New online course: "memoQuickies Resource Camp"

Summer is almost over, but technically, "camping season" will continue in memoQ World until November 30th. Or maybe January 31st, depending on how you count.

Today, a three-month journey of exploration begins, covering six important kinds of resources to make work with the memoQ translation desktop and server environments more pleasant and efficient... and profitable. This self-guided online course will give participants full access to my 14 years of cumulative experience as a memoQ user translating, managing projects and developing hundreds of solutions with this world-leading productivity tool.

Click here or on the icon bar above to have a look at the course description and to see (and maybe download) some of the publicly available information and resources for better work in many language pairs. 

The emphasis of teaching will shift to a new resource every two weeks (with auto-translation rules as the main topic for the first two weeks), but throughout the course, information will be added continuously to all topic sections as I trawl through, sort, upgrade and publish the best or most interesting stuff from my archives. And course participants have access to open virtual office hours each week on Thursdays and some other occasions, where any questions can be asked and special requests made.

A special enrollment discount of 40% is available for the first week (code: HALFOFFLAUNCH) until September 10th, but you can join at any time and work with any of the material posted, ask questions and receive feedback. Learning material and downloadable, ready-to-use and -adapt resources will continue to be added until the end of November, and the full course will remain online through January 2024. Enrollment fees and content are subject to change without notice.

Addendum 1: On Thursday afternoon, September 7th, 2023, a presentation was made to introduce the first course topic - "Auto-translation Rules for Everyone". The recording and slides can be found here.

Addendum 2: Payment options for groups and monthly budgets have been introduced now. These options enable teams, departments and organizations to obtain blocks of passes for their members to receive continuing professional education in translation workflow tools. The host site applies VAT and other taxes where relevant and generates appropriate invoices. All relevant information can be found at the bottom of the information and enrollment page.

"Faulty" memoQ light resource defaults and how to change them

So often in the decade since I began using memoQ, I've felt an undercurrent of irritation at some of the default settings for certain types of resources, and with the need to switch these resources manually in so many projects. But with so many other pressing matters, I didn't really focus on the problem until a participant in last week's summer school course at Universidade Nova in Lisbon expressed the same irritation with regard to the default QA settings.

QA settings are probably the most familiar irritants to many memoQ users. Some have declared memoQ QA to be "unusable" because of many false positives or a failure to check certain things, and these opinions are usually unfounded and reflect a poor understanding of the available options and how to use them. But even those of us who do know how to use them get caught out by forgetting to change the QA settings to our favorite profiles on many occasions.

No more. If, for example, you want to change the memoQ QA default settings, it is very easy to configure them to match your preferred profile. I started off by cloning my empty QA profile, a template file that I maintain in which no checks at all are enabled. This is the starting point I use for custom QA rule sets in memoQ.

I then edited the renamed file and configured it with the terminology, auto-translation rule and tag settings I prefer in routine cases, leaving many of the usual, irritating memoQ QA defaults disabled. Then I exported the MQRES file as a backup and opened it in a text editor.

There I copied all of the text starting with the XML declaration (skipping the MemoQResource header), and I looked (for example, in the Resource Console, though the Options and Project Settings would do as well) to see where the default resource was located:

Then I went to the file location...

... opened the file, and pasted the copied text of my desired settings into the file:

Default resources (as well as already-imported light resources) do not use headers. Then I saved the new default file and closed it. Then I started memoQ again and make a copy of the Default file for QA settings, and used the editor to examine its contents, which matched those I had pasted into the file for the QA option defaults.

I'm not sure (yet) whether these defaults will be replaced when bugfixed builds or new versions are installed, so I am keeping my exported custom QA configuration as a backup in case I need to do this again. And I will be looking at other light resources which might benefit from this approach.

I had originally considered setting my empty QA profile (with nothing set) as the default until I realized that this could lead to a false impression that nothing of interest was wrong if that default profile is accidentally chosen (or not deselected, rather) for a quality check. Then I realized that the best default to use would, of course, be the settings I use most frequently.

One objection to this procedure raised on social media is that one can set the default for new projects in the memoQ options under "default resources". However, this does nothing for projects which already exist. In these, the change would have to be made project-by-project. And for users who tend to re-use projects for a particular client rather than use the powerful, but somewhat confusing project templates feature, this is a real time-consuming nuisance. Changing the installation-level defaults automatically changes how QA is done in all the exiting projects that use "default" QA options.

memoQ as an instrument of bowdlerization

Recently in a memoQ user forum, someone asked if the environment could be used to ensure that certain words would be kept out of a target text. 

The question wasn't clearly understood at first: some thought the asker wanted to ensure that certain words were not translated and suggested the use of non-translatable lists, others pointed out that the memoQ term bases have an option to mark certain term translations as forbidden, which would be indicated by a black color in the Translation Results list, for example:

But no... what was wanted was indeed a monolingual list to ensure that the target text did not contain certain words, regardless of what the source text said.

This is indeed possible in memoQ:

The red box in the screenshot above marks a word on such a forbidden list, which is in an English to English (US) revision project I set up to clean up Mark Twain's 1601 and make it fit for teaching in Sunday school. The presence of a no-no is indicated by a little lightning bolt icon for a QA warning. Actually running a QA check for terminology gave the following result, a list of forbidden expressions (with some alternatives suggested):

How is this done? With an ordinary memoQ term base. One can make a term entry only for a single language - the target language in this instance - and mark the Forbidden term checkbox on the Usage tab.

If there is no source term (or in my example above, where the source and target language are variants of the same language), there will be nothing shown in the translation results list, but if there is a termbase entry marked forbidden which is found on the target side, then a warning will be displayed in the translation and editing grid if the QA profile currently selected for the project includes terminology. (If the QA profile does not include appropriate term checking, no warning will be displayed for segments in the grid, nor will the forbidden words be indicated when QA is run. The Default QA profile does include term checking, but I use a lot of different profiles focused on fewer issues, such as just tag checking, so I have to pay attention to this detail.)

Building such a list word-by-word with manual entries is tedious. So it's probably easier to import your monolingual list of words to avoid from a text file or an Excel sheet, and then in the memoQ Term Base Editor, select a range of terms (like all of them) and set the desired forbidden status for the entire selection:

Bulk changes to any term properties are possible this way as I showed some time ago in a short video tutorial.

The critical setting for the scenario described here is marked with a red box in the QA profile below:

As you can see, the source text can also be checked for forbidden expressions if that option is also selected.

I have created a dedicated termbase to track forbidden expressions in three languages. Lists - monolingual or otherwise - of forbidden expressions can be maintained in one or more term bases or the expressions can be kept in a more ordinary term base. If barring certain common expressions in one or more languages is important to you, it might be convenient to maintain this information in a dedicated term base.

And for recent versions of memoQ (8.4 and later), make sure that the term bases you want to use for quality assurance are marked on the Term bases page of Project home. Here it's not a good idea to use your larger translation term bases for QA, because these may result in rather large numbers of false positives. Optimum term properties settings for translation and quality assurance are often not the same.

Thus memoQ can be used as a powerful tool to avoid embarrassment from an unfortunate choice of words and to adapt the target language to fit a particular audience better. Thinking back to the time, years ago, when a friend who ran the translation department at a conservative German company nearly got fired for writing that a certain software operation could be performed at the touch of a penis (a Freudian slip after he and some other translators were joking about how sick they were of a certain phrase in the user documentation) and remembering the sensitivity to terms I have seen with some clients (at the same software company, the term FAQ was banned, because executive management was afraid that it might be pronounced like fuck), I can see how this somewhat unusual approach to terminology in memoQ could be a job-saver for some.

Building a regex-savvy "termbase" in memoQ

For years I have been frustrated by and dissatisfied with how abbreviations are handled in the current memoQ termbase model. The crux of the problem is the handling of the periods in the expressions. This can be seen with termbase entries like the following, for example:

If the abbreviation "Art." appears in the source text, only the second source entry - the one without the period - will give a match result in memoQ. The first entry is simply ignored.

An additional problem which one would face, even if the terminal period character in the term did not pose a problem, is that authors are often notoriously variable in the way they write abbreviations. Take, for example, the abbreviation for the German expression "in Verbindung mit", usually written as "i.V.m."

In recent legal translation work, I have encountered this expression written as above, but also as "i. V. m." (with spaces), "iVm" (no spaces no periods) and sloppily typed variations like "iV.m" or "i. V.m." What's a poor wordworker to do?

The answer came to me while refining a set of auto-translation rules for bibliography formatting and legal references. These, too, can suffer from similar troubles: "page 7" might be abbreviated as "p. 7", but in the sloppy chaos of source texts poorly edited one might find "p.7", "p 7", "p7" or even variations with the letter capitalized, like "P.7". If you are translating nearly 1000 references in a bibliography, robust shortcuts are very helpful and save a lot of time, and if those shortcuts are based on memoQ auto-translation rules, they can also be used in a QA profile to ensure that every bit matches correctly.

As the screen capture from a memoQ Facebook group above suggests, the way to go about this is to identify which parts of the expression might vary with different deliberate and accidental typing. These are usually spaces and periods in the case of abbreviations; sometimes, particularly with German legal abbreviations, capitalization and dashes may play roles as well. (I tore my hair out not long ago trying to understand an Austrian legal text referring to two laws, which differed in their three-letter abbreviations only by a dash inserted after the first letter of one.)

In regular expressions, the question mark character means "zero or one" of whatever character precedes the question mark. So if I want a rule that acts in the case of one or no periods, I put a question mark after the period character. And because in the language of regular expressions, a period is shorthand for any character, if I want to talk about an actual period ("."), I have to precede that character by a backslash ("\."). In the technical jargon of Nerdworld that is known as "escaping the period" and there is no escaping such syntax if you want a regular expression rule about periods, period.

Spaces (normal or non-breaking ones) are represented by an escaped lowercase "s": "\s". So a matching rule for the English abbreviation "e.g" which catches a lot of typing variations might be

e\.?\s?g\.?

And in German, the target replacement rule might be

d.h.

Of course, if a typist is sloppy, there might be more than one space, or a comma might be typed accidentally instead of a period (the keys are adjacent, and if your screen is as dirty as mine gets sometimes, your eyes might not notice); capitalization might also differ accidentally or based on context. The regular expressions for matching can be adapted to handle all these cases if need be.

Rules of this type are not particularly difficult to construct, but refining them to accommodate all the variations you are likely to encounter may require an expert hand. Thus, as I have suggested before,. the average user should focus on documenting all the possible source variations clearly in a table which includes the desired target equivalents, and this table should be given to an expert (Kilgray support, a qualified consultant like Marek Pawelec or a technical programmer familiar with regular expressions and their use in memoQ). Trust me, this will save a lot of frayed nerves and probably significant time and money as well.

So now I am building a few memoQ auto-translation rulesets which are essentially fault-tolerant abbreviation glossaries. These, together with the similar rulesets for formatting bibliographical references and references to sections, paragraphs, lines, margin notes, etc. in laws, have been very helpful in reducing the time spent translating messy legal source texts, and the accuracy of the work has been improved significantly. Give it a try for your translation challenges!

memoQ autotranslatables: a partial antidote for drudgery

I'm currently working on a stack of legal pleadings for a patent nullity suit – lots of "urgent" words to churn by the end of the week. And after 10,000 or so of them, I got pretty damned tired of typing out the translation of text citations of the form "Spalte 7, Zeilen 34 bis 45" as "Column 7, Lines 34 to 45".

In fact, it was really starting to piss me off. In such situations, I try not to get mad but to get an autotranslatable ruleset instead. This is perhaps one of the most under-utilized productivity tools in memoQ.

So the next time I ran into a text that fit that format, the translation was offered as an autocompletable phrase as soon as I typed the first letter:

Of course life isn't usually that simple, at least not life with technology. And authors? Well, they seem to believe firmly in the old saying that "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". So of course the text also includes lots of references in the form "Spalte 7, Zeilen 34 - 45", with or without spaces around the hyphen. No problem, just add a rule for that (or if you are more clever, edit the single rule to cover the variations):

Now I am not one to advocate that the unwashed masses of translators – or even the washed ones – run out and learn to write regular expressions. I've programmed more computer languages and systems than I can possibly remember for about 45 years now, and I can't keep most of the autotranslatable rules in my head if I don't use them for a week or more after yet-another-refresher, so it would be stupid and hypocritical of me (or just bloody naive) to expect most people to mess with nerdy shit like this. But....

... a few simple rules and a couple of nice "recipe templates" to start can go a long way. And sometimes it pays not to be too clever; I have one highly sophisticated set of rules for complex legal citations that was written by a professional programmer, and it's unusable. Takes minutes to load even on a very fast computer, which is a huge pain in the backside every time a project is opened in memoQ. My more verbose, brute force approach to legal reference autotranslation may not be elegant, but it loads much faster and covers 90% or more of what I encounter. Maybe a case of where it's smart to be a little stupid.

There are lots of good tutorials out there on regex (regular expressions), including a few YouTube webinar videos from Kilgray, the memoQ Help, a few chapters in old books of mine, discussions in the Yahoogroups lists and more.

The examples above require the knowledge of only a few rules:

• Chunks of the source text to be analyzed are grouped in parentheses. In the examples shown, those groups are merely where numbers occur.
• Numbers are represented by the escape code "\d". If there might be more than one digit, add a plus sign: \d+.
• Spaces are represented by the escape code "\s". In the rules you can usually just type a space instead, but if you have to cover cases where it might be missing or where more than one might have been typed (usual sloppiness), then use the escape code, followed by an asterisk, which means "zero or more" of whatever it is put after: \s*.
• For the rest of the text to match, you can usually type it just the way it occurs as I have done above. For the target translation rules, you can usually just type the literal text you want, with the groups represents by the numerical order in which they occur, preceded by a dollar sign. So the first group (parentheses set) in the source is $1, the second is $2, etc. Of course the order can be changed in the target; it's just not necessary in this case, but in autotranslatable rules for dates this happens rather often.

Not only will the little rules I wrote for this big job save me a lot of typing, I can also use them in a QA profile to check that I have made no errors by switching numbers, missing a space or anything else in my translation. That is done by marking the appropriate checkbox on the first tab of the QA profile you plan to use:

Perhaps such things are worth a little effort in your projects once in a while....

Finding resources on Kilgray's Language Terminal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

memoQ auto-translation regex blues

Can you write a regular expression that matches each of the three character sequences marked in green below?

abcdefg
abcde
abc

That's how one interactive tutorial I found start off teaching regular expressions. I found that a bit puzzling, then noticed that the right side of the web page offered a list of notes on "regex" expressions. I've spent too much time in the last two weeks trying to sort out a variety of memoQ auto-translation rules with regular expressions, so the answer came quickly and I typed it in the text field. Then I looked again and realized there were a few alternatives that would work. So I tested them. And then a few more. Various expressions that would work include

[a-z]+
[a-g]+
[\w]*
[abcdefg]*
.+
\D+

and quite a few others. But which is correct? As with word choice in translation, that depends on context, and that's where it gets hard.

Those who have delved into the configurations of various translation environment tools such as SDL Trados Studio or memoQ have seen that regular expressions are used in different ways to identify patterns in information and then filter or transform that information based on those patterns.

Although there is great power in regular expressions, I see their current role in memoQ configuration as more of a liability as far as the average user is concerned. Regular expressions are currently part of memoQ configuration for at least two import/conversion filters (a text filter and a tagger), segmentation rules and "auto-translation". I find the last feature particularly troublesome in its current form.

There are many misunderstandings about what auto-translation is in memoQ. It has nothing whatsoever to do with machine translation, which some propagandists prefer to call "automatic translation" to gloss over the many difficulties it can cause. Nor is it part of the pre-translation feature, though it can be applied in pre-translation to deal with things like catalog numbers, dates and figures in tables rather efficiently.

Auto-translation in memoQ is used to convert certain patterned information into the format needed in translation. In monolingual editing projects, it can also be used to unify the formatting used for things like dates and currency expressions.

memoQ ships with a number of standard rule sets for number conversions. The "English group" that I use consists of ten different rules for converting most of the screwy number formats I encounter with separators for decimals (periods or commas) and 3-order magnitude groups (thousands, millions, billions, etc.) that might be grouped with spaces, apostrophes, periods or something else. The rule for converting hundreds of millions with decimal fractions to my usual preference is:

(?<!(,|\.|\d|\d\s|\d'|\d’))([-|\u2212]?[\d]{1,3})(?:\.|,|\s|'|’)(\d\d\d)(?:\.|,|\s|'|’)(\d\d\d)(?:\.|,)([\d]{1,2}|[\d]{4,})(?!(,\d|\.\d|\d|\s\d|'\d|’\d))

with the replacement rule $2,$3,$4.$5

Pretty damned intimidating for most of us. In fact, most of the people who grasp the basics of regex syntax will scratch their heads over the number assignments of the groups until they realize that conditionals in parentheses (like (?:\.|,)) don't count. Nobody points that out in any tutorial I've read.

If I suggested to most of my esteemed colleagues that they really need to learn this stuff, I think most juries in the civilized world would refuse to convict them of murdering me for the mental cruelty inflicted. There are brilliant translation technology consultants like Marek Pawelec, who eat stuff like this with their breakfast cereal and are a priceless resource to colleagues and corporate clients who need their expertise... and then there are the rest of us.

Kilgray CEO István Lengyel told me recently that there are plans to expand the examples shipped with memoQ later this year to include some reformatting for certain date structures and other information. Language Terminal has a few examples of useful conversion rules for dates, unusual number formats, e-mail addresses and more. You don't need to know regex to use these, just how to download the MQRES files and click Import in one of the memoQ modules for managing auto-translation rules to bring these into your set-up. Once there they can also be used in QA checks.

I think it would be nice if Kilgray or someone more expert than yours truly would produce a "recipe book" with clear documentation of examples so that users of more limited skill (like me) can adapt these examples to their specific needs. Some typical uses I see (some of which have eaten my evenings recently) are

• stripping or adding spaces from numbers with percent signs, such as 37,5 % <> 37.5%
• formatting other numbers with units according to a preferred convention, such as 1,2A >> 1.2 A
• currency expression reformatting like
        TEUR 1.350 >> EUR 1,350 thousand
        34.664,45 €  >> €34,664.45
        € 1,2 Mrd.  >> €1.2 billion
        & cetera
• Legal references such as
        § 15 Abs. 1 Nr. 3 GebrMG
        § 15(1) Nr. 3 GebrMG
        § 9 S. 2 Nr. 1 PatG
• page designations and other elements often found in bibliographies and easily overlooked (for QA purposes)
• conversion of dates like 23.05.67 to
        23 May 1967
        May 23, 1967
        1967-05-23
            or whatever other format one prefers, with or without non-breaking spaces
• Lovely EU legislation designations like 93/42/EWG >> 93/42/EEC
• Telephone number reformatting such as (0211) 45 66 - 500 >> +49 211 4566-500

Some might wonder about that last conversion with the two-digit years. As a veteran of the Y2K scam, I'm fond of two-digit years; they were part of my ticket over the Atlantic. The implementation of regular expressions in memoQ allows for the use of custom reference lists, which are delimited by hash symbols (#) in the expressions. So when I created my rule for converting those two-digit years in dates

(\d{1,2})\s?\.\s?(#month-num-to-text#)\s?\.\s?(#21st-Century-2digit#)  and
(\d{1,2})\s?\.\s?(#month-num-to-text#)\s?\.\s?(\d{2})

with the replacement rules $1 $2 20$3 and $1 $2 19$3 respectively,

I used two custom lists, one with translation pairs like 01 = Jan. and the other with the two-digit years I felt like assigning to the 21st century (i.e. the ones I am most likely to encounter that do, like 00 through 19; I'll have to adjust this in some cases).

In the case of my two-digit year conversion rules, the rule order is important. The conversion will not work as planned if the rules appear in reverse order. THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM with the current rules editor for memoQ auto-translatables. Each time a rule is edited, it goes to the bottom of the list. I'm currently working on a complex set of about 20 rules for converting financial expressions, and rule order is critical for several subgroups of rules (this was disputed after I originally made this post and I backed down... however, subsequent tests have proven that rule order is indeed critical!!!). So editing them in memoQ is a nightmare-. (one expert told me how he generates a basic rule set in memoQ, exports it and does all further rule editing in Notepad++, which also allows him to keep better track of his work with comments.) Some current problems with the edit dialog for auto-translation rules in memoQ are

• the need for "order stability" for rules being edited to maintain grouping (for a better overview and the arrow buttons to move rules up and down easily for better grouping
• insufficient field width/height and bad scrolling behavior, so that it is very difficult to edit long expressions - usually have to paste them into Notepad to keep an overview while I work
• strange, severe bugs in the test window, so the rule results shown are sometimes not accurate; I deal with this by adding a test document with sample data to the project and looking at what the rules do with that text
• helpful <!-- comments inserted in the rules --> to explain them disappear when MQRES files are imported, and there is no way to maintain explanatory comments to keep track of one's own work in the editor (except for the pitifully limited comment box in the resource properties dialog)

A few people I've mentioned auto-translatables to have said to me that they would have no use for them, because they use dictation software. I do that myself, but I find that in many cases (like for those legal references) it is nicer to have a rule configured to client preferences, so I can use  single keystroke to insert

Section 55(2) No. 3 Sentence 2
Section 55 Paragraph 2 No. 3 Sentence 2  or
Sect. 55(2) No. 3 S. 2

as the job calls for. And run a QA check to confirm that I have formatted consistently:

Dominique Pivard posted a nice video about memoQ auto-translatables on his "vlog" a while ago. It's worth a look if you want to see how to create these resources and see a good demonstration of how they work.

Getting a grip on memoQ QA resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translation editing in memoQ with LiveDocs and a QA check

Recently I showed how Dragon Naturally Speaking can be used to dictate translations without a translation environment tool. Quite a number of translators work this way (or simply type in a word processor without a translation tool, because they feel they work faster that way). But what about the advantages lost by not having the integrated terminologies, translation memories, etc. in Trados, memoQ and others similar tools?

Well, that's really not a problem. You can have the best of both approaches. Some people do their first drafts as they like without a CAT tool. The translation can then be imported very quickly to the integrated working environment, for example by a quick memoQ LiveDocs alignment, and then the LiveDocs alignment can be used for pretranslation, with any relevant translation memories or terminologies used to check and correct the draft.

I've created a little demonstration video in which I use my dictated translation on snakes in a quick alignment, pretranslation and editing procedure with a subsequent QA check for key terms. This is just one example of the many ways we can creatively combine tools to get the flexibility we need while taking full advantage of the technologies we want to assure quality.

Time Description
0:14  Adding the alignment pair to LiveDocs
1:17  Importing the source document to pretranslate with the LiveDocs alignment
1:28  Quick pretranslation
1:40  Examining the pretranslation result
2:07  Ad hoc improvement of the LiveDocs alignment
3:05  Inserting a match from the improved LiveDocs alignment
3:20  Beginning corrections of the translation
4:06  QA check for terminology (check the settings)
4:42  Running the QA check
5:00  Examining the QA check results, correcting terminology errors