The memoQ Web Search memory leak fix! (updated again)

A big thank you to Italian veterinary surgeon and translating colleague Claudio Porcellana, who solved the mystery of the memory leak which has plagued users of memoQ's Web Search for years now. While Kilgray developers busily work on alternative engines for fixing future versions, Dr. Porcellana used his head - as impatient Southern Europeans are wont to do.

The problem it seems is with troublesome Java applets on sites like Linguee. So he simply turned them off. And plugged the leak.

Kilgray currently uses an Internet Explorer component for memoQ Web Search, so here's the fix:

1. Start Internet Explorer and open Internet options in the Settings:
   
   
    
2. Go to the Security tab and click the Custom level button:
   
   
    
3. Then find the Scripting section and disable the Java applets:
   

Leave Active scripting (= JavaScript, etc.) enabled or you will mess up the search for some sites like LEO.

After I made this change, I tested memoQ Web Search. Instead of the usual steady increase in memory consumption I used to observe due to the infamous leak, everything remained rock stable, and all my site searches that I typically use for legal and scientific translation worked just fine.

This fix ought to work with all versions of memoQ since the introduction of the web search feature (in memoQ 2013 R2 I think it was). So thank you, Dr. Porcellana, for making our working lives a little less crash-prone!

UPDATE: Further testing has revealed (as noted in some comments below) that there is more to the story. I was puzzled that some people continued to experience the memory leak unless "active scripting" was active, and at Varga's request I tested again on my system (I was sure up until then that his troubles might be tied to a Hungarian system, but it turns out that is in fact not the case). To9 my astonishment, the problem re-appeared after it had been eliminated before after disabling the Java applet scripting alone. I had to turn off "active scripting" too to achieve stability. And then suddenly the problem went away again.

Puzzling, right? And annoying of course. And then an idea occurred to me, and I dug up my Linguee user account password and logged in to Linguee under my user name. I contribute a lot of terms when I search in other browsers so I have a lot of credit, and this credit is applied as searches without ads.

It's the advertising. Some ads seem to involve Java applets. Other ads do buggy things with scripts that do not use applets. And some ads do neither of these two things and cause no trouble.

Maybe an ad blocker applied to Internet Explorer will fix the problem for memoQ Web search until the changeover to Chromium occurs in the next version. [No, it does not, alas.] In the meantime, I will achieve stability for today's big job by staying logged in to my Linguee account!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: As advertisements and the like have been identified as the real source of trouble, one user suggested substituting the Windows hosts file. This approach has a number of advantages apparently; it presumably de-craps your Internet connection by blocking sites that send troublesome content, communicate with spyware, etc. A better hosts file with instructions for where to put it is found at: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Substituted hosts file on my Windows 10 system; the old file was backed up by re-naming it.

Medienbruch.

For years now, I've watched the German term Medienbruch and derivatives like medienbruchfrei seep their way into various, well, media. And the results are, by and large, linguistically discontinuous and/or broken :-)

The screenshot above shows a sampling from the "feast" of bilingual web alignment offered by Linguee, one which those who are familiar with the service realize must be enjoyed with some care to avoid the odd bits of broken glass and strychnine that may be found in its sometimes machine-translated, sometimes Bulgarian-inspired English. Some of the more thoughtful marketers in the translation profession may use the site as a source to research firms desperately in need of better translators rather than merely pan its buckets full of linguistic swamp sediment in desperation to find the few flakes of gold which might have settled there. Not to say that Linguee is not a valuable working tool, but its use requires a great deal of professional judgment in most cases and often further research is one is on unfamiliar ground. It is a tool, and a fool with a tool remains a fool. Like the often criticized Wikipedia, it is often a good starting point but seldom the journey's end.

Why not just Google "media discontinuity", for example, and see how often the particular phrase occurs? Uh huh. You got 8,100 results, did you? Sounds pretty authoritative, right? Look again at where the sources are. Ah, you say, Kevin ought to have used Google's advanced search options to narrow it down. Have a look at the garbage on the first page again, and tell me with a straight face that better sources will somehow rise to the top of that like tasty cream.

At this point, a colleague less overcaffeinated might point out that I'm going about this all wrong and that I might do better searching some of the monolingual corpora available free online, such as the British National Corpus (which is great for making Americans believe that Brits really do say "at the weekend" most of the time or the BYU Corpus of Global Web-based English, which allows those who master the arcana of its search rules to compare Indian weekends with those in Canada or Kenya. But these text collections, for all their value for a general understanding of common language use, are seldom satisfying for specialized use and neologisms.

A cooler head might point out the terrible bias in my approaches so far and encourage me to consider the context in which this word has occurred while percolating into my awareness in recent years. Hm. Well, usually when some German public authority decides to bring its information management practices up to 20th century standards. Since they usually follow well behind practice in English-speaking countries for this sort of things (I still see German government texts that put "E-Mail" in quotes as if it were something new and exotic), it's a good bet that a corpus of texts from similar institutions in the UK or US might reveal some interesting and useful and even natively acceptable possibilities. (That's how I learned years ago that a usual and proper term in English for Vieraugenprinzip is "dual review", not the "four-eyes principle" that some so happily click their heels to. In the elementary schools I attended, that was the principle based on which bullies punched my friends with glasses in the face.)

Juliette Scott, who writes a rather nice blog mostly concerned with legal translation issues, has done some nice (NIFTY) work as part of her doctoral thesis using monolingual corpora to study patterns of use in target languages and suggest useful strategies for building collections of specialized text. Good, perhaps even obvious stuff which applies to any domain I can think of, though the practice of building focused corpora from carefully selected sources is still far too rare among those of us who use the label "translator" or "language professional". I certainly need to do that more often.

Ah, but if I have just a monolingual corpus to understand proper use of terms in the target language, how will I know what the right translation is? That's a hard one. One that perhaps I can't answer. At least not without the use of a BAT* tool. But if that's too hard, I know just the place to go: proZ.com, where "certified pros" compete for points on KudoZ and offer mutual reinforcement and enlightenment to those who run rapidly on their wheels to keep pace with changing expectations of quality.

I could of course take one of the accepted "solutions" from Linguee and feed the same sort of self-recycling GIGO loop that Google now admits to be an ever-growing part of its searched wisdom.

So what is your solution to the Medienbruch? Or are you part of the problem?