Ergonomic optimization for memoQ windows & more!

Click the graphic to see the mind-blowing details of all you can get on two silly little screens. Imagine two big ones!

How many functional windows do you see for working in the memoQ project of the screenshot here? Do you need more? It's possible. Are you familiar with all the functions shown in this two-screen view of my laptop and a repurposed television screen on my working holiday?

Of course one need not be restricted to just the many undockable, resizable and relocatable windows of memoQ; other, third-party like the SDL MultiTerm Widget (for searching SDL term bases in memoQ or other applications) or IntelliWebSearch, which offers many customized, configurable multi-tab web searches with the browser engine of your choice, or others can be added as needed.

"But wait!", you say. "You can't undock memoQ windows except for the preview, and it's impossible to get enough space to see all the information in the Translation Results pane or see the comparison of large matches well!" Well, here you can. The Translation Results hit list can take the whole height of your screen if you want it to. And you can even see more than one translation and editing grid for files if you need to.

Just because memoQ Support or some expert in the company says stuff like that is not possible doesn't make it so. For something like a decade now I have heard users ask for a lot of layout customization features to improve working ergonomics in memoQ. Heck, I've heard myself beg for that for ages. But typically, one is told how difficult and expensive such efforts are, how there are other priorities, yada yada yada. What, apparently, nobody realized was that while all these discussions were going on, someone actually implemented the requested features, deliberately or otherwise. In any case, somehow that secret never got out. Until I stumbled over it last week while trying to enjoy a few days at the beach.

"How do I get there?" you and David Byrne may ask. Join us for the Best Practices in Translation Technology course from 15 to 20 July (next month) in Lisbon and find out! Or wait until I get around to opening my upcoming online courses, Working Ergonomics in memoQ and New Beginnings with memoQ 9.0, coming soon. Or look in all those memoQ basics tutorials from memoQ Translation Technologies Ltd. on YouTube - something as basic as ergonomics for using the software must be in there somewhere. Or maybe not. Yet.

Or... explore and discover the tricks yourself. And while you're at it, you might find some of the other hidden surprises cleverly concealed in the world's greatest translation environment toolkit.

Terminology output management with SDL MultiTerm

I have always liked SDL MultiTerm Desktop - since long before it was an SDL product, back when it came as part of the package with my Trados Workbench version 3 license.

Then, as now, Trados sucked as a working tool, so I soon switched to Atril's Déja Vu for my translation work, and after 8 or 9 years to memoQ, but MultiTerm has continued to be an important working tool for my language service business. I extract and manage my terminology with memoQ for the most part, but when I want a high-quality format for sharing terminology with my clients' various departments, there is currently no reasonable alternative to MultiTerm for producing good dictionary-style output.

Terminology can be exported from whatever working environment you maintain it in, and then transferred to a MultiTerm termbase using MultiTerm Convert or other tools. In the case of memoQ, there is an option to output terms directly to "MultiTerm XML" format:

Fairly simple; there are no options to configure. Just select the radio button for the MultiTerm export format at the top of any memoQ term export dialog. And what do you get?

Three files: the XML file with the actual term data and the XDT file with the termbase specifications are the important ones. The latter is used to create the termbase in SDL MultiTerm. If you have an existing termbase to use in MultiTerm, you won't need the XDT file, though if that termbase is not based on Kilgray's XDT file there might be some mapping complications for the term inport from the XML file.

Now let's create a termbase in SDL MultiTerm 2017 Desktop:

Give it a name:

When the termbase wizard starts, choose the option to load an existing termbase definition and select the XDT file created by memoQ:

At the end of the process you will have an empty Multiterm termbase into which the data in the XML file are imported:

Now you'll have an SDL Multiterm termbase with the glossary content exported from memoQ. This is a process which can be carried out when sharing terminology with a colleague who uses SDL Trados Studio for translation, for example. If they don't know how to use the import functions of SDL Multiterm or you want to save them the bother of doing so, just share the SDLTB file.

Now that the glossary is in Multiterm it can be exported in various formats which can be helpful to people who prefer the data in a more generally accessible format. Please note that this is not done using the export functions under the File menu! SDL Multiterm is a program originally developed by German programmers, who have their own Konzept of Benutzerfreundlichkeit. Even in the hands of Romanian developers, it's still kinda weird. The desired functions are found in the Termbase Management area of course:

In keeping with the German Benutzerfreundlichkeitskonzept, the command to generate the desired output is Process, of course.

There are a number of pre-defined output templates included with Multiterm. I usually use a version of the "Word Dictionary" export definition, which produces a two-column RTF file, which by default will give output like this:

I prefer something a little different, so I have prepared various improved versions of this output definition, and I usually edit the text, adjust the column breaks as needed and clean up any garbage (like redundant initial letters caused by inflected vowels in a language like Portuguese), then I slap a cover page on the file and make a PDF out of it or create a nice printed copy, possibly with other page size formatting. Here is an example:

Example PDF dictionary output - click to enlarge

Other possible output formats include HTML, which can be useful for term access on an intranet, for example. Custom definitions can be created by cloning and editing an existing definition; these are specific to a given termbase. If you want to apply a custom export definition to another termbase, export it as an XDX file and then load it for the other termbase. The definition file used to generate the example above is available here.

One essential weakness of the SDL export definition which has always annoyed me is the failure to include the last word on the page in the header as most proper dictionaries do. I addressed this in the definition with my limited knowledge of RTF coding, but the change can be made manually in Microsoft Word too, for example, by copying and pasting the SortTerm field and editing it to add the \l argument:

There are, of course other, possibly better ways to get some nice output formats from memoQ glossaries or termbases in other tools. One approach with memoQ is to create XSL scripts to process the MultiTerm XML output from memoQ. For years I have been hoping that Kilgray would create a simple extension to the term export dialog in memoQ, which would allow XSL scripts to be chosen and a transformation applied when the data are exported. It really is a shame that after more than a decade the best translation environment tool available - memoQ - still cannot match the excellent formatted output that my clients and I have enjoyed with MultiTerm since I first started using that program 17 years ago!

Optimizing term properties for many entries in a memoQ termbase

Terminology: On my wishlist: an easier way to deal with termbases imported into MemoQ in Studio packages. Especially annoying: the habit of many Studio users capitalizing termbase entries & thus torpedoing recognition. It would seem the default setting in MultiTerm is fuzzy matching.

memoQ is noted for its compatibility with SDL Trados Studio files and projects; with the latest release of memoQ (version 8.1) there is apparently full compatibility with tracked changes in SDLXLIFF files and with Studio's translation quality assurance. However, there are apparently a few little points remaining to satisfy some.

The opening comment is from a colleague who seems to experience less than optional matching for terminology which is imported as part of a memoQ project using an SDL Trados Studio package (SDLPPX). The solution to this person's frustration is fairly simple, however, and it is useful in many other cases where the properties of terms in a memoQ glossary are not well optimized.

Many people are unaware of the fact that it is possible to change any of the term properties for a large number of terms at once. To do this, simply open the memoQ termbase for editing and select the terms to change. Multiple selections can be made by holding down the Shift key and clicking on the desired range of rows or by using the control key to mark individual selections. Then simply set the desired property (such as fuzzy matching) and the change will be applied to all of the selected terms.

About four years when fuzzy term matching was introduced by Kilgray I made a short video about this. The memoQ interface is a little different since then but the procedure works just as well today:

First month with SDL Trados 2017

A month ago, when I announced the Great Leap Forward from my rather neglected SDL Trados 2014 license to the latest, presumably greatest version, SDL Trados 2017, after seeing how wet the largely untested release of memoQ 8 (aka Adriatic) has proved to be, there was some surprise, as well as smiles and frowns from various quarters. It's been a busy month, and I am still testing options for effective workflow migration and exchange (useful in any case given how often memoQ users work together with those who prefer SDL tools) as well as discussing the good and bad experiences of friends, colleagues and clients who use SDL Trados Studio 2017.

As can be expected, this product has more than a bit of a bleeding edge character, though on the whole it does seem to be a little more stable and less buggy than memoQ Adriatic so far, with fewer what the Hell were they smoking moments. However....

I was a little concerned at the report from a colleague in Lisbon that the integration of the plug-in for SDL Trados Studio access to Kilgray Language Terminal amd memoQ Server translation memories doesn't work with SDL Trados 2017 after functioning so well in SDL Trados 2014 and 2015. Despite the stupid inter-company politics between SDL and Kilgray, which hindered the approval of the plug-in so that a warning dialog appeared each time it was loaded in SDL Trados Studio (bad form by the boys in Maidenhead), it was a great tool for users of SDL Trados Studio and memoQ to share TMs in small team projects. I was very happy with how it worked with SDL Trados Studio 2014, and I am very disappointed to see that API changes in the latest version have bunged things up so that Kilgray will have more work to re-enable this useful means of collaboration. I hope that SDL will see fit to be less petty and more cooperative with the upcoming "fixed" plug-in! It is in their interest to do so, as this makes it easier for SDL Trados users to stick to their favorite tool while working on jobs for or with those who prefer memoQ as their resource. Better work ergonomics for everyone and no BS with CAT wars.

I was pleased to see that SDL Trados Studio has added AutoCorrect facilities recently. And they seem to work reasonably well in English and mostly in German, though there was a strange quirk which hamstrung the "correct as you type" feature. That setting took a while to "stick" somehow when I tested it first with German. It was fine for Portuguese too. However, Ukrainian and Arab colleagues can't get it to work for some reason. I did not believe this at first until a colleague in Egypt showed me live via shared screens in Skype how the autocorrection simply failed to activate. Perhaps this is an issue with languages that don't use the Roman alphabet, so I suppose colleagues in Russia, Serbia, Japan and elsewhere may be tearing some hair out over this one. It doesn't affect me directly, but it looks like a pretty serious bug that ought to be addressed ASAP.

SDL generally kicks some butt with regex facilities in SDL Trados Studio; customer service guru Paul Filkin has written a lot about these features on his Multifarious blog, and most advanced users of the platform make heavy use of regular expressions in filters and QA rules. For a long time, memoQ users could only look on in envy at all the excellent possibilities before Kilgray belatedly added more regex options to its work environment. However, there are a few raw rubs remaining.

My Arabic translator friend pinged me recently to ask if I was aware of the "regex trouble" in the latest Studio version. He made heavy use of these features for Arabic and English work in some rather amazing, creative and inspiring ways (I had not imagined) in earlier versions of SDL Trados Studio, and some of these features are rather broken at present in SDL Trados 2017. He gave me a very useful tutorial (which I had planned to beg him for anyway soon) in the use of regex in SDL Trados Studio for basic filtering, advanced filtering and QA checks. Overall I was very impressed with the possibilities, but the failure of some regular expressions which worked well in the advanced filters to work at all in the basic filter or in QA rulesets was very disturbing. We argued a little about what the basis of the problem could be in the software programming, but it is a major problem which limits the functionality of SDL's latest software severely and should cause advanced users and LSPs to wait and watch for the fix before upgrading to the latest version. The persistence of such a major flaw in such an important area as quality assurance some 6 months after release is frankly shocking. I hope this will be addressed very soon so that I can migrate and upgrade some of me favorite QA routines from memoQ.

Last but not least is an irritating bug in an auxiliary feature for what has always been one of my favorite terminology tools, MultiTerm. It was the first Trados product many years ago, and despite many quirks over the decades, it remains one of the best. Face it: the memoQ terminology model is OK for most practical uses, but for maintaining high quality corporate terminologies tracking many important attributes it is hopeless garbage. Most other CAT tool terminology databases and glossaries are far worse. MultiTerm sets the standard today still for affordable, flexible, powerful terminology management. For 17 years I have used this excellent platform for my best terminologies for my best clients and delighted in its output management options (even when they can be a pain in the butt to configure properly).

When I want to access my high value MultiTerm resources while translating in memoQ or working in web pages or MS Word, I use the convenient MultiTerm widget to access the data. However, I am very disappointed to find that recent versions do not display the attributes for terms when the widget is used for lookup. Damn. That makes the results just as annoying as the lobotomized MultiTerm/TBX imports into memoQ. I really hope that SDL fixes this flaw ASAP and remains on top of the terminology game with MultiTerm and its lookup tools as a valuable resource even for translators who hate Trados Studio and won't use it.

Overall I am seeing a lot of nice things in SDL Trados Studio 2017, and I would say it is probably more mature and stable than memoQ 8 at this point. But it really is just a late-stage beta release, and more fixes are needed before I can trust it for routine production work. We are all better off for now to stick with the prior versions of both SDL Trados Studio and memoQ.

Corpus Linguistics and AntConc in the 2016 US Presidential Contest

Professor Laurence Anthony's AntConc concordancing software remains my favorite tool for analyzing the word content of text collections for my professional translation purposes. Although a free tool, it offers some important functionality beyond what I can get from the integrated term extraction and concordancing means in my translation environment tools, particularly SDLMultiTerm Extract and memoQ. AntConc is my first recommendation to my friends who teach at university and want to introduce their students to practical corpus linguistics and to my clients in industry who need to produce useful glossaries which cover the most frequently discussed things in their range of products and services.

That is not to say that its features are the most wide-ranging, but in addition to dead-simple incorporation of stopword lists (still a problem for most memoQ users), AntConc (like many other academic concordancers) offers excellent facilities for studying collocations, those words which occur together in important contexts. For years I have begged that this useful feature be added to the tools for professional translators, because it is a great aid in studying the proper language of a particular field or subject matter, and although the memoQ concordance can in fact search for multiple terms at once so that one forms a visual impression of their co-occurrence in text, it lacks the simple precision of AntConc for specifying the proximity range of the words found together in a sentence.

In one form or another, tools for analyzing the frequency of words and the contexts in which they occur have been a part of my life for a very long time. And yet it did not occur to me to use them as a means of studying the many words that are part of the many political and social debates taking place in the countries that concern me. One can get a quick impression with fun word cloud pictures (such as those in this post, created from the convention speeches of The Orange One and The Infamous HRC using a free online tool). But AntConc lets you go deeper and achieve a greater understanding of how language is used to influence our thoughts and discussions.

Katelyn Guichelaar and Kristin Du Mez have done just that in an interesting article title, "Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, By Their Words", which offers some interesting insights into the psychology and public postures of the two candidates. No spoilers here – go read the article and enjoy. Then think about the professionally and personally relevant ways in which you might use the practical tools of corpus linguistics.

memoQ&A in Porto - good people, great bagels!

Last night from 6:00 to 9:30 I enjoyed a "memoQ&A Evening" at the Porto Bagel Café as a reward for surviving the long bus ride to Porto/Gaia from Évora to attend the JABA Partner Summit. About 25 local colleagues attended to hear my not-as-short-as-promised presentation and discuss approaches to memoQ and other translation technologies as our working tools. The evening was part of the Translators in Residence initiative and a good start to my second visit to the area after my whirlwind tour last month to investigate venues for teaching events. Many thanks to the sponsors. the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters and Chip7 of Évora for providing the funding and tools (an excellent LCD projector - thank you, Carlos!) to do this.

I very much appreciate IAPTI's commitment to the professional education and continuing development of my good colleagues in Portugal, particularly in difficult economic times when many findit difficult to attend translators' events in faraway places. The evening was free for all attendees, who only had to pay for whatever they drank (great coffee - I had my usual galão) and ate (the best bagels in Portugal!).

After an initial hour of snacks, coffee and chat, the evening began with a discussion of the game-changing implications of speech recognition technologies for our working lives. Not only is it now possible for colleagues to use high-quality speech recognition on desktop computer and laptops in languages such as Hungarian and Portuguese, which are not currently supported by Dragon NaturallySpeaking (using, for example, the integrated recognition tools in the Mac Yosemite OS, as demonstrated with SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in Lisbon the day that SDL conquered Portuguese translation), smartphones are part of the game now too. Since picking up an older iPhone model (4S) for a few hundred euros about a month ago, I have had excellent results testing it with English, German, Russian and Portuguese and e-mailing texts to myself with just a few taps on the phone's screen. Once transferred as an e-mail, the text is then aligned in a CAT tool such as memoQ and subjected to tagging, QA and other procedures of the usual virtual translation working environments.

The use of memoQ and other CAT tools for single-language original authoring and text revision was also discussed. This flexible workflow extends the relevance of translation environment tools well beyond the usual limits within which translators and translation companies live and operate and offers interesting prospects for collaboration and re-use of creative resources. This topic willalso be covered next week in a lecture and workshop at Universidade de Évora and in an eCPD webinar on June 2, 2015.

Interoperability is another important topic for translators; I discussed different ways in which I use SDL Trados Studio and other tools to prepare projects to work in memoQ and vice versa as well as mz highly profitable use of SDL Multiterm to enhance customer loyalty and my professional image with this terminology management ssystem's excellent output management features.

Other tips and tricks in the memoQ&A included the untapped potential of LiveDocs, tracked changes and row histories in memoQ, dealing with embedded objects, graphics and transcription, PDF 3-ways and new tricks for nasty and/or illegible image PDFs, versioning and a concept for transforming translation memory concordancing into something much, much more useful and less prone to errors in editing and translation.

Copies of the slides from the evening's presentation are available here. It is, however, merely a palimpsest of the evening.

Many thanks also to colleague and translation tools teacher Felix do Carmo for kindly chauffeuring me around town and for the interesting tour of the training and production facilities at his company, TIPS.

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:

Complex dictionaries in memoQ LiveDocs

One never knows when a good idea might come up. This one isn't particularly original, in fact it's probably bleedin' obvious to the memoQ LiveDocs cognoscenti. I think it's drifted in and out of my mind a few times, but I never gave it much heed until a friend contacted me shortly before midnight with a slightly urgent question about what to do with an "XML terminology" that a client had sent. It turned out to be an SDL MultiTerm XML export but without a definition file. She wanted the data conveniently available in memoQ. Oh, crap, I thought. This could be a long night. Kilgray has added such capabilities to its qTerm server application, but the Fußvolk who use memoQ desktop versions don't have that option right now. And I shelved my XSLT efforts for this some time ago because nobody seemed seriously interested.

But then she said something about a "Word file". It turned out that the client had made one of those nice RTF dictionary exports that MultiTerm can produce and which was also the target of my XSLT work a year ago. This was exactly what I planned to make for her if the XML proved to be loaded with synonyms and term metadata. It was.

And then... I thought... why not just throw this in LiveDocs as a "monolingual" document? And thus a nice way to make complex glossary data available without importing it into a termbase was (re)born. Of course stuff like this has been going on for ages with Archivarius and other search tools. But not so much in an integrated way with CAT tools. Here's a quick visual tour of the process and the end result:

Here's the RTF file and a peek at the financial term data it contains. Not a chance I can parse that beast for a termbase! So I picked a LiveDocs corpus and clicked Import document and chose the RTF file:

I lied and said it was "German". Well, that's partly true and in this case, the end justifies the means.

A few minutes later, this dictionary was available in an ordinary concordance search, its entire content indexed as "source" text. To see the context, I right-click on the concordance hit to open the document saved in the LiveDocs corpus.

And here it is. I can do further searches within the document using Ctrl+F (Find). The English definition can be copied from here if I feel like doing that.

Now I know what I should do with that huge trilingual fire safety dictionary that's been kicking around my reference folders for the past 10 years... once again, LiveDocs made my day.

Happy Thanksgiving memoQ tutorials & book special

After fielding quite a few questions in the past week on segmentation problems with translation files and alignments as well as questions from a few colleagues and clients about ways to get better-looking output of the data stored in memoQ term bases (with SDL Trados MultiTerm), I prepared two longer tutorial scripts and distributed these with a segmentation practice file to registered subscribers to my ebook, memoQ 6 in Quick Steps. This is a little thank you and dividend for their early support of my first commercial publication effort for translator education.

To celebrate the national holiday in my native country as well as my own thanksgiving for all the ideas for best practice which my colleagues and clients continue to share, I have also set a "Thanksgiving Weekend Special" with a special rate for the ebook until the end of Sunday, California time. Registered purchasers will receive the book update for memoQ 6.2 in December as well as any further updates for a year.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Are we aMused by memoQ 6.2?

I'm not in the habit of reposting messages off online discussion lists, but this contribution on the Yahoogroups memoQ forum was just too tempting. It was the Muse that got me. I hate predictive typing, but I love the laugh I got out of considering the possibilities of that feature.

One question in inquiring minds right now should be what the heck freelance translators can expect for improvements in terminology handling and when.Two of the three points mentioned for qTerm are things I have been pushing for ages, and I often got the impression that Kilgray is afraid to give freelance translators what they need because of some daft notion that might hurt qTerm sales. Really, guys... that last feature is basically what I have been doing with Trados MultiTerm since the year 2000. I know that MultiTerm sucks boulders in the eyes of even most Trados users, but it excels in its flexible options for formatting output, and for many years I have exported data from memoQ to format nicely in SDL Trados MultiTerm and share with clients and colleagues. In fact I did a big dictionary for an industrial customer this morning - a beautiful two-column format with my own custom touches and marketing cover. It was only when friends using memoQ wanted to make good looking extras like that for their clients that I started messing with XSL transforms again after a ten year break and dragging others into the game. So please, play with us Gábor!

Ah yes, that repost.. good stuff....

memoQ 6.2.1 [beta] released

Thu Nov 15, 2012 6:56 am (PST) . Posted by:

""Gábor L. Ugray"" gabor.ugray

Hi All,

For the kamikaze and the Zen lovers: I am happy to announce that
6.2's first beta build is now ready for download at the following
link:

http://kilgray.com/memoq/62/memoQSetup.6.2.1.exe

Some technical information.
-- The 6.2 client installs "next to" previous versions, i.e.,
you'll get a new desktop icon and you can continue using 5.0 or
6.0.
-- The beta version accepts 6.0 licenses; no upgrade license
needed yet. This will change when the beta flag is stripped and
it becomes a normal release.
-- The Help, localized UI, and graphic elements are not final
yet.
-- LiveDocs corpora need to be migrated again. You can also do
this one by one, so unmigrated corpora remain available in 6.0.
-- If you're running a server or memoQWeb, mail us at support for
instructions about getting a beta for the server-side components.

The Zen. This is what I consider to be the most important
innovation in the client, a feature that I expect will no less
than revolutionize computer-aided translation.

A concise list of the functionality this release adds in the
client.
-- The Muse. Wouldn't it be nice if memoQ automatically, er,
suggested expressions extracted from TMs as you type your
translation? Now it does. Create a Muse and train it from your
existing TMs or LiveDocs corpora, and memoQ's predictive typing
will get inspired.
-- How about importing SDL Studio packages directly - including
the TMs? Also, SDLXLIFF is now a filter in its own right, not
part of the generic XLIFF filter.
-- 101% matches from LiveDocs. Cross-links are also
retrieved as matches now! (Works only with fresh content
in your corpus. You can export to XLIFF and reimport to
get this working with existing content.)
-- Numbers, tags, terms, upper-case words? Take them over from
the source with a single shortcut. A really, really short
cut. Just press "Ctrl". This is AutoPick.
-- Get results from multiple MT plugins.
-- Open translated documents automatically after export.
-- "Reject" changes, or revert to an earlier version of the
entire document.
-- Filter for X-translated rows; rows with tracked changes; rows
modified by a user, or after a given date; sort by segment
status.
-- Prefix matching in term recognition for Hebrew.
-- A new QA check for tag order changes, and other neat QA
tweaks. Missing term? The warning's text now contains the
possible target terms.
-- A simpler X-translate for mid-project updates. It also takes
over previous comments; retains the previous match rate recorded
in the document; and retains ignored warnings.

In the server and memoQWeb.
-- Document history recorded for actions related to 6.0's new
workflows: FirstAccept, GroupSourcing, slicing, and subvendor
groups.
-- Option to disable MT and terminology plugins in specific
online projects, for confidentiality.
-- Statistics and pre-translation for all target languages at
once.
-- Attaching analysis to e-mails sent out for FirstAccept.
-- FirstAccept and sliced documents available in webTrans.
-- qTerm: MultiTerm XML import
-- qTerm: CSV import, including updating existing TBs
-- qTerm: CSV export; fully formatted "dictionary-like" lookup
result and export; glossary PDF export.

Download and enjoy! BR,

Gábor

--
Gábor L. Ugray
Head of Development

Kilgray Translation Technologies
1255 Budapest, P.O. Box 7., Hungary
5700 Gyula, Béke sugárút 72. II/8., Hungary

The Sodrat Suite: delimited text to MultiTerm

The growing library of tools in the Sodrat Suite for Translation Productivity now includes a handy drag & drop script sample for converting simple tab-delimited terminology lists into data which can be imported directly into the generations of (SDL) Trados MultiTerm with which we've been blessed for more than half a decade.

Many people rightly fear and loathe the MultiTerm Convert program from SDL and despite many well-written tutorials for its use, intelligent, competent adult translators have become all too frequent callers on the suicide hotline in Maidenhead, UK.

Thus I've cast my lot with members of an Open Source rescue team dedicated to squeezing a little gain for the victims of all this pain and prescribing appropriate remedies for what ails so many of us by developing the Sodrat Software Suite. The solutions here are quick, but they aren't half as dirty as what some pay good money for.

The script below is deliberately unoptimized. It represents less work than drinking a cup of strong, hot coffee on a cold and clammy autumn morning. Anyone who feels like improving on this thing and making it more robust and useful is encouraged to do so. It was written quickly to cover what I believe is the most common case for this type of data conversion. An 80 or 90% solution is 100% satisfactory in most cases. Copy the script from below, put it in a text file and change the extension to VBS, or get the tool, a readme file and a bit of test data by clicking the icon link above.

To run the conversion, just put your tab delimited text file in the folder with the VBS script and then drag it onto the script's icon. The MultiTerm XML import file will be created in the same folder and use the name of the original file with terms as the basis of its name.

Drag & Drop Script for Converting Tab-delimited
Bilingual Data to MultiTerm XML

ForReading = 1
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
inFile = objArgs(0) ' name of the file dropped on the script

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(inFile, ForReading)

' read first line for language field names
strLine = objFile.ReadLine
arrFields = Split(strLine, chr(9))

outText = "          "UTF-16" & chr(34) & "?>" & chr(13) & "" & chr(13)   
   
Do Until objFile.AtEndOfStream
 strLine = objFile.ReadLine
 if StrLine <> "" then
  arrTerms = Split(strLine, vbTab)
   
  outText = outText & "" & chr(13)
      for i = 0 to (UBound(arrTerms) )
        outText = outText & chr(9) & "" & chr(13) & chr(9) & chr (9) _
                   & "" & chr(13)
        ' write the term
        outText = outText & chr(9) & chr (9) & chr (9) & "" & _
               arrTerms(i) & "" & chr(13) & chr(9) & "" & chr(13)
      next
  outText = outText & "" & chr(13)
 end if
Loop

outText = outText & ""
objFile.Close
outFile = inFile & "-MultiTerm.xml"

' second param is overwrite, third is unicode
Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(outFile,1,1)
objFile.Write outText
objFile.Close

A new look for MultiTerm XML data in memoQ & Trados

Recently I got back to testing suggestions made last year for improving the quality and usability of terminology data from memoQ and Trados MultiTerm. With a bit of a refresher for rusty XSLT skills and brilliant help with sorting challenges from Stefan Gentz of Tracom, things are now looking quite promising. Here's a first look at early results for HTML conversions of term data in MultiTerm XML format:

This approach, perhaps including other useful conversions, will be included in the chapter on "possibly useful scripts and macros" in the tutorial guide memoQ 6 in Quick Steps, which will be released very soon with over 200 pages of productivity suggestions for the latest version of Kilgray's desktop technology.

Sometimes one CAT tool is not enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dissecting SDL Trados Studio project files (SDLPPX) for translation with other tools

When a translation request with an SDLPPX (SDL Trados Studio project file) shows up in my inbox, it's always a bit irritating. The current version 5 of memoQ can't do a thing with these project files, unlike those from Star Transit, where a nicely automated wizard sets up a memoQ project with everything I need except terminology. To translate the content (SDLXLIFF files) of an SDL project file, you have to take the thing apart.

Of course, if you own an SDL Trados Studio license, it's usually a simple matter to open the package with Trados and export the resources you need. But today that didn't work. An error message informed me that the PPT source file for one of the SDLXLIFF resources was missing. Indeed. It was sitting on an FTP server to which the PM had failed to give me the access data before the weekend. Looked like I was SOOL.

In the past, when I took these SDLPPX file apart manually to get at the components I wanted, my luck was mixed. These are just ZIP files, so if you take a project file named MyWonderfulSubcontractedJob.sdlppx and rename it MyWonderfulSubcontractedJob.zip you can unpack it with WinZip or other utilities. Inside the ZIP file, the structure will look something like this:

Inside an SDL Trados Studio project package with Source language German (DE) and target language English (UK)

Both the source and target language folders contain an SDLXLIFF file with the source content. But there's a catch. You must take the SDLXLIFF file from the target folder.

Here's an example of a translation segment from the SDLXLIFF in the source fiile:

<trans-unit id="4e4fc380-8fac-4570-942b-a4bf6c4a4c7f"><source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</source><seg-source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</seg-source></trans-unit>

Notice anything missing? There is no tag set for target content. This is essentially a monolingual file. When imported into memoQ it will show zero segments! A look at the same translation unit in the SDLXLIFF file out of the target language folders shows the difference (a bit more than just the target tags highlighted):

<trans-unit id="4e4fc380-8fac-4570-942b-a4bf6c4a4c7f"><source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</source><seg-source><mrk mtype="seg" mid="560">Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</mrk></seg-source><target><mrk mtype="seg" mid="560" /></target><sdl:seg-defs><sdl:seg id="560" /></sdl:seg-defs></trans-unit>

This second SDLXLIFF file will import fine into other tools like memoQ using the XLIFF filter and allow you to translate without difficulty. I had not noticed this before, because in the past, if the SDLXLIFF file I imported had no segments, I just opened it in SDL Trados Studio, copied source to target and resaved it, and the resultant file imported without trouble and showed all segments. It took a missing original file that Studio demanded to save changes for me to look at matters a bit more closely.

I really do hope that a future version of memoQ will include a project import routine for these SDL projects similar to that for Star Transit projects. I am encountering SDLPPX files with increasing frequency due to the general lack of understanding interoperable workflows by those living in the Trados ghetto, and this added functionality in my primary tool would be a great help.

What should an SDL Trados Studio user do to ensure a less troublesome collaboration with those who use other tools? Don't send a damned project file. Send SDLXLIFF files and export the relevant TMs to TMX. If you are part of the 1% of Trados users who have a clue what to do with terminology, export the MultiTerm data, if you have any, to a delimited format of some kind. Most tools can take it from there, and you'll get back your finished SDLXLIFF files to review.