL Trados MultiTerm. MultiTerm is unique among the terminology tools on the low end of the market in that it has always offered some useful export format templates (which can be adapted) for re-use of the term information in other environments. Formatted RTF dictionaries like the one shown here as a thumbnail, web pages, custom text exports... the sky's the limit if you can deal with the odd configuration options and unexpected crashes. Having traversed that minefield often enough in the past decade, I can usually produce something good-looking from my memoQ terminology with SDL Trados MultiTerm without much ado. And my clients like it a lot more than an ugly CSV export.

So why didn't I just use Déjà Vu or Trados in the first place? Re-read the text above. None of the three CAT tools I use was capable of doing everything I required as efficiently as I needed it done. DVX2 came the closest, but the lack of a preview, the primitive way that tags (codes) are still managed and the lack of comfort I feel translating in that environment (I'm much slower now) made it a poor option for the bulk of the work. But working in carefully planned concert, these three tools produced excellent results, made my client happy and made me happy by saving the rest of my day with an early delivery.

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.

Twitterview: SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, DVX2 and PDF extraction

When I began using Twitter somewhat hesitantly three years ago, I never expected that it would eventually prove to be one of the most useful social media tools for gathering information of professional value. Much of this is serendipitous; I really never know what will come floating down the twitstream or where some of the conversations in it will go. Like the direct chat I had with with a colleague in New Zealand about features she liked best in the two main CAT tools she uses, SDL Trados Studio and memoQ.

We both really appreciate the TM-driven segmentation in memoQ and the superior leverage this offers. But to my surprise, she expressed a preference for SDL Trados Studio, particularly for the quality of its PDF text extractions from electronically generated files. This is not a feature I make heavy use of in either tool, though I have used it more often lately in memoQ for alignments in the LiveDocs module and found it generally satisfactory. Most of my work involving PDF files is with scanned documents - there one has no choice but to use a good OCR tool like OmniPage or ABBYY FineReader.

So I was quite intrigued that the quality of PDF was "better" than from standalone tools. Especially because my experience is quite different. Further discussion (not shown in the graphic) revealed that what she actually meant was that the quality of the text extraction with the CAT tool usually beat the quality of text received from translation agencies who performed conversions. That is easy to explain, really. In my experience, most agencies are clueless about how to use conversion tools and too often use automated settings and save the results "with layout". This is very often utterly unsuited for work with translation environment tools or requires a lot of cleanup and code zapping.

For years I have recommended to agencies and colleagues that they spare themselves a lot of headaches by saving PDF conversions as plain text and adding any desired formatting later. Most people ignore that advice and suffer accordingly. So in a way, a CAT tool that does so encourages "best practice" for PDF translation for those files they are actually able to handle.

Encouraged by the Twitter exchange, I decided to do a few tests with files from recent projects. I took a PDF I had with various IFRS-related texts from EU publications. It appeared to extract quickly and cleanly in memoQ, giving me a translation grid full of nicely segmented text. SDL Trados Studio 2009 choked badly on it and extracted nothing. Her extraction in SDL Trados Studio 2011 caused a timeout with the project I was told, but the text itself was completely extracted and converted to DOCX format. This is useful, because unlike the extraction to plain text in memoQ, this offers the possibility to add or change some text formatting in the translation grid. Other extraction examples from SDL Trados Studio 2011 showed that text formatting was preserved.

A closer examination of the extracted texts revealed some problems with both the memoQ and Trados Studio extractions. The memoQ 5 PDF text extraction engine proved incapable of handling text in multiple columns properly. The paragraph order was all fouled up. The extraction with SDL Trados Studio had a great number of superfluous spaces. Whether it is possible to optimize this in the settings somehow I do not know. The results of all the extraction tests are downloadable here in a 6 MB ZIP file. I've included the SDL Trados Studio extraction saved to plain text as well for a better comparison of the text order and surplus spaces problems.

Overall, I am personally not very pleased with the results of the text extractions from PDF in either tool. The results from SDL Trados Studio are clearly better, and other examples that were shared made it clear that this tool works better than many an untrained PM with better PDF conversion software. This is certainly much better than solutions I see many translators using. But really, nothing beats good OCR software, an understanding of how to use it well and a proper workflow to get a good TM and target file better fit for most purposes.

*****

Update 2012-05-22: I met colleague Victor Dewsbery at a recent gathering in Berlin, and he told me about his tests with the recently introduced PDF import feature of Atril's Déjà Vu X2 translation environment. He kindly offered to share his results (available for download here) and wrote:

Here is the result of the PDF>DVX2>RTF>ZIP process for your monster EU PDF file. Comments on the process and the result:

• The steps involved were: 1. import the file into DVX2 as a PDF file; 2. mark all segments and copy source to target; 3. export the file as if it were a translated file (it comes out as an RTF file). The RTF file is 20 MB in size and zips to 3 MB.
• Steps 1 and 3 took a long time, and DVX2 claimed to be not responding. For step 1 I just left it and it eventually came up with the goods. Step 3 exported the RTF file perfectly, even though DVX2 claimed that the export had not finished. I was able to open the RTF file (it was locked, but I simply renamed it), and this is the version which I enclose. Half an hour later DVX2 had still not ended the export process (and had to be closed via the Task Manager), although the exported file was in fact perfectly OK. The procedure worked more smoothly with a couple of smaller PDF files. Atril is working on streamlining the process and ironing out the glitches in the process, especially the “not responding” messages.
• The result actually looks very good to me. There are hardly any codes in the DVX2 project file (the import routine also integrates CodeZapper). I didn’t spot any mistakes in the sequence of the text. Indented sections with numbering seem to be formatted properly - i.e. with tabs and without any multiple spaces.
• The top and bottom page boundaries in the exported file are too wide, so most pages run over and the document has over 900 pages instead of just under 500. Marking the whole document and dragging the header/footer spaces in Word seems to fix this fairly quickly.
• I note that some headlines are made up of individual letters with spaces between them. This may be related to the German habit of using letter spacing (“Sperrschrift”) for emphasis as an alternative to bold type.
• I found one instance where text was chopped up into a table on page 857 of the file.
• There are occasional arbitrary jumps in type size and right/left page boundaries between sections.

On the strength of this sample, it would usually be OK to simply import the PDF file into DVX2, translate in the normal way, and then fix any formatting problems in the exported file.

Five favorite things about the CAT

When I listen to colleagues talk about the tools they use, I find it interesting how diverse the points are that they emphasize when describing the advantages of their environments. I'm not surprised, really, because the needs of individuals vary a lot as do the projects they may encounter in different phases of their careers. And the limits of a tool itself influence the "advantages", of course.

So I sent off a few e-mails to some friends, asking what they felt the "top five" features of their choice of CAT tools are for their purposes. I'm still waiting for a few responses, but I'd like to share what I've heard so far. I'll add more as and when I get more feedback. Others are welcome to add their Top 5s in the comments.

OmegaT
The respondent here uses this tool exclusively and does a fine job of correcting me every time I put my foot in my mouth with a misstatement about the capabilities of the software. He wrote with his typical humility:

I don't think I'm the right person to do this. Mainly because OmegaT is the only tool I've used for the last nine years.

Favourite features:

• It runs on Linux.
• It does what it says on the box.
• It *always* works. It doesn't hang or crash. I can't remember when it last did, if it ever did. Bugs are rare and when they do happen tend to concern secondary features that are still at the beta stage.
• It's fast; almost everything is near-instantaneous. (An exception is the "Search files" function, though I don't use that much and I doubt many others do, either.)
• "Upgrading" means downloading and unpacking, that's it.

Not very sexy, sorry. Like my '99 Mazda 626 wagon, it just gets the job done

Just gets the job done? Well, what more could one want? There are plenty of tools that often don't manage that. I've seen huge improvements in this environment in recent years, and there are certainly worse tools to start with. It is Open Source but worth taking seriously for professional work.

SDL Trados Studio
The respondent here is still using Studio 2009, so surely more notable features will be discovered after an upgrade to Studio 2011. But for his team of top-notch translators, the three he indicated are pretty persuasive:

• AutoSuggest (which is apparently so good that Kilgray will implement it in the next memoQ version, a rare exception to emulation that more often runs the other way)
• File format filters. (I have often used SDL filters to prepare content to translate in other environments)
• Project package sharing. (This is useful in any environment which offers it, but there is a need for all vendors to get off their butts and support interoperable package standards.)

Déjà Vu
See Victor Dewsbery's comment below. DVX used to be my favorite tool, one whose innovations have still to be matched in some respects by any of the competition. Its visionary software architect is arguably one the greatest contributors ever to the development of user friendly CAT tools.I am not personally familiar with the current version of the software at the present time nor with the server solution which was finally released.

memoQ
I spend far too much time on my blog talking about my fave features of this tool, so I asked a few others to have their say. One said that the things she found most helpful were

• PDF alignment (although it doesn't always work)
• The infinitely customizable interface - fonts, colors, sizes of windows, placement of windows, horizontal/vertical split, etc.
• Extensive [bilingual] export options (memoq bilingual, xliff, trados, two-column rtf)
• Lean software - version 5.0.62 is under 26 MB download, even smaller than version 3.0.37 which was nearly 35. Compare this to the bloat of SDL - currently 338 MB if my research is correct.
• "Duh" comments: very responsive support, frequent new releases and features, inexpensive

 *******

Do you use one of these tools or another and want to share the features which help you most to be productive or which just put a big smile on your face? Have your say in the comments.

.

Translation tool concordances compared

A recent experience when tutoring a new memoQ user started me thinking about the way concordance searches work in various translation environment tools and how the results are displayed. The user, who was quite experienced with OmegaT, kept telling me that memoQ could not find examples of a term's use in the TM and she had to do all her searches in OmegaT. I was somewhat puzzled by that, and when I looked at her screen with the memoQ concordance dialog, I saw something like this:

The memoQ version 5 concordance dialog

Looks like the term ("Inverkehrbringen") was found. So what was the problem? For years she had looked at this concordance view:

The OmegaT concordance dialog

The differences in layout and the lack of highlighting of the key term (which was aligned in the center of the memoQ concordance window in the ancient KWIC display tradition) were unexpected and confusing to the new user.

This inspired me to have a look at how various other tools display concordance results. I was not very happy with some of what I discovered, especially with some of today's leading commercial tools. I took a look at the TWB translation memories in SDL Trados 2007, concordancing in SDL Trados Studio 2009, Wordfast Pro (very limited test due to a demo license and my inability to load my TMX test data), memoQ and OmegaT.

In terms of overall performance, the best results were obtained with OmegaT and "Trados Classic" (2007). Searching a huge TM gave results in a flash. Concordance searches with SDL Trados Studio 2009, on the other hand, really sucked with a big TM (EU data, about 400,000 TUs). I vacuumed my entire apartment and fed the dog while I waited for the result, and I wasn't even told how many hits were found. Unfortunately, my favorite working environment, memoQ, performed worst with the same big data set: it simply gave an error message. Further testing revealed that this error was due to the very large number of hits. (This would have been obvious had I paid enough attention to read the dialog title in the first place.)

memoQ error message from too many concordance hits

So it looks like some development attention may need to be directed here. (Update: Kilgray's develops are actively working to remove this restriction.) Of all the tools I was able to test with a large concordance, memoQ was the only one to fail this way. My personal TM with about 10 years of my work in it is nearly as long as my German/English EU legal test database, but concordance searches in it using memoQ are not unduly slow.

Other concordance views looked like this:

The concordance in SDL Trados 2007 - hits limited compared to OmegaT (see above)

SDL Trados 2009 - perhaps the easiest to read, but slower than molasses

Wordfast Pro - format not bad, but the test was limited due to the demo license

The Déjá Vu X concordance hasn't changed significantly in appearance in the latest version (DVX2). Once again, Victor Dewsbery was kind enough to provide me with screenshots of the two "scan" options for searching the translation memory. The initial scan produces only fairly close matches, while the "power scan" is more like the usual concordance with the term embedded in a larger body of text (the non-matching parts being crossed out)

DVX2 scan (first click)

DVX2 Power Scan (second click)

I do have a license for the older version of DVX, but I didn't attempt any stress testing. While its performance with large TMs has always been good (my personal "Big Mama" is about 330,000 TUs), import and export of such data volumes are painfully slow. We're talking overnight. I hope the new version is better in that respect. There I must really give kudos to the OmegaT developer: loading the TM was even faster than with Trados Workbench, which for me has always been a benchmark of speed to aspire to. All you have to do to add a TMX file to the TM of an OmegaT project is to drop it in the "TM" folder of the project. Very nice :-)

I also received a screenshot of a search in Transit NXT from colleague Hans Lenting in the Netherlands. He searched the term "Inverkehrbringen" in the German/Dutch EU dataset from the DGT:

STAR Transit NXT concordance search

As you can see, there are many ways to display data from a concordance search. Which do you find easiest to deal with? Personally, I love the insertion features of the memoQ concordance, but for readability I think some of the other tools are better. And I do like to know how many results I can expect from my data, and I might even want to view them all.

ODT files in translation environment tools

After an interesting afternoon with a friend who was a bit frustrated with the behavior of her translation assistance technology with an ODT (Open Office text) source file, I decided to have a look at how a variety of common tools handle this format. I created a small test file which contained some of the troublesome elements and saved it as *.odt for testing. The test file looked like this:

The ordered list was created using the numbering feature.

When the file was imported to OmegaT, the segmentation looked as follows:

Fairly clean, though the segmentation is a bit off due to the encoding of the space after the end of the sentence in the second block of text. Nine segments where there should have been ten.

With memoQ, the result was:

Altogether there were a dozen segments after import. The part with the hyperlink was segmented incorrectly in three parts instead of one. However, memoQ did handle the space tag after "tool." correctly and start a new segment at "Here". Once can, of course, use the segment joining function to correct the segmentation until Kilgray gets around to fixing the segmentation on the hyperlink tag:

Update 9 January 2012: The developers at Kilgray have informed me now that this quirk in the ODT filter has been corrected and will be included in the next build released.

When I tried to test my SDL Trados Studio 2009 license, at first it refused to joint the party:

Never a dull moment with SDL as we all know. Of course SDL Trados 2007 was in fact installed, but when I upgraded to Studio 2009, of course it trashed my 2007 installation, and I had been too irritated to do anything about it for over half a year since I don't use Trados for anything more than file preparation and compatibility testing anymore, and I was still able to do that for my projects with the damaged installation. However, when I discovered that the ODT file caused TagEditor to run and hide without even saying goodbye, I sighed deeply and wasted half an hour reinstalling SDL Trados 2007. At least I didn't have to go through that insane check-in/check-out license procedure online. I trusted in God and my Windows Registry entries, and the location of my license file was remembered, so all was well.

The second attempt at SDL Trados Studio 2009 was much better:

Same segmentation problem as OmegaT, and examining the tags reveals where the issue might be addressed in a tweak of the filter.

I haven't got the latest upgrade, but someone was kind enough to run my test file through SDL Trados Studio 2011, which appears to offer the best results for filtering ODT (the settings were slightly different, with the URL included, but that is also possible with some other tools):

SDL Trados TagEditor also worked after re-installation. The results were:

Oh dear. Well, it works, but if I still used TagEditor, I would run, not walk, to the much cleaner interface of OmegaT for this sort of thing if I didn't have the good sense to upgrade to Studio or something else commercial. Note the same segmentation issue and the need for filter modification.

Victor Dewsbery was kind enough to import my test file to the original Atril DVX and the newer DVX2 and send me the results:

DVX import of the test file

DVX2 import of the test file.

I also tried to test SDLX, Wordfast Pro and Wordfast Anywhere. The first two tools don't support ODT. Wordfast Anywhere claims too, but went nowhere, with the following status message displayed in my browser for about half an hour before I gave up and went to lunch:

Of course I canceled. I had a blog post to write and a New Year to get on with. Anyone who wants to try the test file in another tool (to compare apples with apples) can get it here.