memoQfest 2020: call for papers

The twelfth memoQfest will be held in Budapest on June 10th to 12th, 2020. Presentation proposals are being accepted until January 30, 2020. A description of the theme for this year and suggested topics can be found here.

This event has always been a good opportunity to meet the development and support teams and exchange ideas with fellow users from around the world. I've always looked forward to this conference and the excellent people I meet there, and every time my usually high expectations have been exceeded.

memoQfest 2019: presentation proposals due by January 30

memoQfest 2019 will be held in Budapest this year from May 29-31. The call for papers has gone out, and submissions for talks are due by January 30th.

Last year I attended after a two-year break, during which quite a few things changed with the company (which has continued to change in name at least - now memoQ Translation Technologies Ltd., the artists formerly known as Kilgray). Not only was memoQfest 2018 a good opportunity to meet new members of the memoQ team, it was simply a spectacular event in its own right, the best of the 7 conferences I attended over the years, with a great deal of content relevant to users at all levels, both individuals and companies.

Stay updated on the conference and its planning at the memoQfest.org site (which redirects to its current home on the memoQ.com domain).

Technology for legal and financial translation: lecture video

memoQfest 2018, held this year in Budapest from May 31 to June 1, was a great event as I noted in my recent discussion of how Kilgray – or rather "memoQ" as the company is now called – is on track with changes to the product and additions to its development and support teams in the broadest sense. This year, I spoke on some of the benefits of technology in general and memoQ technology in particular for translating specialists for law and finance. This was, in part, an abbreviated and updated version of my talk last year at the translation program in Buenos Aires University's law faculty and it is of course simply an overview of possibilities with some examples. This is a subject which could easily make up a full course for a semester or year, and in less than an hour one can only discuss a few bones of the concept, much less the full skeleton or the vital and varied body of modern practice.

The recording of the talk was released recently on the memoQ YouTube channel, so here it is embedded for those who missed it and want to see what was said:


I'll be giving a similar talk at the end of this in Valencia, Spain at IAPTI's international conference this year, though from a little different perspective. I hope to meet some of you there.

On track with changes in memoQ

After a two-year break I decided to attend memoQ Fest again this year. I had burned out a bit on memoQ as a working environment in 2015 because of the slow resolution of many problems associated with the transition from traditional application menus to the awful, space-stealing Microsoft-style ribbons... bugs remained unresolved for so long in fact that I released my last book (New Beginnings with memoQ) with a "beta" designation and then months later simply withdrew it from the market because it seemed that no fixes were in sight. And then at the beginning of 2017 as things with memoQ 2015 (7.8) had stabilized to an acceptable degree, memoQ 8.0 (Adriatic) was released with a dog's breakfast of foolish interface changes and new bugs. The two minor releases that followed (8.1 and 8.2) deepened the muck, not the least by introducing new and very broken tracked changes features. Dark days indeed in which experienced users generally stuck desperately to the only really reliable release of memoQ that Kilgray still supported (7.8).

And then last autumn there was a perceptible inflection point in the memoQ development trajectory. The 8.3 release still had the awful new match comparison and other confusions, but it was unusually stable for a new release. And it dealt with some long-standing issues while introducing some improved term-handling features. Improvements in terminology handling continued in the version that followed, and stability increased with each minor release - a phenomenon nearly unheard of with any CAT tool I know. Whether it's memoQ, SDL Trados Studio or another tool, new releases are usually painful experiences with a lot of bug bites, but Kilgray seems to have discovered some new secret of pest control in software development. With memoQ 8.4 and 8.5 I have actually been able to recommend upgrades very near the release date, which past experience taught me is usually not a professionally wise thing to do. Whatever the memoQ team is doing now, I hope they keep it up, because this is the kind of stability and reliability that is needed in critical business applications and which is seldom delivered on schedule by any company.

Adding to that, the latest version of memoQ has restored the old (and better) match comparison feature and other aspects of productivity that went missing when the 8.x series first hit the street. I still have my usual long wish list of improvements and features, but at the moment the only big objection I still have to memoQ's feature set is the limitations of its image transcription module for handling graphics with a lot of text. Something closer to Fluency's approach to transcription would be helpful.

With all the encouraging things happening with the translation environment I depend on, I decided to go to Budapest this year and meet the new team members who were contributing to many of these improvements and to catch up with old friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to improving my productivity and professional satisfaction for many years. memoQ Fest is inevitably a good event no matter how good or bad its published program sounds; the gathering of talent, brains and outright decent people in the memoQ community means that it's probably impossible not to have a good time and learn a lot of useful things in the sessions, breaks and after-hours events. This year's 10th anniversary of memoQ Fest exceeded all my expectations in every aspect.

I was extremely pleased to see the progress made with the integrated speech recognition feature suggested three years ago after investigations begun by David Hardisty and others, and to listen to the new design and education teams about approaches to future development, support and training. I'm even a little excited, which is an unusual thing given the cynicism that nearly half a century of working with software has embedded in my brain.

There are so many interesting things happening now in the memoQ world: not just speech recognition, but major ongoing improvements to terminology handling, subtitling, easier QA control... the list goes on, and the importance of any item on it will depend, of course, on the nature of an individual translator's or other service provider's work and clientele. But, really, it's not about the features. It's the people. And I think that the combined quality of the team behind the creation and support of memoQ software and the superb, mutually supportive professionals in the user community remains unbeatable for a secure professional present and a promising future in #xl8.

Lots of tasty tidbits in the latest memoQ!

Survey for Translation Transcription and Dictation

The website with the survey and short explainer video is http://www.sightcat.net
The idea is to build a human transcription service. We just need a few translators per language that want to work with a transcriptionist due to RSI, productivity etc. and we can use that data to build an ASR system for that language. There is also a good chance the ASR system will be accurate for domain-specific terminology and accents as it will be adaptive and use source language context. 

Click on the graphic to go to the survey

memoQ Fest 2018 was, among other things, a good opportunity as always to spend time discussing things with some of the best and most interesting consultants, teachers, creative developers and brainstormers I know in the translation profession. One of these was my friend and colleague, John Moran, whose work on iOmegaT introduced me to the idea that properly designed, translator-controlled (voluntary) data logging could be a great boon to feature research and software development investment decisions. Sort of like SpyGate in translation, except that it isn't.

John and I have been talking, brainstorming and arguing about many aspects of translation technology for years now, dictation (voice recognition, ASR, whatever you want to call it) foremost among the topics. So I was very pleased to see him at the conference in Budapest last week, where he spoke about logging as a research tool in the program and a lot about speech recognition before and after in the breaks, bars, coffee houses and social event venues.

I think that one of the most memorable things about memoQ Fest 2018 was the introduction of the dictation tool currently called hey memoQ, which covers a lot of what John and I have discussed until the wee hours over the past four years or so and which also makes what I believe will be the first commercial use of source text guidance for target text dictation (not to mention switching to source text dictation when editing source texts!). John introduced that to me years ago based on some research that he follows. Fascinating stuff.

One of the things he has been interested in for a while for commercial, academic and ergonomic reasons is support for minor languages. Understandable for a guy who speaks Gaelic (I think) and has quite a lot of Gaelic resources which might contribute to a dictation solution some day. So while I'm excited about the coming memoQ release which will facilitate dictation in a CAT tool in 40 languages (more or less, probably a lot more in the future), John is thinking about smaller, underserved or unserved languages and those who rely on them in their working lives.

That's what his survey is about, and I hope you'll take the time to give him a piece of your mind... uh, share your thoughts I mean :-)

memoQfest 2018 call for papers and the memoQ Trend Report

The tenth annual conference for memoQ technology will be held by Kilgray in Budapest on May 30 to June 1, 2018. Even though the programs for these events sometimes seems overly skewed toward the bulk market, there is no better opportunity for anyone interested in the productive use of translation technology to meet and consult with experts on how to get the most out of memoQ as an individual translator, a language services broker, a corporate translation manager or someone in another technical or managerial role related to translation.

Presentation proposals for memoQfest 2018 are now being accepted; the final deadline for submissions is February 5, 2018. Why not share your expertise and help move the discussions for product development and use in a direction you feel they should go?

Today, Kilgray also published a new site discussing "trends" in translation technology and the thoughts and opinions of key personnel and memoQ users in that regard. The memoQ Trend Report isn't really a report; I'm not sure what to call it or what its purpose is, but many of the points discussed are interesting and worth thinking about. More than the content, I particularly liked the technical implementation of the new site, particularly how it works on a smartphone. The success of adaptive design here gives me something to aspire to when I get around to remaking my personal business web site one of these days. Have a look on both mobile devices and large screens, and add your thoughts to the discussions!

memoQ 6: more power under the hood

Yesterday, Kilgray held its virtual memoQ Day on ProZ. Given what a disaster the ProZ online conference interface was in the first virtual conference I attended long ago, I had no intention of looking in, but since this was the first occasion on which the new version 6 of memoQ was to be presented in public, I decided to "visit" after all. The format and management have improved since my last experience with these virtual conferences, and it was definitely worth the time. I encourage those with access to the recordings of the sessions to see what's on offer; there may be many things of value. Despite over 1000 participants during the day, the event worked well.

The memoQ 6 presentation was in the evening for the Central European time zone, so I did not catch that session live. The day was long enough before then. When I did look at it, I was pleased to see confirmation of may useful changes I had heard about and see a live demo of many more I had not expected. Given that the software is still pre-beta, I expect there will be a number of changes and additions before the release, so I will simply share my impressions using the list of running feature notes I kept and a few screenshots I made. And a few addenda from conversations at memoQfest 2012.

• A smaller footprint – previous versions of memoQ suffered increasingly from “bloat”. (That statement reveals an attitude I like - SDL, which takes up about ten times as much space and uses more resources, does not seem to be similarly inclined to streamline.)
• Vastly improved scalability and handling of large files and large numbers of files. Speed improvements of an order of magnitude in many cases.
• memoQ 6 has added support for binary MS Office (DOC & XLS) formats – and can be used without MS Office being installed. This new functionality also includes the server APIs for sophisticated, automated workflows – no more manual saving to RTF or DOCX, etc.
• TM corruption problems have been decreaseda and can no longer crash servers; servers generate diagnostic exports for better troubleshooting
• Improved concordance functions – no more result count error, additional viewing format. LiveDocs can now be opened from the concordance and edits/corrections can be made to TMs from the concordance window.Meta data can now be used as sorting and filtering criteria in the concordance.

• "Content connectors" now in the Translator Pro edition to watch folders and automate operations such as file imports and statistics in projects

• Versioning features will be identical in the Translator Pro and Project Manager editions. Now anyone can create a comparison view of two source versions.

• Preferred languages will be added to the top of selection lists, saving time. This is a major improvement over the previous workaround of hacking the XML configuration file.

• Translation results can be ordered by preference
• The horizontal editing option has been changed to "pin" the segment being translated in the middle of the text view

• Spelling checks for locked rows
• Confirm locked & proofread segments in TM
• A new QA warning shows TM matches not used
• 4 new MT engines integrated
• Several new server workflows, including "cattle calls" and one with a subvendor group to maintain translator/reviewer anonymity from the higher level service provider

• Enterprise IT integration: Active Directory integration, proxy support, security protocols
• memoQ 5 & 6 can co-exist, and each needed for the respective servers; opening a mQ5 project will migrate it to mQ6 (create an upgraded *copy* of your project). This actually sucks. There should be middleware to ensure that any client version of memoQ can talk to any server version. The current incompatibilities cause too many headaches.
• Inconsistent translations can be extracted directly into a view in the QA module! This feature saves a regular memoQ view combined from as many documents as were checked.
• An AUTOSUGGEST feature which mines resources to suggest target content
• TMX as a translation document format (this has interesting possibilities for TM maintenance).

This list of notes is by no means an exhaustive representation of what we can expect in about a month. And I do believe there are a number of other interesting things scheduled for minor releases in the months to follow. The progress Kilgray has made with the "refactored" version of memoQ will benefit everyone and surely inspire further rounds of "Follow the Leader" with the competition.


There are introductory webinars for memoQ 6 scheduled in June. See Kilgray's schedule for details and sign up.

memoQfest 2012: another great year and great things ahead

Some say translation technology has gone to the dogs, and

this was certainly the case in Budapest this year as Ajax

and Benny noted to their satisfaction.

Although I was first asked to consider memoQ by a client of mine in 2007 and actually began to look it a year later, I was very skeptical about the software when István Lengyel convinced me to take a break for the first memoQfest at the Benzcur Hotel in Budapest in 2009. I had seen interesting progress in the year I had tested the software, but it was simply too immature for my needs and lacked nearly all the features which were most important to me. About a week before the conference, Kilgray released a version that barely met my minimum requirements for a small portion of my clients. I was impressed and actually did my first bit of commercial work with memoQ - a press release - the night before the conference began. The event itself was a blast, and I was convinced that this team had the right stuff or at least the potential to make it.

The next two years confirmed the wisdom of this leap of faith as the company raced from strength to strength despite a few stubbed toes; the advance of memoQ clearly played a role in improving other leading tools like DVX and SDL Trados, the latter borrowing generously from Hungarian innovation or using it and the unmatched service ethos on the Danube as an inspiration to overhaul the catastrophic mess of legacy Trados and enter the modern age of CAT tools, even surpassing memoQ in a few points, though with the current Renaissance of creative development in what appeared just a few years ago to be a dead-end IT ghetto, it's not an easy guess as to who will stay ahead anywhere for long. These are indeed good times for users despite the renewed threats of lock-in posed by the current misguided server politics of most providers.

Nonetheless, Kilgray's rapid growth has not been without difficulties, and despite anticipating most of the challenges long before they arose, the team doesn't always put in the performance its demanding fans expect. This is often to be expected when a company experiences the exponental growth which can obscure long-turm interests in the confusing melee of daily business. And the product which seemed so fresh and clean just a few years ago is beginning to look like a car that has been taken on too many roatrips without a good cleaning, has hauled too many dogs and needs new tires. But last week I saw clear signs that there may be a new Maserati getting a tune-up in the development garage. The hints regarding memoQ 6 and the company's further roadmap led me to scratch of most of the items on my technical gripe list. The organizational wishlist has gotten longer, but it's clear that the "refactoring" process at Kilgray is not limited to the software, so I think I can trust them as I did four years ago when few could have anticipated the company's impressive track record.

I almost did not go to Budapest this year. When I read the published schedule, it sounded far too skewed toward corporate interests, a bit like a sell-out now that server sales revenue has far surpassed that from Translator Pro licenses. And bad calls like the confused differences in implementation of versioning features in memoQ 5, weariness from providing support for issues arising from a lack of professional service consulting in the sales process with some of my agency clients and my own stupidity of forgetting to vaccinate my puppy against rabies before the trip (which required me to leave him with someone else for the first time) had me considering a week of vacation at home.

That would have been a mistake. I only expected to draw value from one presentation - regular expressions by Polish guru Marek Pawelec - and even there I didn't expect to understand very much. Instead, every one of the rather random sessions I attended had a lot to offer, even for a freelancer. The agency presenters who talked about their approaches to challenges in complex translation projects shared a great deal of information that is directly relevant to my agency and direct client business and can help make it better. And the general talk on refactoring your business through innovation by Richard Brooks, which I expected to be the biggest hot air balloon of the week, was the absolute highlight for me. I might even have gotten something out of the Asia Online keynote on machine translation, though an idiotic quote I read from the speaker about how we need to get on the MT boat or drown suggests perhaps not. I do hold out some hope he might have been misquoted or taken out of context, however. It's the least I can do in a world where people still believe in the Tooth Fairy and US Republican politics.

When Kilgray releases the videos of the talks, do watch them. I do hope the sound and picture quality will be good, because too often I really did wish I could have been in two rooms at once.

The Twitstream shared a lot of the gritty details of the presentations; the hashtag #memoQfest or an archive established by a Ukrainian user will show these for a while at least. And I'll be drawing on the tweets, my other notes and the memories of conversations in the breaks to share insights, many quite trivial, all of which confirm that memoQ is the right choice for most of my translation IT needs. The only thing I'll say now is that in memoQ 6 the versioning features will be the same in all editions of memoQ. Big deal. For some of us.

Oh yes, and next year's memoQ fest might not be in Budapest. If I weren't visiting that city with some frequency now for dogs, I might be disappointed, because I love it and the rest of the country I have seen, but the change is unlikely to be a problem, because what makes Kilgray's memoQ truly great is not the venue and not the rather good technology, but the people: the ones who make it and the ones who use it.

The memoQ ménage à trois

A few years ago, I tagged along behind Kilgray COO István Lengyel as he gave guests remaining after memoQfest a tour of the lovely city of Budapest. It was a beautiful spring day - what better opportunity to talk about the pressing matters of software licensing and server availability for small teams? We talked about the difficult position of translating couples who spent far too much time trading data on the SneakerNet or e-mailing TM exports to a partner sitting five meters away. He proposed a "honeymoon edition" of the memoQ Server to serve the needs of these teams, a licensing scheme certain to evoke warm feelings on par with a romantic cruise on the Blue Danube. But, alas, the promised edition never saw an official release.

But if there is one thing I've learned in my four years as a migrant to memoQ, it's that the swinging software developers in Hungary have a knack for taking a good idea and adding just a little more spice. Thus it was again as István announced to the audience in the final session of memoQ 2012 that a new small team edition of the memoQ Server is now available from Kilgray, with three licenses. The cost mentioned was € 3000, very competitive when compared to other tools in editions above the basic standalone freelancer package. I expect that when the Kilgray team recovers from the great efforts of hosting this year's excellent event there will be a follow-up announcement of what I have dubbed the memoQ Ménage à Trois edition, and those teams looking for an affordable entry solution to the industry's current best option for translation resource and project management in small- and medium-sized companies will surely celebrate.


Contact Kilgray for more details on this server solution or other excellent translation technology.

memoQfest 2012: practical outsourcing with memoQ desktop editions

This week I'm in Budapest for Kilgray's memoQfest, the annual gathering of users and curious bystanders as well as CAT tool competitors who want to learn how to get the technology right.

This morning I gave a presentation on a topic which has become a regular part of my consulting with colleagues and clients... or better said, has been a part of my work with them from the beginning of my association with the language services industry. Every time I hear a translation agency or corporate translation consumer say that a qualified translator with the subject expertise needed cannot be used because he or she doesn't work with the "right" translation environment tool, I am saddened by the foolishness of that statement or the lack of understanding it reveals. In mature IT sectors interoperability and lossless data exchange have been common for decades, though sometimes one must be clever to get there. But the cottage industries for languages are, in many ways, stuck in the IT mentality of the early 1980s despite the fact that the actual technology today is more like Y2K. Gut Ding braucht Weil as the Germans say.

At a memoQ master class yesterday, Kilgray COO István Lengyel stated that "Interoperability is the art of compromise." True, but if you keep your wits about you and apply them, the compromises are usually not as awful as originally assumed.

memoQ is distinguished by the great ease with which it can manage data to be used in translation with nearly any other translation environment. SDL Trados Studio actually does a few things better, but overall, the utility and ease of use for memoQ is far greater in most cases. It's like a Swiss Army knife of translation integration, with one or more reasonable workflows for almost anything.

Today's talk was a 45 minute distillation of a workshop I usually deliver in half a day. It was a bit of a challenge to pare it down in the limited time available with last-minute translation projects having more content than planned and late nights talking to colleagues from around the world. For experienced users, most of what I had to say was "old hat"; some new memoQ users were surely overwhelmed by a flood of "new" information. I hope that each listener was able to leave the session with at least one useful idea to apply and improve their business. For those who fell asleep and couldn't take notes or anyone else who likes to play "guess the context" with lecture slides, here is a link to the slides from the talk. Questions are welcome on whatever appears mysterious; most of it is somewhere on this blog in great detail. Re-use is permitted for any morally acceptable purpose (with attribution please). When Kilgray puts the video of the talk online, I'll post it here so those slides make more sense.

Coming to terms with Kilgray

The pre-conference day for memoQfest 2011 offered dual tracks in the morning session for the TM Repository and qTerm, the advanced, server-based terminology module for memoQ. Ever since attending a webinar when qTerm was released last October, I've been intending to blog on it, and since I already had an overview of what I needed to know about the Repository from last year, I chose the qTerm track. However the Twitter feed from Polish translator @wasaty made it clear that I was missing a lot of interesting news about Kilgray's TM management technologies.

István Lengyel and Gergely Vandor of Kilgray served a lot of meaty technical details on qTerm, many of which could be the subject of an entire blog post. It's a product with great potential I think, and I expect it will evolve considerably in the course of the next year. Gergely's technical insights on problems often encountered in data migration and how non-standard the TBX "standard" truly is were particularly interesting to me personally, revealing some useful and interesting information about data exports in that format from SDL's MultiTerm. And I thought the world of TMX was a big mess....

István's telling of the history of term management at Kilgray offered me a look at the very different world of translators of technical information working with small distribution languages. In some respects, that is a very different world from mine, and I very much appreciate how being shaken out of my comfortable German/English language pair perspective can sometimes help to flush my hardened arteries and get a little more oxygen to my brain. And the repeated reference to the role of terminology in branding by all three speakers in that morning session gave me some new ideas for how to help my direct clients and agencies understand even more clearly the importance of getting terminology right.

But like yesterday's train-the-trainer session, the real highlight of the day for me was not a technical presentation with specific details of a product I find interesting. It was a general discussion of purpose and philosophy in terminology management, by expert terminologist and consultant Barbara Karsch, who was deeply involved with terminology at JD Edwards and Microsoft before becoming an independent service provider to LSPs and corporate translation consumers. Her web site offers a lot of interesting information and definitions that are well worth reading. Her methodical presentation of the real costs involved in terminology mis- or non-management left little room for excuses and made a strong, objective case that any sober business person can appreciate. What I learned from her will help me make a better case to clients I value so they can help themselves. I very much look forward to getting a copy of the slides from that presentation.

Among all her valuable advice, however, one particular point stands out for me, an obvious one that I know well from my own experience. It applies to both terminologies and the collections of data often used inefficiently for terminology: translation memories. Without maintenance and updating, terminologies (and TMs) eventually become worthless. There is a definite life cycle which applies to a lot of this data, and all of the babbling about matches, fuzzy matches, etc. and the inertial complacency of many of us and our clients with regard to existing collections of data can too easily cause us to lose perspective and sacrifice future quality and reputation while indulging in the illusion of cost savings.

Those who make an effort to think clearly about the real costs of processes and decisions very often discover truths at odds with lazy common wisdom and benefit accordingly. When we get beyond the fear, uncertainty and doubt invoked by dishonest companies and "experts" with an agenda at odds with the interests of freelancers, public bodies and LSPs of acceptable size, we are very likely to arrive at decisions that seem risky to those blinded by propaganda.

Viewed objectively, the case is very clear for efficient, modern management of terminology with technologies such as those offered by Kilgray. And considering the larger technological context of the integrated environment in which tools such as qTerm work, the case for memoQ as a mother lode of value for translation management is just as clear. That is perhaps why I will be able to greet esteemed colleagues from SDL and other important contributors to the translation tools industry who will be attending memoQfest this year to divine the future directions of translation technology :-)

memoQfest 2011 off to a strong start training trainers

Though it's hard to have a bad day in Budapest, where even the police are uncommonly kind to stupid foreigners who can't deal well with their nightmarish traffic messes and troublesome parking, both serving to highlight the value of the city's excellent public transportation system, today was an especially good day thanks to a well-organized, superbly presented "train the trainer" session at Kilgray's headquarters. The instructors were Gábor Ugray, one of Kilgray's founders and current head of development, Gergely Vandor, Life Cycle manager at Kilgray, and Angelika Zerfass, one of Europe's finest trainers for translation environment technologies such as Trados and memoQ.

Angelika Zerfass sharing her expert understanding of

      effective training for any translation tools.

The guys from Kilgray shared important insights into memoQ technologies such as the termbases and recently introduced LiveDocs feature, and advanced tool for creating collections of reference information from monolingual and bilingual sources. Gábor gave an excellent summary of important configuration techniques in memoQ termbases to increase the value and effectiveness of the automated quality assurance tools for translations.Almost as an aside, he shared gold-plated tips on approaches to setting up projects to take advantage of folder structures, future plans for qterm, Kilgray's advanced server-based terminology module, which will soon include reporting features which will facilitate compensating translators for their contributions to a project's terminology. But the most valuable part of his presentation I think was the absolutely basic advice on how to use stemming techniques to improve term matching and QA in many languages. Trainers adopting his approach to sharing this information with memoQ users will make a great contribution to their clients' productivity.

Gergely gave a comprehensive overview of "LiveDocs", a simple yet sophisticated set of tools for automated alignment and collections of reference documents that currently has nothing on the market to offer it a real challenge for the convenience and efficiency it offers users for looking up information and applying it to their translations. His presentation was also sprinkled liberally with valuable tips such as the use of memoQ's backup feature to create "jump points" for training presentations. Another important point made was that a LiveDocs corpus can be a simple way to organize projects and create multilingual reference collections for large team projects involving many languages.

About half the day's training was offered by Angelika, whose presentations rank at the top of all the software training (and other training) I have attended in the past 25+ years. A respected leader for Trados training and project consulting, she has had an eye on memoQ since its earliest day and now gives the product her full endorsement as the best solution in most cases for SMEs. Although her presentation often included specific examples and structures relevant only to memoQ, the majority of what she shared is relevant to any training. I have been involved with adult continuing education in many forms for 27 years now, and the only training I have experienced in that time which offered clear, relevant insights at this level was the training for Apple Education Sales Consultants, which was one of the key factors for Apple's early dominance in the education markets. The high opinion I have had of her work for a decade now has been confirmed time and again by colleagues who have had the fortune to be trained by her. Every time she opens her mouth I learn something important, and she's one of those rare German trainers with modesty, subtlety and insight that would make her effective with most international audiences. And the partners in her consultancy are of equal caliber. It's a privilege to know people of their character and competence and an even greater one to be able to learn from them.

After a brilliant conclusion to the day's training (with a rhetorical trick that still has me smiling), there were a few hours to relax and eat before the evening party at Kilgray's headquarters. It was a great pleasure to meet familiar and new colleagues from Canada, Latvia, France, the US and many other countries and chat about anything and everything. The only downside to the evening was the shocking absence of Unicum. How a Hungarian company can hold such a gathering without one of the country's key drivers of innovation is utterly baffling to me. But then Kilgray is good at offering alternative solutions for the challenges faced in our profession, and Kilgray's general manager Peter Reynolds deftly mixed several Irish coffees that caused the Unicum problem to be forgotten quickly. Throughout the evening I was impressed time and again by the openness of Kilgray's team and the respect they have for their competitors. When I hear serious praise for other industry leaders backed by real expressed intent of cooperation, it's hard not to believe that some of my silly hopes for great advances in interoperability for competing translation tools might not in some way become a reality that will benefit all of us. In the next few days, some of these important competitors will be here in Budapest at memoQ to share ideas, build trust and explore models of cooperation and probably spy a bit on the most innovative provider of translation technology on today's market. I look forward to meeting them and doing all I can to see best practices combined in the interests of translators, translation project facilitators, and translation customers.

A time for travel

A local friend of mine spends an awful lot of time not being local. That's understandable if you know the clammy cold and icy roads of German winters in Berlin/Brandenburg. I love snow, mind you. It makes it easy to see the boars at midnight even without a full moon, and my dog is very fond of doing snow angels or frosting his beard. But I do get tired of walking like I'm twice my age because I've forgotten the slip-over grippers for my shoes to keep from breaking my legs on the ice and, although I'm not terribly fond of my native region of Southern California, my skin occasionally craves a bit of sun. Probably a Vitamin D thing. In any case, now that I'm getting settled in the Schloss, I've been giving some thought to all the other great places I might be in the coming months. There are some tempting options.

For me, of course, one of the most attractive is a return to Budapest in April. Kilgray is hosting the third memoQfest from April 13 to 15. Rumor has it this year's speakers will include competitors. I hope to see a number of Kilgray competitors at the event; while they are spying out the lead they should follow, I hope they also engage in useful discussions that will lead to better interoperability and results for everyone. How about some open server interfaces to connect with 3rd party clients, huh? Do an SDL server project with a memoQ client, and a memoQ server project with an installation of SDL Trados Studio 20xx. &c. Aside from the mememoQfest simply being a good time, a chance to mingle with interesting colleagues and enjoy wonderful food, Budapest is one of my favorite European cities, and I'll probably pad my trip with a few days on either side of the conference to explore the city and relax.

Despite my skepticism regarding ProZ and its ever-dumber pandering to the clueless masses, the company's conferences and site user organized pow-wows usually afford a good opportunity to meet colleagues and some agency clients, and see interesting cities. I might never have seen Edinburgh otherwise, and I wouldn't mind seeing it again. In May there's a conference planned in Rome, but in what appears to be a spectacular feat of dysfunctional planning, the day after the Rome conference ends, there is another ProZ conference in Cairo. What's with that? It's obvious that someone either thinks there will be little or no overlap in the groups of persons interested, or someone just wasn't thinking. And the big P seems to be somewhat challenged when it comes to the numbering of its events. There seems to be an obsession with everything somehow being the "first". With more than some multiple of ten conferences having been held around the world so far that just seems silly. I'll probably make it to Rome, if only to ditch the conference and go check out the restored ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, which I've been intending to do for so long now that it's probably time for another restoration. But Cairo is just so tempting, especially because I could skip the conference and take some sort of transportation to Luxor and other places that have been on my mind for a good three decades.

The British Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) also has an interesting conference program - er... programme - at the beginning of May in Birmingham. Although somehow the phrase "dark, satanic mills" comes to mind when I hear that city's name, the ITI is quite a respectable organization, better organized (or organised at least) than my own BDÜ and populated by interesting, competent professionals. If I attend that conference, I probably would be tempted to stay and participate and wait until afterward for trout fishing and pub crawls.

And I suppose there are other events in the translating world that may be of interest, which I may stumble upon in due course. One of the wonderful things about this business these days is that one tends to collect clients around the country and abroad, so there are many good reasons and excuses for a road or rail trip.

The TM Repository

One of the most interesting presentations for me at this year's memoQ Fest in Budapest was the presentation by Kilgray's CEO Balázs Kis on the company's new product in beta testing, the TM Repository. The concept was actually discussed at last year's conference, but it has matured a lot since then and developed into a web-based application (based on Microsoft IIS, ASP and SQL Server) for sophisticated management of translation memory resources from any source. Here are two more slides that emphasize aspects which I find particularly useful:

The complete presentation slide set can be downloaded here, and I think the talk will eventually be made available on YouTube.

It's important to understand that this is not a memoQ add-on. It is a tool intended to manage TMX data from any translation environment without metadata loss and allowing mapping of attributes for other systems, data maintenance and much more. It could be used by LSPs and corporations with extremely large Trados data set, for example, and it offers version control for the data. I'm not aware of another translation environment tool that does this in an efficient way.

Organizations interested in learning more about this technology and how it might support their workflows should contact Kilgray.

Moving to memoQ

The day before the main memoQfest 2010 conference was dedicated to all-day workshops to allow the participants a chance to get into real depth with the subject. And that's just what we did in the memoQ master class focusing on migration. Taught by Angelika Zerfass, one of the top trainers in the German-speaking countries for translation tool technology for nearly a decade and assisted by Kilgray's CEO Balázs Kis, adding a lot of content not shown on the agenda slides as well as revealing newly released and future memoQ features, this day was simply a gold mine of content for me. It answered a lot of questions on compatibility issues that have nagged me for a while and offered clear guidelines for migration project planning and best practice. Here is the title slide (with the contact e-mail address for the presenter) as well as the list of topics covered in the plan for the day:

The workshop got into a lot of detail on the various topics, as much as would be required by any LSP or corporate user I know. Here's an example of the comparison of TMX export structures in Trados and memoQ:

Ms. Zerfass does not work for Kilgray; she is an independent consultant and trainer who works with a broad range of tools, including SDL products and Across. She does do occasional webinars in German for Kilgray, and her workshops and training courses are available anywhere in German and English. This is a good person to turn to if you want a sober, accurate analysis of your situation and best options. And she's the only German trainer I know who doesn't put me to sleep by starting a presentation with the Big Bang, the course of human evolution and the work of Charles Babbage to show how to use Windows-based software.

She's also part of the newly-formed Loctimize GmbH in Saarbrücken, Germany, whose CEO Daniel Zielinski described to me last Thursday at Kilgray's wild birthday party how although memoQ may be the best general solution for SME LSPs and corporations in other sectors, advanced applications often require integration and customization involving other tools. That's exactly the approach which mature IT operations have taken for a long time now and which language service providers and their IT staff are starting to wake up to. With its founders' long experience in translation technology, programming, integration, migration and training, Loctimize is well able to help customers in German, English, Spanish, French, Italian and Swedish to make the right move.

Human Interoperability

-->

Anyone who is bored enough and has enough time on her hands to read my shot-from-the-hip presentation description from last fall, published in the conference schedule for memoQfest 2010 and who then compounds her error by watching the YouTube version of the actual talk delivered in my green hunting drabs (at least I took the hat off so more light could diffuse in the room) will notice that there is a bit of a difference.

By the time I got up to talk, my slides were best described as a palimpsest; I had scraped off the original text and written Something Very Different, something heretical. Like Ol' Ned, I've forsaken technology.

I'm quite pleased to see that other, more technically competent persons have taken up the banner of technical interoperability and come up with more permutations than previously imagined in my philosophy. I nearly swooned with pleasure as Angelika Zerfass deftly explained how to fix every mistake I've ever made migrating data to and from memoQ as well as a few more mistakes I was planning to make next week. Balázs Kis, Denis Hay, Gergely Vándor and an army of API-savvy LSPs charged the ramparts of monolithic software solutions and competently routed the enemy. And Tom Imhoff was there to pick off the stragglers who doubted the depths to which Trados integrations might go.

The best thing about a battle like this is that I don't expect any dead bodies, but rather healthier practices and, I hope, healthier translators.

But the Devil never sleeps, and his Infernal Engines are ready to receive the best of tools placed in the wrong hands with a wrong heart. Aside from its insatiable appetite for resources, there probably isn't much wrong with Trados Studio 2009 SP2. What I saw in the beta looked OK; I intend to purchase an upgrade to one of my Trados licenses at some point if only to write more accurately about it, but more likely to integrate it in my workflows where it makes sense to do so. SDL has some super employees on board who work late into the night helping users, and who have a sense of balance and fairness. I think they've done a lot to repair the damage done by insulting SDL marketing campaigns like the infamous "amnesty" offer to those who had dared to pass up a few upgrades. I look forward to writing about the good side of SDL products, particularly how they can finally help bring about those blooming landscapes that my neighbors in Brandenburg have been waiting for for so long.

memoQ too can be straight from Hell. Not in the usual CAT tool way, crashing and destroying your 300-page translation five minutes before it's due. Well, not usually anyway. If you want that, the best thing to do is re-install the original release of SDL Trados Studio 2009 from last June. The worst a beta of memoQ has been is a bit of frustration, and I got used to that in my first marriage.

No, the hellish aspects of memoQ – or any other tool – come to the fore when Good Tools fall into the hands of Bad People. Or Good People with Good Intentions, which as we all know are the paving stones on the path to Hell.

Think of those Trados word count logs. Useful things, actually, even if they aren't all that accurate as tools for assessing real effort in many real cases. MemoQ offers something better/worse. Homogeneity. For those of you in Kansas, yes its implementation can indeed be a sin, just not the one you think. Last year at memoQfest 2009 the evil I had anticipated was revealed in the form of a fallen angel from a French agency who spoke of using the memoQ homogeneity anaysis for text, which "anticipates" fuzzy matches that will arise in the course of a translation, to reduce the rates paid to translators. Boo, hiss. Actually, the angel in question was a nice guy doing his job trying to keep his staff off the dole, and I really felt bad about throwing him to the wolves when I asked for clarification of the matter in front of an audience. So I was more restrained this year when one wiry LSP rep spoke of accelerating workflows and 15 minute turnarounds that would make the Dark Lord's Turncoat Translations concept seem sluggish. All this with the power of the memoQ server that many of us hold dear. Satanic mills indeed.

It's not about tools, it's about people. Nothing less.

If it's too risky, too rushed, let it go. Walk the wire over the chasm of drop deadlines long enough, and eventually you'll fall into the Pit. Go slow, like food should be to digest in a settled stomach. Remember those twelve-course Belgian dinners that start at six and go to midnight before she asks you to go dancing and how well you sleep afterward. And when you plan your translation processes, remember that there are no processes without people, and if you insist on thinking of people as tools, then treat them as fine ones, restore them, not discard them, when they lose their edge, and show them greater respect than the finest heirloom plane in the chest of tools from your great-grandfather.

True interoperability is whatever it takes for people to work effectively and happily together. Technology may facilitate this, but never, never confuse the technology with the concept it should serve.

What's your exit strategy?

Better a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.

- M. di Mayo, Ph.C.

 

One of the brilliant presentations at the recent memoQfest 2010 in Budapest was by Isabella Moore, former head of the British Chambers of Commerce as well as past and present owner of COMTEC Translations in the UK. Speaking to agency owners, she advised them to develop an exit strategy with which they could reap the just rewards of their toil. This got me to thinking. Some of us translators work almost as hard as a PM, a few even as hard as an agency owner. But what options are open to those who choose not to tread the Golden Path of outsourcing and become, in stages, the next Lionbridge? What cash-out might a FREElancer pursue that might be more remunerative than Young Werther's? So I popped the question. (She was a little old for me, but it had been a long, lonely week, and I really wanted to know.) The answer, my friend, was a breezy platitude about "personal goals" and an example of someone who set up a community interpreting service. Interesting. Useful advice. But I was thinking, "That's a cash-out?" I was thinking more like beach, bikinis and Bacardi.

So I'm still thinking. I can packrat my bank account 'til it bursts and live on what leaks out afterward. Time's running out on that option for this old man, but for those of you who are young, an your marks, set and go. Don't worry about bank failures and hyperinflation, just trust in the markets and Lehman Bros. – uh, make that Goldman Sachs – and ALL WILL BE WELL.

I could hang out the red light and sell myself, but that wouldn't be much of a change from what I do for the marketing departments of some major German corporations. But I do sorta fancy changing my name to Roxanne. Maybe that should be my translation pseudonym. I'll sign certified patents with an extra flourish on the X.

My senile old tax consultant, the one who kept telling the German authorities I was in the import/export business because my e-mailed deliveries cross national borders, brought in fresh blood and lives on the stipend he gratefully pays for the chance to keep the customers she was in the process of losing. This time-honored system of professional succession has its attractions, and maybe this will be an effective way of convincing my daughter that she should still do as I say when she's 60 years old. But I have my doubts.

I could start outsourcing, build up a service organization, then sell it to Lionbr... oh wait, I already said I wouldn't go there. Human trafficking may be profitable and even legal in some jurisdictions, but something tells me it's so, so wrong.

I could just keep typing translations until my fingers drop off, then pick up where I stopped after I get a pro copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking. By then maybe the TEnT vendors will have the integration right. Oh wait – Kilgray already did that with version 4.2 of memoQ. Take your time, SDL ;-) Slow and unsteady wins the race, just ask Atril and PowerLing.

Now that might be the answer, for me at least. Keep going at what I love so much as long as my brain holds out, expose myself to the challenges and pleasures of evolving fields of interest until I am ready for the glue factory. And then when I can't do it any more, reach for my copy of DLDJW and read a few chapters for inspiration.

memoQfest 2010: we all win

My intention to live blog this year's memoQfest 2010 didn't work out, though I managed a few pre-breakfast posts in the days before the conference and the occasional tweet during the sessions. There was simply too much going on. Either my full attention was focused on the great information and surprise announcements or I was out on the terrace of the beautiful venue at Restaurant Gundel recaffeinating my brain and trying to catch my breath for the next round. The event's location was much better than last year at Hotel Benczúr, which was quite adequate and which served as the location for the gala 5th birthday party for Kilgray on Thursday evening. The atmosphere was great, but it often went unnoticed, because many of the announcements and presentations had my attention in a mental vise grip. The riveting workshop by Angelika Zerfass on data migration best practices (to and from memoQ) on the day before the main conference was definitely a harbinger of what was to come: interoperability and integration of memoQ were in one way or another part of nearly every presentation. I think this reflects a broader industry trend which one can see with Kilgray's better competitors as well and of which SDL's move to XLIFF is a good example. But there's a special flavor to interoperability with memoQ which I really don't taste elsewhere and which is the result of the unique spicing of the company's support philosophy and its team's understanding that no matter how good tools and processes are what matters in the end are the people. This is so obvious in Kilgray's interactions with partners and customers that shortly before I was to deliver my own talk Friday morning on interoperability I threw out the script I had been preparing since November and talked about interoperability and the dignity of the participants in the processes, the translators, editors, clients and everyone else involved. The technical bits had already been covered in more detail than I will ever be capable of discussing.

There appears to be a perfect storm brewing in Budapest. But not a destructive one: already the pressure of innovation and good attitude from the east of Europe has caused the industry's biggest player to take some positive steps in the past two years which have benefitted many in our profession. And the teams and technologies I saw gathered at the conference in the past week promise a deluge of innovation and good practice that will benefit even those who can't be bothered with translation environment tools.

No, I haven't been oversampling the Unicum, nor am I being too caught up in my own rhetoric as I sometimes am. I just saw a lot of stuff that gives me just cause for optimism. Most importantly optimism about the ability of my colleagues, clients and others to work together more effectively no matter what religious TEnT they seek shelter in. Although it's really clear now even to those with the thickest skulls that Kilgray has got the innovation, attitude and endurance to go the distance with its best competitors in the translation tools field, the best news for me is that the company's real openness to that competition and Kilgray's commitment to making processes work as well as helping people work together in a reasonable way will help bring about that rising tide which lifts all boats.

Moving to memoQ and selling translations

Yesterday was workshop day for memoQfest 2010. Two all-day sessions were offered. In one, Doug Lawrence provided training to language service providers on selling translations. His company is noted for its nuts-and-bolts practical assistance to translators and small agencies in improving their viability as businesses. Training webinars on selling translation services have been offered through proZ and other venues and Doug's company regularly offers introductory and advanced sales courses for individual translators and a three-day master course for translation companies at their locations. The second workshop that day was the memoQ master class on migration to memoQ. This advanced seminar taught by the highly respected German training consultant Angelika Zerfass and Kilgray's CEO Balázs Kis (also a university instructor for 15 years) went into great detail on the best ways to move data for translation memories, terminologies and configurations between memoQ systems and other systems. In some ways it was a far more detailed version of the talk I'll be giving tomorrow on interoperability. Everything you need to know for optimizing the migration process from Trados to memoQ was presented in the session, covering the range from freelancers to large companies with complex translation processes. Balázsalso revealed the new memoQ open interface for external terminology service integration and showed an online service to which all licensed memoQ users will receive free access. Thomas Imhoff, a former senior developer of Trados systems for a decade was present and expressed an interest in using this new interface to allow memoQ desktop and server systems to access online and offline MultiTerm termbases. If this happens you can be sure I'll announce that loudly here, as I believe it will be a great benefit to a huge number of translators and companies who want to maintain the value of their legacy systems and integrate parallel systems more effectively.


LSPs and other companies in German-speaking countries can turn to both Ms. Zerfass and Mr. Imhoff for practical advice, strategic consulting and implementation of system migration from Trados to memoQ as well as establishing new enterprise memoQ systems from the ground up. Both are knowledgeable industry veterans with deep expertise in Trados systems who have joined the Kilgray camp because they know a superior solution for corporate (and freelance) needs when they see it. Competent migration planning and assistance is also available from Kilgray's team as well, and there are several team members currently based in Germany.


I attended the workshop on memoQ data exchange and learned how to correct a number of errors I've made in the past. At the very least, anyone planning a major move from another system to memoQ should get a copy of the presentation from Kilgray or attend a similar workshop offered in the future. (In Germany the two experts mentioned above can provide local training and support.) Migration to memoQ is really easy, but even so there are many subtleties to the process, and knowing these can make the difference between a solution that works with some hitches and a more perfect process.


And now I'm off for a quick breakfast and a great day at the first regular day of the memoQfest conference. Maybe I'll try tweeting the most interesting parts.

Training the trainer for memoQ

On March 4, 2010 on the day before the memoQfest 2010 conference, Kilgray held a special day of training for memoQ experts to help them better understand the many changes in the latest version of the translation environment tool. Trainers from around the world - Canada, the USA, Germany France, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Finland, the UK and elsewhere - came to learn about the latest advances and key developments to come.

Topics covered included (in a more logical order than in this list):

• permissions management
• offline synchronization
• online projects
• termbase rights
• licensing and license management
• project workflows for translation and review
• project management reporting including post-analyses
• notifications for online project participants
• RTF tables for translation and review
• memoQ resources for settings, etc. and how to share and publish them for online and offline projects
• multilingual project configuration
• online project forums, messaging and chat
• PM through handoff packages and delivery
• splitting large files and selecting portions in online projects using views; local views exported as MQ bilinguals for the online project
• setup a local project and publish it to the server (publish ONLY views is possible)
• filtering strategies using views for project management efficiency, locking out matches, etc.

The event was held in Kilgray's new offices in a beautiful old building whose electrical circuit breakers were severely challenged by over 20 translators plugging into a single circuit in the training room.

The delivery was informal and flexible with plenty of opportunities to clarify situations encountered in real situations with clients. The long lunch break also provided an excellent opportunity for networking and discussion with colleagues and the Kilgray team as well as great food. The presentation was made in roughly equal parts by Gabor Ugray, Kilgray's head of development, and Gergely Vándor, the Kilgray lifecycle manager.

Denis Hay, who recently joined Kilgray and works remotely in support from southern France made numerous valuable contributions to the discussions as he has always done as an expert user of DVX and memoQ software. His creative, user-oriented approach to problems is a perfect fit with Kilgray's philosophy and long-term practice. His occasional comments on possible applications added a lot to what was learned.

A representative from Kilgray's office in Austin, Texas shared news in the breaks and at the party later that evening of developments on the US market and communication issues there. Angelika Zerfass, one of Germany's premiere trainers for CAT tools and a noted expert for SDL systems also shared interesting perspectives on the German market. Agencies and corporations in the German-speaking countries have an excellent resource in Ms. Zerfass if they want a neutral, competent overview of this technology. Her English is also superb, so communication with clients in that language is no problem at all.

Overall, the day provided memoQ experts with a lot of valuable material to assist their clients and employers in planning and managing their translation projects. I left with many ideas for guidelines and training materials to assist my readers and clients with this user-friendly, cost-saving, efficiency-boosting technology. And I'm looking forward to tomorrow's pre-conference workshops.