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....

Finding resources on Kilgray's Language Terminal

Kilgray’s online platform for translation, Language Terminal at https://www.languageterminal.com/, may be a game-changer in many ways. Not only does it offer affordable, on-demand memoQ translation server capacity for small teams on demand, it provides free InDesign server availability to users of any tool for converting InDesign formats to XLIFF and PDF for translation and review, back-up features fully integrated with recent versions of memoQ, some evolving project management and invoicing tools and a growing library of light resources shared by users. This post discusses how to find and use these resources, which can be useful in all supported versions of memoQ.

Accessing your account
The user menus of Language Terminal can be accessed in two ways: in a web browser from the URL above or from the link on your memoQ Dashboard.

If you are not already a Language Terminal user, a free account can be set up in just a few minutes.

Looking for resources
The current user interface for finding resources on Language Terminal is confusing to some users. The Resource menu link in the orange navigation bar shows a list of resources you have uploaded yourself to Language Terminal. The dropdown list indicated by the arrow filters your own resources. To find resources from other people, click the Advanced Search button.

There is nothing “advanced” about this search. It simply allows you to use four fields to find resources which are publicly available on the site. Be careful of your selection criteria for language as some resources (like auto-translation rules) are not language-specific by definition even if they might have been created for use with a particular language.

The result of the search for English stopword resources to be used in terminology extraction to filter out “noise” words (like prepositions, pronouns, articles and common vocabulary) looked like this at the time I performed the search:

Download the resources you want by clicking on their names in the Resource column. The shared library of filters, QA profiles, auto-translation rules, stopword lists and more on Language Terminal continues to grow. Why not contribute something yourself?

In any case, Language Terminal is a useful place to archive one’s valuable light resources, such as segmentation rules developed over time with great effort, and these are not shared with others unless you specifically release them. Given the occasional unfortunate “disappearances” of light resources known to occur with some memoQ upgrades, this is a very useful backup option to have, and it would be nice if future integration of Language Terminal and memoQ were to facilitate more complete, automated resource backups from desktop systems.

memoQ cloud: a team server "on tap"

This afternoon, Kilgray CEO István Lengyel held one of the best webinars I've seen him do yet to describe the convenient new hosted server facilities known as memoQ cloud, which I reviewed recently.

In the webinar, he explained the company's evolution of thought for online computing and how concerns about security were finally resolved to create a more sustainable offering than the more support-intensive "honeymoon" server solution.

He made it clear how existing desktop licenses for the Project Manager and Translator Pro editions can be used in combination with concurrent access licenses (CALs) for the server, as well as how cloud services can be suspended for periods in which they are not needed, saving considerable costs for those with only occasional needs to work in a coordinated online team.

Backing up the server configuration can be done quickly and easily from a Language Terminal account, so if cloud service is dormant for more than three months (after which data are deleted from the server), everything can be restored quickly when needed.

The webinar also included a demonstration of the integrated translation in web browsers, memoQ WebTrans. This is one way of providing access to the server for others who do not have installed copies of memoQ or working on your server when using other computers. Of course this interface also works in web browsers under other operating systems, such as MacOS or Linux. (Click on the graphic below to get a full-sized view of the web translation interface.)

Access to Kilgray's premium terminology server qTerm and memoQ server APIs is also available for an additional subscription fee. Subscribed services can be changed at any time as your needs evolve.

In the webinar, István showed how in about the same time it takes to enjoy a cup of coffee, one can get a free Kilgray Language Terminal account and register with a credit card for a month's trial of the memoQ cloud server (with any services available) for just €1/$1. If you are trying out services which you will not want beyond the trial period (like the API, qTerm or extra licenses), these can be set to cancel at the end of the trial period to avoid unwanted charges.

The embedded video below is a 20-minute tour of how simple it is to set up and manage projects in memoQ cloud. Use the icon at the lower right of the video frame to watch this on your full screen.


This is a good overview of the process, although the licenses aren't explained very well, and the project type recommendation is bad advice in many cases, as I pointed out in my post on server projects on segmentation and projects with desktop documents. Everything else in the video is good, but it's often very important to allow segmentation to be changed or corrected, particularly if the segmentation rules used in the project do not cover abbreviations which may split sentences in very unfortunate ways. If you need to have instantaneous access to work from other team members by using online documents, the the segmentation will need to be checked very carefully and corrected before the project begins to avoid difficulties.

Those testing the memoQ cloud server or using desktop editions of memoQ may also want to check out various free configuration resources on Language Terminal. These include special QA profiles, AutoCorrect files, import filters that are not part of the shipping product and auto-translation rules for easier translation of number and date formats, etc. Language Terminal offers other facilities which may be of interest even to those who do not use memoQ, such as the free InDesign server, which can create PDF previews of InDesign documents (very useful for reviews before delivery) or convert InDesign files of any type to XLIFF for translation in many different environments.

UPDATE:
The memoQ cloud webinar is now available to watch on Kilgray's page for recorded webinars; it can be accessed directly here or viewed in the embedded video below.

Want a revolution? Try memoQ 2013 Release 2.

OK, so I'm exaggerating a bit. And even though the new version of memoQ was officially released today by Kilgray, it really is still beta software. But damned good beta. I expect that there will be more of interest to individual translators added in this version of memoQ than in any other version I've seen up to now. Lots of T's to cross and i's to dot still, but there is great promise, and it's worth having a look now at the future of memoQ.

I'm not talking about changes to the memoQ Server. There are lots of those in this version, and for a change many of them actually seem to be helpful to translators working on the server and less focused on slicing and stuffing linguistic sausage faster like many of the 6.x server features introduced. The rollout webinar with István Lengyel and Florian Sachse of Kilgray showed enough of why memoQ Server users should be pleased. But they could have filled the hour and three quarters with nothing but presentations of new or improved functions for the rest of us and still not run out of material. Since I still have a project to finish tonight, I'll just hit a few of the highlights that I'll probably return to later as the features stabilize and are truly ready for productive work.

Language recognition
memoQ now intelligently recognizes the language(s) of the source text. This is a small convenience in setting up projects perhaps, but for those occasions when a source language has many passages in another language or more than one other language, these other language segments can be identified automatically, copied source to target and locked. I can think of more than a few patent dispute translations where this would have been helpful.

Startup Wizard
A new feature under the Help menu gives a quick, friendly guided tour of important settings that are often overlooked that are hard to find for new users and many experienced ones. This is actually one of my favorite new features and possibly the best help I've seen yet for making a better start with the software.

Better Microsoft Word spelling integration
Custom dictionaries can now be imported from Microsoft Word with greater ease. Users can now also choose Microsoft Word for dynamic marking of possible spelling errors (unknown words). This is a good thing for those of us who hate Hunspell. Oh, and those pesky doubled words are caught now.

More stuff with Microsoft Word...
like exporting tracked changes between translation versions to a DOCX file (sans formatting I think), exporting target comment to a DOCX file (alas! in writing the specification Kilgray failed to consider that one might want to select which comments get exported and possibly suppress all the comments, but I'm told this will be remedied quickly), font substitution in DOCX files (this was a major WTF feature for me, but if I understood correctly, there is some way I can use this to protect text formatted a certain way, such as code in a programming guide - if that's true, this is cool) and...

the TM lookup tool,
an external application which runs in Microsoft Word and any other environment and allows you to look up text copied to the Clipboard in selected memoQ TMs. Too bad they didn't include termbases in this new feature. Yet.

New filters and processes
like direct import of InDesign files with a preview using the free online Language Terminal integration, Adobe InCopy and some file formats that must be pretty damned geeky because I've never heard of them.

Why am I excited about
a plain text view which is about as exciting as lukewarm, unspiced pea soup. Well, because it's absence has been driving me nuts for years now. It's in this version.

Meanwhile, back at the termbase
great things are happening with new import options that are still a wee bit buggy but will get very good very soon. Until now memoQ could only import terms as TMX and delimited text. New options include Excel (at last!), MultiTerm XML and TBX. It was child's play for me to tweak a couple of TermStar MARTIF exports from STAR Transit to import those terms, because TBX is a dialect of MARTIF and STAR's MARTIF is very close to TBX. Extra effort? About 2 minutes of search and replace so I'm hoping Kilgray will go the extra five yards and touch this import option down.

The addition of the MultiTerm XML import option means that memoQ users can now roundtrip data from memoQ to partners using SDL MultiTerm and back for termbase updates. Unfortunately at the moment, the only meta data transferred in the import is the definition field, but efforts are in progress to support at least the MultiTerm fields memoQ exports to XML with Kilgray's own definition. That was simply forgotten at specification time (oops). But still, this will be serious headache relief for those of us who work in teams with SDL Trados users and want to share terminology in the most effective ways.

Is that all?
No. This new version of memoQ is like a very messy Christmas where one can easily lose the overview of hat's under the tree with all the wrapping paper and bits of ribbon cluttering the floor. As it gets cleaned up, we'll all notice a good bit more, and I suspect that Santa's Hungarian and German helpers will be slipping a few more things under the tree that they might forget themselves until some user trips over them. There has been so much effort put into consolidation and improvement of existing features that it's simply too much to keep track of. I've made a list and checked it more than twice and still find things to add. But I'll end with another look at something I've already blogged about, that groundbreaking

Monolingual Project and TM Update
with edited files in any target format. It still has a lot of little quirks, especially with some formats, but here I expect a lot of improvements. I've made a little demonstration video and put it on YouTube; it shows the reimport of edited translations to update the translated file and the TM in memoQ, and it shows two different ways to look at tracked changes before revealing the dark secret of Row History Recovery which I think Kilgray didn't realize was possible. Well, damnit, they should have made it a feature with a button anyway.

  (View this in full screen mode by clicking the icon at the lower right of the video window.) 
Oh yes, and one more cool little thing about this release that I forgot to mention...

... the quickstart shortcut to creating memoQ projects
in the context menu by right-clicking on a file. I'm not much into single-file projects any more and prefer to use "container" projects for customers or categories instead, but it's still a nice little addition that can save time once in a while:

Getting a grip on memoQ QA resources

I think the initial reaction of a lot of people to memoQ's QA functions is overwhelmed bafflement. And that's really a shame. This simple, versatile and power feature included in the translation environment can save a lot of time and grief. But perhaps Kilgray and many memoQ advocates and trainers (yours truly included) have not taken as user-friendly an approach to presenting this feature as we might. The problem starts, I think, with the default QA profile in memoQ - as far as I know the only configured profile that is delivered with the software. It has nearly every damned option turned on and drives many people crazy with long lists of uninteresting alleged "errors". Even with sorting to group the problems that are of interest, the huge list of QA warnings is often like a big, nasty finger wagging in one's face. It just pisses me off.

In my previous memoQuickie posts on QA profiles and terminology QA as well as a later post with a demo video showing terminology QA in a LiveDocs alignment/editing workflow for a dictated translation, I tried to show how one can create focused QA profiles that can accomplish specific, important tasks like verifying tag integrity or checking a translation against a list of critical, mandatory terminology, but when one of my frequent collaborators called for advice on how to use memoQ to check the integrity and format of more than one hundred footnotes in an OCR document and admitted that she still had not created a custom QA profile for tags and didn't know how, I realized that my approach up to now has probably been a colossal failure.

I keep telling people how easy it is to create some of those custom QA profiles. But why should they have to for common tasks? Why doesn't Kilgray help them out a little with some demo QA profiles than can be used for common tasks, avoiding the "noise" of the point-the-finger-at-everything default profile? After all, there are many demonstration configurations for that LQA feature that is of little or no use to the freelance community. Why not something that would benefit more users?

Well, there are now a few simplified QA profiles available on Kilgray's Language Terminal:

Language Terminal is a community resource with a growing number of features, most of which I haven't blogged about for lack of time. Its future is far more interesting to me than its present, but it currently includes a small but growing library of resources such as custom filter configurations and QA profiles which can help users with certain tasks. It also offers nice online backup integration for memoQ projects and a free InDesign server. The latter can be used by anyone (including those with other tools) to create PDF previews of InDesign files they have received or translated, and the integration of this InDesign server with memoQ desktop projects is expected to increase in the not-distant future.

The three QA profiles (MQRES files which can be imported to your memoQ installation in seconds) are the ones I use most often. "Tags only" allows me to verify that I haven't messed up my target file formatting by leaving out important tags, and "Terminology check" lets me use an approved list of terms to ensure that they are translated as agreed with the client.

The "Empty QA profile" is great for the ego. Apply that to your project, and the QA check will show no errors or warning at all. Fantastic, right? If you decide that there is some particular type of error or maybe a few types that you want to check in one go, it's a simple matter to clone this file, rename it and edit to activate the QA tests of interest. Much easier than turning off all the garbage in the default profile.

Any of those three simplified profiles might make a good basis for creating an automatic QA check that best meets your needs for a particular project. And if you want to share it with others, Kilgray's Language Terminal is a good place to do so.

Nonetheless, I do hope that future builds or releases of memoQ might include these or other QA profile examples in every memoQ installation. That would surely help more users get a proper grip on memoQ's best quality assurance features.

Selectable metadata for memoQ 2013 projects

One of the things I have missed very much since switching from Déjà Vu to memoQ years ago is the ability to create and maintain selectable lists of metadata for classifying my data. One of the strengths of DVX was that this data could even be used to prioritize TM and terminology relevance during translation. But even for simple things like sorting and filtering data for an export, it can be very helpful.

Let me give an example. I have an old client I'll call National Translators. Well, sometimes that's the name I use when filling in the Client field for the memoQ project. Sometimes I write Nat'l Transl, sometimes it's NatTrans or even NT. And then when my fingers get rebellious I might have the occasional NtaTarns or worse.

Despite the messy appearance of screenshots of the TM and termbase lists in my various tutorials, for the most part I follow the "Big Mama and Papa" approach to data management with a large master TM and termbase with over a decade of archived reference material. But I do occasionally like to filter those data and produce a more focused termbase or TM for a projects, such as all the NatTrans material from projects involving Poultry. That was easy with Déjà Vu. Each client had a unique, selectable code. Subjects were number coded with a sophisticated classification scheme that I adapted for my own use. With memoQ it's been a real pain in the ass.

Well, it seems that times are a'changin. A little bit at least in this respect. One change that sort of slippe under my radar in memoQ 2013 was the addition of selectable data to projects through the use of the free Kilgray Language Terminal. I almost missed it completely, because I was looking at some of the latest "innovations" there from the wrong perspective. Wrong for me at least.

Clients list on my demo profile on the Kilgray Language Terminal. Click to enlarge.

Kilgray recently introduced the ability to do basic project "management" on Language Terminal. Price lists. Clients lists. And more. I was appalled, or at least quite uninterested in that, though I rather like other aspects of Language Terminal. I have a good tool for quoting jobs and maintaining my client records, and I really don't think I'll be replacing that with the rather simple start that has been made by Kilgray in this area. And having lived in Germany for years, I have almost adopted the knee-jerk aversion to storing my client data online which is so common there.

But... there's another way. Better for me. I don't have to enter my clients' details. I can enter just the names. Or better yet - my preferred codes (which can protect their identities but let me sort my data better). Click on the screenshot above to see an example of this in the last two entries. You need not be as cryptic as I was in that example.

On the "Professional" page of my Language Terminal profile (the link to the left of "Clients"), I can enter my subjects. Kilgray intended this for their find-a-translator search function that they are adding to Language Terminal, but I'm probably not going to be interested in being found and approached by the sort of prospect that might use their database. My philosophy is that looking for a translator based on tool use is fundamentally backward, and I really don't want to support bad practices like that. Translators should be engaged based on subject and linguistic expertise; the translation technology involved is like a shirt, tie and a pair of shoes - you just put on what is appropriate for the occasion. But without the subject and linguistic competence, you really ought not to be part of the game at all.

So once again, I would enter my subject data on Language Terminal, not with the idea of being "found" by some Indian or Mongoloid agency to be offered the opportunity of a lifetime at 2 cents per word, but rather with an eye toward sensible data classification for use in filtering later. Here's an example of what these metadata entered on Language Terminal look like when you start a new memoQ project and mark it to be "entered" on Language Terminal.

I still like the local DVX approach better for such metadata, but this is actually an improvement, and it will help me clean up my data organization. And using these features for my purposes, rather than the purposes for which they seem to have been created, will also maintain confidentiality as I want to. In fact, the profile seen here is not even viewable by other Language Terminal users.

There are many other very useful features of Language Terminal, which make it worthwhile to get a free account, even if you don't use memoQ. The blockbuster is still the free InDesign processing service, which enables one to handle native INDD files, get PDF previews at any time and convert InDesign files to XLIFF for convenient translation in most modern CAT tools. As a memoQ user, I find the backup feature useful as well; the Resources page is starting to get a few useful things, and rumors of future plans make me think this is really something to watch closely.

But this recent "revelation" of the possibility of selectable metadata for my memoQ projects is a small but very welcome addition to my toolbox in memoQ 2013, and finding this in an area of the site that I had already written off as uninteresting to me was perhaps the most pleasant surprise. It's nice to be wrong like that.

Kilgray's Language Terminal: A Communist plot!

If you type definition: terminal into Google's search field, at the top of the hits you'll see:

Although it's clear that Kilgray's new Language Terminal is extremely useful, it's certainly not the end of the line. As in so many other cases in our profession, where a good translator will look up five definitions for a word and choose the sixth, his own, a very different definition is needed for this service, and it is by no means a final one. What the ultimate definition will be only time and the occasional information leak from Kilgray employees will tell, but I think it will be one well liked even by those who are not fans of memoQ.

Here was the official announcement on the Yahoogroups list for memoQ by the company's chief developer, Gábor Ugray, last Friday:

Hi All,

One announcement is not enough on a day like this. Today we are also officially launching LanguageTerminal.com, our first Cloud offering ever.

What are the benefits?

• Convert InDesign files (even INDD) to mqxlz, and enjoy translating with a live preview
• After translating in memoQ with a preview, or in any other XLIFF-compliant tool without a preview, get your export back in the original format
• Review the source text and your translation in PDF format
• Back up your memoQ projects into the cloud, straight from memoQ. We are giving away 1 GB of storage to you.
• Share your favorite auto-translation rules or other light resources in the Resource Marketplace. No, it's not an app store to sell: it's a free space for sharing.
• Create a profile and allow other members to find you

Why is this a beta?
This is the first Cloud offering we are launching. Until we see how this scales up to a growing user base, we are not charging for anything. We are also going to keep the basic service free once the beta is over. If you have any feedback or comments to share, do not spare us!

Signup is now open at https://www.languageterminal.com/.

Enjoy! BR,

Gábor 

WTF? I'm not sure what Gábor means by basic service, but I would gladly pay cold  cash (or cash of any other temperature) for this useful service. And free? Even to users of other tools like OmegaT and SDL Trados Studio? Not sure I like that. At least he hasn't revealed the secret to my competitors using other tools that the mysterious MQXLZ format (which reminds me vaguely of a villian's name in an old Superman comic) is really just a ZIP file with the extension changed, and that the XLIFF file can be extracted from it and translated with any tool. I'm certainly not going to help them out by revealing more. I hope SDL plans to respond to this outrage by introducing its own service and charging users a hefty fee and requiring verified competence in SDL Trados MultiTerm before allowing users to sign up. And I want to see it work only as a plug-in the the latest version of SDL Trdos Studio 2011, available on the SDL OpenExchange with a price tag of at least € 299.

I've tested the Language Terminal service myself, particularly for backing up some memoQ projects. Nice. The integration with memoQ 6.2 is excellent and easy to use; just choose the usual backup command under the project list and select the option to save the data to your Language Terminal profile.

PDF previews of InDesign translations are nice; I enjoyed these for years using Ontram, but this goes well beyond the functionality I remember from that high-end corporate tool developed for the likes of Daimler and CLAAS. The dynamic preview created for use in local memoQ projects is a very, very welcome feature, because in most cases, memoQ will not offer a preview of exotic formats. The "trick" for doing that in this case tells me that this might be possible in the future for other formats using a web integration approach like this.

I'm not terribly excited about this "marketplace" thing. The capitalist pig in me is vehemently opposed to giving things away, which is why each reader of this blog pays a hefty monthly subscription fee for the privilege of reading my tips and rants. This silly idea probably reflects the bad attitude of Kilgray CEO Istvàn Lengyel, who poo-pooed the idea of a commercial exchange for Kilgray modeled on the superb OpenExchange offered by his competitor when the suggestion was made at this year's memoQfest. You would think that a young entrepreneur like him would show a little more raw meat spirit. Oh wait. I forgot he's a vegetarian.

Another terrible thing about the Language Terminal beside its enabling of those disloyal enough to want to translate InDesign in tools other than memoQ and its awful Communist approach to a "marketplace" (and oh yes - István has spoken openly of Five Year Plans for Kilgray too!) is that fact that the best features are missing.

That's right. I was hoping to see sharable online translation memories and termbases integrated in memoQ which could be used by the teams of expert translators forming in transparent alliances to end translation agencies' reign of anonymous quality terror, where good but faceless translators are used to bait the client, who is later switched to a monkey translating in the jungles of Burpal. Declaring openly who they are and what they stand for, these allied freelancers, who blatantly sign their work and take responsibility for its usefulness, would be using those integrate features to outcoordinate and outperform the linguistic sausage factories in eastern Europe and India who salivate over the memoQ 6 features for slicing and dicing translatable text and passing it to dehumanized first-come-to-the-cattle-call resources in a sort of virtual assembly line linguistic whorehouse operation.

And when and if we ever do see these Cloud-based collaboration tools for memoQ , those pinkos at Kilgray will probably want to share the wealth and offer access to our enemies using other CAT tools. Next thing you know, they'll be getting endorsed by Obama.