Kilgray training resources: is this what you need?

Some years ago I was relaxing at an informal occasion with one of Kilgray's directors, who expressed concern that the growing number of features might lead to confusion among users and obscure the basic simplicity of memoQ, which at the time was the company's only product. I think version 3.5 or 4.0 was the current release at the time of our chat. I disagreed with him at the time, because compared to other tools at the time, memoQ was easier to understand, more ergonomic than any of the leading tools. It still is.

But as most users of the software know, things have gotten a lot more complicated since then. As memoQ has taken a forward position in the market for translation environment tools, many features have been added (by necessity one could argue) to accommodate various interest groups. Some of these features I find very good and useful, others inspire a response that cannot be expressed in polite company, because they support server workflows which I personally find exploitative and offensive in the hands of some companies. But any tool can be used for good or bad purposes, and one of my favorite tools for planning my time accurately - the homogeneity analysis - is sometimes abused by Linguistic Sausage Producers to put further economic pressure on individual translators, yet I would not wish it to go away.

Many, many features to master for a wide range of work challenges. Even the so-called "experts" often don't have a clear overview. This problem is, of course, common to almost any popular software application: the situation with SDL Trados Studio is similar, and look at Microsoft Word, my God. An "expert" might understand 10% of Word's features.

Kilgray, it must be said, does try to go the extra mile and provide information to users in many ways so that they can work effectively and avoid frustration when navigating the sometimes tricky paths one must follow in a complex project. Each month the company offers free webinars, and recordings of these are available for later reference in most cases. There is also a knowledgebase (which is quite a challenge to keep up to date given the software's rapid pace of development). The company has also produced a number of shorter instruction videos. The Kilgray YouTube channel has a wide mix of material, including some recordings of past conferences, which are not always easy to understand but which contain a lot of interesting and useful material for some groups. There is also an extensive collection of user guides and white papers on the Kilgray site.

More recently Kilgray as taken its first steps with integrated e-learning, adopting the Moodle platform popular with many educational institutions. I think this is a very interesting new direction; since late spring I have been researching and testing such platforms myself, and I expect very good things to come of this in the future.

The first Kilgray e-learning course was a memoQ basics course, consisting of ten recorded PowerPoint lectures, each about 10 to 15 minutes long. There is a short review quiz at the end to give learners some feedback on what they have retained, and a certificate is offered for those who get a certain number of questions right. Although this course structure uses only a small part of the potential of the Moodle platform, it is easier to navigate and find particular information than it might be in a webinar, for example. The basics course is free to any memoQ user with a current support contract and is worth a look. Others can take the course for a fee of €90 (which is close enough to the cost of annual support that you might as well update your contract and enjoy the updates it includes). Feedback and suggestions should be sent to support@kilgray.com to help in the planning of further courses to help users.

More recently, another Moodle course was published for project managers working with the memoQ server. I know from my own experiences as a consultant and someone who occasionally has to deal with the frustrations of misconfigured server projects set up by my clients that there is a real need for better training for those who work with the memoQ Server. Many of my clients who have adopted this solution have had very little prior experience with CAT tools at all, and given the many pressures of a production environment, they may find visual media a more effective form of support than "RTFM".

The structure of the PM training course is similar to that of the memoQ basics course: ten recorded PowerPoint lectures in English. There is also a quiz at the end. The course is available free to all licensed memoQ server users, who should contact their Kilgray support representative to arrange access.

As the screenshot above indicates, Kilgray has moved its e-learning resources to Language Terminal, and along with all the other plans for that platform, there are many under consideration to expand the scope and quality of learning resources available, not only for Kilgray's products, but perhaps for other knowledge which can contribute to their successful use in the complex world of real projects.

What is your experience so far with Kilgray's training resources? What has worked for you? What has not? What kind of resources do you think would help you and those with whom you work to master the challenges of your daily routine?

New tutorials for translation productivity

As many may have noticed from reading this blog or following me on Twitter in recent weeks, I have begun to create and post on YouTube a larger number of videos on various topics related to translation support tools or processes to make the business of translation a little easier. Many, but not all of these videos cover the use of memoQ; there are also discussions of special file preparation, VBA macros, piece rate equivalency calculations and more.

Subscribe to the channel and keep up to date as I add more material on a range of software tips and other productivity ideas for translators.

I have used a number of different tools to record and edit these videos - Camtasia in a few cases, and so far mostly the free Open Source tool CamStudio, both for Windows. The production values of the clips vary considerably as I get back into video production after a 17 year break. I'm not aiming for perfection here, but rather for quick and practical - more or less in the spirit of my memoQuickie tutorials which formed the basis of much of the e-guidebook of memoQ tips I released last year. I start gnashing my teeth before the 4-minute mark with many translation tool tutorials I see, so I try hard to keep most of the clips well under that length. I find that even the good longer videos are difficult to use as references, because I often have to search for the few minutes that interest me in an hour-long webinar recording, and without a reasonable index, that's just too difficult.

Many of these videos and the ones that follow will be embedded content in courses I am developing for translator and project manager education using Moodle. These combine text, video and audio along with practice files in many cases for multimodal learning of basic and more advanced processes that those in the translation business often require.

I've watched the growth of webinars in recent years as well as various other forms of distance assistance and instruction. But aside from coaching sessions for clients and colleagues using TeamViewer, I have refrained from taking part in these popular new media, because I am unconvinced of their effectiveness in many cases. This is not to say that there are not many very good webinars available, both live and recorded, but even with the best I am often left with the sense that there should be something more. Maybe something like a self-paced review course online with the resources where one can practice what was just covered in the long webinar and go over its most important points more easily. Such a resource might also be useful as a backup to live lectures or courses I or others might do.

I think that having a "toolbox" of online short courses might change the way I teach in person in some positive ways. It would likely give me more flexibility in how to cover topics for groups where a range of skills are present - the "outliers" requiring more remediation or greater challenge could perhaps be served better by offering them appropriate online follow-up resources, or even drawing material from these in a live workshop as the need arises.

Careful study of a wide range of current e-learning approaches in recent months has led me to think about what appears to work best and how I can learn from that and encourage others to do so as well. This has been an active and interesting discussion with quite a few friends and colleagues, and I don't expect we'll ever find the ultimate answers. But I imagine we will have fun and probably learn a lot, and maybe help others to learn some useful things too.

Coping with objects and graphics to translate in Microsoft Office documents

About a year ago, I published a series of posts describing a simple way to get at the objects and graphics embedded in Microsoft Office documents, such as Microsoft Word DOCX documents or PowerPoint PPTX presentations. These investigations were inspired by a series of jobs where I had to cope with up to 60 embedded Excel tables in a Microsoft Word document. The four related posts are:

• Translating embedded objects in Microsoft Office documents
• Coping with embedded BIN objects in Microsoft Office documents
• Replacing bitmap graphics in Microsoft Office documents
• Refreshing embedded objects in Microsoft Word (a macro)

The post titles may differ a little from the text in the links here, which is updated for a little more clarity.

I've also added two short videos to my YouTube channel which illustrate how to remove embedded objects from a DOCX for translating separately from the Microsoft Word document and how to put them back afterward.

Here's how to extract the embeddings folder from the DOCX file:



And here is how to put the translated embedded objects into the DOCX file and refresh the view of the embedded objects in your translation:



These and other videos I've produced recently are part of an effort I began recently to develop integrated courses for self-instruction and review with software tools used by many of us. These courses use the Moodle platform and offer text, screenshots, audio, video and data files such as examples of file formats to translate, backups of memoQ practice projects to restore on your local computer for training, configuration resources for memoQ, useful macros to support work with many translation environment (CAT) tools and a host of other resources and learning links.

Caption editing for YouTube videos

I've spent a great deal of time in recent weeks examining different means for remote instruction via the Internet. In the past I've had good success with TeamViewer to work on copywriting projects with a partner or deliver training to colleagues and clients at a distance. So far I have avoided doing webinars because of the drawbacks I see for that medium, both as an instructor and as a participant, but I haven't completely excluded the possibility of doing them eventually. I've also looked at course tools such as Citrix Go To Training and a variety of other e-learning platforms, such as Moodle, which is the tool used by universities and schools around the world and which also seems to be the choice of Kilgray, ProZ and others for certain types of instruction.

Recorded video can be useful with many of these platforms, and since I've grown tired of doing the same demonstrations of software functions time and again, I've decided to record some of these for easy sharing and re-use. When I noticed recently that my Open Source screen recording software, CamStudio had been released in a new version, I decided quite spontaneously to make a quick video of pseudotranslation in memoQ to test whether a bug in the cursor display for the previous version of CamStudio had been fixed.

After I uploaded the pseudotranslation demo to YouTube, I noticed that rather appalling captions (subtitles) had been created by automatic voice recognition. Although voice recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking is usually very kind to me, Google's voice recognition on YouTube gave miserable results.

I soon discovered, however, that the captions were easy to edit and could also be exported as text files with time cues. These text files can be edited very easily to correct recognition errors or combine segments to improve the timing and subtitle display.

Once the captions for the original language are cleaned up and the timing is improved, the text files can be translated and uploaded to the video in YouTube to create caption tracks in other languages. As a test, I did this (with a little help from my friends), adding tracks for German and European Portuguese to the pseudotranslation demo. And if anyone else cares to create another track for their native language from this file, I'll add it with credits at the start of the track.

It's easy enough to understand why I might want to add captions in other languages to a video I record in English or German. But why would I want to do so in the original language? My thick American accent is one reason. I like to imagine that my English is clear enough for everyone to understand, but that is a foolish conceit. Of course I speak clearly - I couldn't use Dragon successfully if that were not true. But someone with a knowledge of English mostly based on reading or interacting with people who have very different accents might have trouble. It happens.

Although most of the demonstration videos SDL has online for SDL Trados Studio are easy to follow, some of the thick UK accents are really frightening and difficult for some people in places like Flyover America to follow. Some Kilgray videos of excellent content are challenging for those unaccustomed to the accents, and the many wonderful demos of memoQ, WordFast, OmegaT and other tools by CAT Guru on YouTube would have been difficult for me before I was exposed to the linguistic challenges of the wide world that can English. All of these excellent resources in English would benefit from clear English subtitles.

How difficult is it to create captions? The three-minute pseudotranslation demo cost me about ten minutes of work to clean up the subtitles. The English captions for another slightly shorter video explaining the use of the FeeWizard Online to estimate equivalent rates for charging by source or target words, lines, pages, etc. also took me about 10 or 15 minutes with all the text and timing corrections. And I've spent a good bit of time in the past week transcribing a difficult spoken English lecture by a German professor: it took me about 7 hours of transcription work to cope with a spoken hour. I don't know if this is typical, because I almost never do this sort of thing, and there were a lot of WTF moments. But I suppose three to seven times the recording length might be a reasonable range for estimating the effort of a draft edit and some timing changes. Not bad, really.

So if you are involved in creating instructional videos to put on YouTube or use elsewhere, please consider this easy way of making good work even better by investing a little time in caption creation and editing. Once you have done this for the original language, it will also be a simple matter to translate those captions to make your content even more accessible.