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Just before a recent short holiday, I ran across an article from 2017 which described how to search Google Drive directly from Chrome's address bar. "Interesting," I thought, and with the possibility of integrating such Google Drive searches with IntelliWebSearch or memoQ's integrated web search feature (or similar features in other environments) in mind, I shared the link with a few friends.
Google Drive and its application suite, which includes GoogleDocs (the word processor) and Google Sheets (the spreadsheet application), offer many possibilities for helping in language projects, collaborative and otherwise. I have written extensively about these possibilities with terminology (here, for example, and in a number of related articles). But these earlier investigations involved specific documents and viewing these - or selected portions of them - in a web browser window. Searching a number of files of various types on one's Google Drive ("My Drive") or a subfolder thereof is a little different. Possibly more useful in some circumstances, such as in a group project where multiple participants are contributing to a shared reference folder (though this folder will have to be added to the "My Drive" of each collaborator).
Google's Help for the relevant search function explains:
You can find files in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides by searching for:
File title
File contents
Items featured in pictures, PDF files, or other files stored on your Drive
You can only search for files stored in My Drive. Files stored in folders shared with you won't appear in your search unless you add the folders to My Drive.
You can also sort and filter search results.
It all starts with a basic URL, such as
https://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=SOMETEXT
Execute that in your browser's address bar, replacing the SOMETEXT with your desired search expression, and you'll get a hit list of all files on your Google drive which include that text in the title or contents. In a tool like memoQ Web Search, it is substituted by the placeholder for search text that the application uses (that is {} in the case of memoQ Web Search). With a little experimentation, you'll soon find the additional arguments to search specific file types or folders.
For example, if I want to do a search in the "Other" subfolder on my Google drive, I can discover the URL arguments by starting a manual search and just reading the address bar:
The parameter to use for a specific folder search is "parent", followed by a colon and the coded ID of that folder.
An example of a folder search with a specific text segment is in the screenshot above; this was taken while configuring and testing the search in a memoQ Web Search profile. One document containing the search text "turnip" was found in the folder. To view the document, right-click on it in the hit list and choose Preview.
Search inside the preview of a document found in a Google Drive search with memoQ Web Search
Unfortunately there seems to be a bug in the memoQ Web Search - which now uses Chromium - because double-clicking the document tries to open it in the old search engine based on Internet Explorer, where I was not logged in to Google.
An Internet Explorer window, bizarrely launched by the Chromium-based memoQ Web Search
In fact, you'll have to log in to Google each time you open the memoQ Web Search window (a total nuisance), so it's better to leave it open in the background, even though the current bug in which the web search window is no longer brought to the forefront can make this inconvenient. In other tools this may not be an issue.
The Chromium/IE issue as well as the focus and login hassles with memoQ's web search have been reported to memoQ Support; I look forward to seeing how these are handled. Nonetheless, this Google Drive search seems to have significant potential for individuals and teams to build searchable document collections in the folders of a Google Drive account. Try it in your working environment and share your findings!
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.
Sometime last year, memoQ Translation Technologies Ltd., the software artists formerly known as Kilgray, aka mQtech, released their "Trend Report 2019" including the graphics above and more. I have studiously avoided blogging about the trend report up to now, because enthusiasm comes hard for a document that was clearly prepared by an industry outsider (consultant) with little understanding of issues faced in the translation sector, so that some of the "questions" proposed and discussed are really quite irrelevant to the present and future state of translation.
But Kilgray... oops, mQtech is the de facto technology leader for advanced desktop and client/server translation environment management, usually introducing the truly innovative tools for improving translation processes and quality so that others like SDL can copy them at some later date. This, of course, doesn't account for everything, for example the underappreciated bilingual review tables of Déjà Vu, which probably resulted in one of the biggest boosts for memoQ when that feature was adopted in version 4.2 before it was copied by so many others later, including the flawed Fluency, SDL Trados et alia. The "monolingual review" feature of memoQ, which allows edited translations in certain formats or portions thereof (to avoid mangling formats of parts which have not changed) to be re-imported to facilitate TM updates, is one example of memoQ leading the way for SDL (who implemented that feature about two years later) and others, as is the long history of optimization for speech recognition with Dragon NaturallySpeaking(with editing controls unavailable when that tool is used with most other CAT tools), which lately has gone farther in the somewhat bleeding edge but interesting implementation of speech recognition in Hey memoQ.
There is a long history of SDL looking to its main competitor to find its way in the darkness of translation sector tools competition. But one rather obnoxious advert that keeps cropping up in social media feeds makes it clear that the leadership of mQtech extends beyond mere technology for SDL:
These days, translation memories are better forgotten!
It seems that in the horrors of preparation for Brexit, UK-based SDL is unable to find original service providers internally, domestically or internationally to produce the artwork needed to market their questionable technology and concepts. What we have above is the same thing in terms of style and construction as we see with mQtech, but in green.
This gives me no little worry, really, because the underlying symbolism is deeply disturbing. Range and Green... Brexit... I fear that the situation between the two leading tool providers for translation technology is degenerating into a situation like we find at the Irish border:
It's an ugly situation. With Cromwellian arrogance, SDL has appropriated the colors of the political underdog, ravaging not only the translating Irish countryside with its confusing pathwork of features, but exporting the conflict internationally as dark powers so often do. And mQtech, unfortunately, bears Unionist colors into the battle at the wordface, though the symbolic interpretation of that is anyone's guess. We can only pray that some compromise, some peace accord can be achieved before the looming Brexit deadline, when things at the border and at translation conferences around the world may escalate into the Unthinkable.
A wise man once said, "SDL should copy memoQ's features or its artwork, but not both", but I would argue that in the current political climate, doing the latter is a bad idea in any case!
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!
Many years ago as an exchange student at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken I marveled at the competence and breadth of the university's offerings for translation and interpreting and the great competence I found there in its Dolmetscherinstitut. Other programs in linguistics with Max Mangold and Vorderasiatische Archäologie offered complementary enlightenment for analyzing language structures, early writing systems and long-dead languages of the Fertile Crescent. Most of that is gone today.
Reports over the years of the decline of language teaching programs in Saarbrücken felt like watching a slow-motion car crash. So a few weeks ago when a friend in that area informed me of the demise of the translation and interpreting institute and its replacement with some IT-based nonsense emphasizing machine translation, I was not particularly surprised. I have watched other university translation programs wither or at least fail to thrive under current conditions, largely as a result of their failure to adapt to changing times in a responsible way.
Most would agree that adaptation is necessary, but there is less agreement on the actual changes which should occur. There is, of course, no single right answer to this dilemma (except in Germany, where such things are Pflicht), but it is nonetheless disappointing to see the lack of vigor and vision with which the necessary discussions sometimes take place.
A recent article by Ramón Inglada on the European Parliament DG TRAD Terminology Coordination site presents some key issues regarding the use of technology in translation teaching but fails to provide accurate information or useful recommendations. This is surprising given that the author has been a professional translator for some time, and colleagues tell me that he is not unfamiliar with the current state of technology in the the real world of commercial translation. I take particular issue with his mention of possible "disadvantages" to the use of technology in the instructional program:
Some students might struggle with the technology and this could have a negative impact on their acquisition of translation skills.
Some universities might not have enough staff with the required technical skills.
The potential costs associated with a technology-based approach (computer labs, software licences).
First of all, in the programs with which I am familiar, students do not struggle especially with technology taught in an appropriate way. The "struggle" is too often instead with teaching faculty unwilling to update their professional knowledge and not-so-quaintly antiquated curricula. One also encounters toxically ignorant professors like one I know at a Portuguese university, who did his best for years to discourage new students in the now-suspended masters program by informing them that translation is all about poetry and literature and that it is impossible to make a living as a translator.
I can understand the fear of some faculty who recognize that things have changed and continue to change but who are baffled by the bullshit barked in the catastrophic carnival of machine pseudotranslators and confusing and sometimes creepy CAT clowns. I take their concerns as a sign of mental health and hope for the future; a healthy dose of skepticism will be needed as some universities transition from pen and paper work, with the odd bit of word processing and Moodle thrown in, to more modern tools for organizing reference information, text sources to translate, and writing tasks.
Most of these skeptics understand some fundamental truths that many crazed advocates of computer-assisted translation have forgotten: without an excellent foundation in source languages, first-class writing skills in the target language and a clear understanding of the relevant subject matter to be translated, technology for translation is more useless than lipstick on a pig. Anyone who tries to tell you that machine translation or massive archives of parallel translated texts or any other gimmicks can replace the actual competent mastery of language and content by qualified translators or subject matter specialists with outstanding linguistic skills is either a liar or a fool or both.
Those who have the competence to assess translation quality are usually of the considered opinion that more emphasis should be placed on developing language skills, subject expertise and research skills, while the hucksters, the wordblind and those who really don't get the meaning of "fit for use" or who try to sell snake oil with a label stating that "Quality Doesn't Matter" tend to push more monetary transfers to the IT side of things.
One cannot argue responsibly against the first position: the utter train wrecks we see so often in the bulk market bog of translation, with its unsustainable practices of exploitation and frequent disregard of the occupational health and safety of service providers, make it clear that only a few dishonest middlemen are served much of the time by its unusual business as usual.
Good linguists are hard to find and often not so easy to train, so it is important to consider where technology can provide some relief in organization and ergonomics and improve the processes of learning and professional work. There is a lot of scope for technology to streamline current teaching programs at universities and in programs for continuing professional education and free up more time to focus on essential language skills and knowledge acquisition.
As for the concern that there might not be enough staff with the requisite technical skills to include technology in university programs of instruction, I find that suggestion ridiculous and insulting to a lot of competent people. Anyone who is competent enough to teach at university also possesses the wherewithal to evaluate how technology might contribute effectively to the curriculum. Too often, the failures are on the part of technology advocates who have too narrow an understanding of their own "expertise" and do not listen to the teaching experts and understand their needs and objectives. With patience and open discussion, we will all get a lot further.
As for "potential costs", I almost hurt myself laughing about that one. Universities are among the places on this planet most familiar with Open Source software, and there are quite a number of such tools or other free software which can fully meet the requirements of teaching professional concepts for the use of technology in translation. The OmegaT project is just one example, but it is an excellent one. Major commercial tools are also available for teaching and learning at low or no cost: SDL offers many resources to universities at minimal cost, and Kilgray's memoQ - the most flexible environment available for the widest range of translation workflows - is free to instructors and students for educational purposes, with server resources also available for a small support fee. There are quite a number of other tools available for corpus analysis, speech recognition, format management and a myriad of other peripheral needs of translators on similar terms. Money is not the real issue, but a commitment to doing better with the resources available most certainly is.
There are of course points of light in the firmament of academic blight. The Facultad de Derecho at Buenos Aires University is one such. In April 2017 I visited the law school's integrated translation program and spoke to students, some staff and guests about various ways in which technology can help to better organize the work of legal translation.
Students in the Certified Public Translator program at the Buenos Aires University Law School take many of the same courses as those working toward a law degree; some pursue both degrees. This means that the young professionals graduate with the kind of solid subject matter competence one might expect only from those with significant work experience or who have side-stepped to translation from another field.
In today's market situation, where very few translation graduates can look forward to staff positions in an in-house translating team for a law firm, engineering company, hospital or other institutions as they might have in the past, the problem of acquiring real subject matter competence seems difficult. But programs like BAU's Facultad de Derecho offer can serve as good examples of how similar programs might be established with engineering schools, medical schools, science faculties and other such institutions. Interdisciplinary cooperation is inevitably a great source of creativity and useful results, and I think that struggling translation programs at universities have much to offer in collaboration with other departments and much to learn as all reap the good harvest of such cultivated seeds.
Even the miserable state of translation's bulk market bog offers a fruitful source of research topics to investigate the implications on physical and psychological health under current conditions and to propose remedies for problems. This would seem a much more useful thing than yet another boring and useless doctoral thesis on machine pseudotranslation and post-editing underwritten by short-sighted and unscrupulous promoters of human sacrifice for corporate profit today and who knows what destruction tomorrow.
Do universities need to consider a greater role for technology in their teaching programs for translation? In most cases probably. But just as the real value of technology is measured only by its ability to improve our lives, the most difficult challenges ahead are not technical, but human. A program which fully embraces technology but fails to deal with matters of psychological and physical health and which does not reinforce its credibility and open doors with many possible alliances with other departments or outside institutions will sadly not achieve its full and evident potential. But with good will, open eyes and a willingness to commit to learning and partnership we can all get there.
On April 10th, 2017 at 4 pm (UTC) there will be a free webinar for those interested in the basics of development for SDL Trados Studio 2017 using SDL's application programming interfaces and software development kits.
Romulus Crisan, an SDL Language Platform Evangelist Developer, will guide you though:
configuring the development environment
new APIs introduced with the Studio 2017 release
upgrading current plug-ins to support Studio 2017
building a simple editor filtering plug-in
Heads-up to Kilgray developers: maybe here you can figure out how to fix problems with that cool plug-in that allows SDL Trados Studio 2014 and 2015 users to read and write memoQ Server TMs so that it will also work with the latest Clujed Maidenhead Madness.
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.
US Homeland Security deals with many threats in its daily routine: the occasional radical Islamic jihadi, lots of christofascist buddies of Bannon bombing black churches in their dreams and sometimes their neighborhoods, presidential cabinet members and maybe even The Big Orange Man himself trading their daughters, wives and mothers as well as national secrets for hard Russian rubles and caviar-grade hacking, but the greatest threat in some minds are those Help files from SDL. Bad words from bad hombres as we know.
Fortunately, working together with patriotic Americans and wannabe Americans at Microsoft, they have managed to block the pernicious content of those CHM help files in many a colleague's work environment, preventing an unimaginable number of involuntary seductions by The Dark Side.
If you are one of those fortunate people protected from mind-bending propaganda on the MultiTerm Object Model and other elements of The Dark Arts, praise all the gods and sacrifice a black chicken so that your good fortune may continue.
Do not, I repeat DO NOT allow yourselves to be led astray by seemingly innocent computer geeks suggesting that you right-click on the icon of the CHM file, select Properties and then....
... as they say in memoQ (or used to anyway), DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON!!!
If you do, there is no telling what sort of Evil may confront your eyes!
Next month on Wednesday, November 16th, the SDL roadshow featuring the latest release of SDL Trados Studio will be coming to Lisbon, Portugal. The all-day event is free of charge,but registration is required.
A full afternoon of training on the SDL Trados Studio translation environment is included in the day. Even if you live and work in a country other than Portugal, this is an excellent opportunity to be briefed on one of the leading technologies for efficient translation work and then take a very long weekend to enjoy Europe's capital of cuisine and culture.
It has been interesting to see the behavior of my codornizes since I moved them from the confines of a rabbit hutch in a stall at my old quinta to the fenced, outdoor enclosures in the shade of a Quercus suber grove. In the hutch, they were fearful creatures,panicking each time I opened their prison to give water and food or to collect eggs. Their diet was also rather miserable; the German hunters who first introduced me to these birds for training very authoritatively told me that they ate "only wheat", and I felt bold to offer them anything different like cracked corn or rice. In the concentration camp-like conditions in which they lived, they also developed a serious case of mites and lost a lot of feathers. I thought about slaughtering and eating them as an act of mercy.
Then last spring I moved to a new place with a friend, who built a large enclosure for my goats and chickens. She didn't know about the quail. I brought them one day and hastily improvised an enclosure for them with a large circle of wire fence around a tree, because I was afraid the goats might trample them. There was far more space in this area than they had before, and real, dry dirt for taking dust baths. Soon the mite infestations improved (even before regular dunks in pyrethrin solution began), and the behavior of the birds began to change. They became less nervous, though sometimes when someone approached the enclosure they flew straight up in panic as quail sometimes do and bloodied themselves on the wire.
A few months later I built a much larger enclosure for a mother hen and her chicks to keep them out from under trampling feet or from wandering through the chain link fence of the enclosure into the hungry mouths of six dogs who watched the birds most of the day like Trump fans with a case of beer and an NFL game on the TV. The quail were moved in with the chickens as an afterthought. With nine square meters of sheltered space, the three little birds underwent further transformations, becoming much calmer, never flying in panic and allowing themselves to be approached and picked up with relative ease. They also exhibited a taste for quite a variety of foods, including fresh fruit and weeds such as purslane. Most astonishing of all, they began to lay eggs regularly in an overturned flower pot with a bit of dried grass. Nowhere else. All the reading I've done on quail on the Internet tells me that quail are stupid birds who drop their eggs anywhere, do not maintain nests and seem to have no maternal instincts whatsoever. I am beginning to doubt all that.
At various times in my life I have heard many statements made about the cultural proclivities of various ethnic minorities, but these assertions usually fail to take into account historical background and circumstances of poverty and prejudice, choosing instead to blame victims. In cases where I have seen people of this background offered the same opportunities I take for granted or far less than my cultural privilege has afforded me, I cannot see any result which would offer itself for objective negative commentary.
There are a lot of ignorant assumptions and assertions made about the class of digital sharecroppers known as translators. Some of the most offensive ones are heard from the linguistic equivalents of plantation owners, some of whom have long years of caring for these hapless, technophobic, unreliable "autistics" who simply could not survive without the patriarchal hand of their agencies.
Fortunately, technology continues to evolve in ways which make it ever easier to take up the White Man's Burden and extract value from these finicky, "artistic" human translation resources. The best of breed in this sense could make old King Leopold II envious with the civilization they have brought to us savage translators.
On many occasions, I have advocated the use of various server-based or shared online solutions for coordinating translation work with others. And I will continue to do so wherever that makes sense to me. However, I have observed a number of persistent, dangerous assumptions and practices which reduce or even eliminate the value to be obtained from this approach. It's not a matter of the platform per se, usually, unless it is Across to bear, but too often over the past decade, I have seen how the acquisition of a translation memory management server such as memoQ or memSource or a project management tool such as Plunet, OTM or home-rolled solutions has led to a serious deterioration in the business practices of an enterprise as they put their faith more in technology and less in the people who remain as cogs in their business engines.
As the emphasis has shifted more and more to technologies remote to the sharecroppers actually working the fields of words, a naive belief has established itself as the firm faith of many otherwise rational persons. This is expressed in many ways – sometimes as a pronouncement that browser-based tools are truly the future of translation, often in the dubious, self-serving utterances of bottom-feeding brokers and tool vendors who proclaim the primacy of machine pseudo-translation while hiding behind the fig leaf argument that we need such things to master the mass of data now being generated. It is fortunate for them perhaps that this leaf is opaque enough to hide their true linguistic and intellectual potency from public view.
A related error which I see too often is the failure to distinguish between the convenience of process and project managers and the optimum environment for translating professionals. I don't think this mistake is malicious or deliberately ignores the real factors for optimal work as a wordworker; it's simply damned hard much of the time to understand the needs of someone in a different role. I could say the same for translators not understanding the needs of project managers or even translation consumers, and in fact I often do.
So indeed, the best tool for a project manager or a corporate process coordinator might not be the best tool for the results these people desire from their translators. Fortunately, this is usually a situation where, with a little understanding and testing, both sides can win and work with what works best for them. The mechanism to achieve this is often referred to by the nerdy term "interoperability".
Riccardo Schiaffino, an Italian translator and team leader based in the US, recently published a few articles (trouble and memoQ interoperability) about memSource, a cloud-based tool whose popularity among translation agencies and corporate or public entities with large translation needs continues to grow. High-octane translators like Riccardo and others have trouble sometimes understanding why these parties would choose a tool with such great technical limitations compared to some market leaders like SDL or memoQ, but the simplicity of getting started and the convenience of infrastructure managed elsewhere on secure, high-performance servers with sufficient capacity available for peak use is an understandably powerful draw.
And the support team of memSource and the tools developers are noted for their competence and responsiveness, which is equal in weight to a fat basket full of sexy technical options.
So I will not argue against the use of memSource by agencies and organizational users whose technical needs are not particularly complex and who do not have concerns about a tool almost entirely dependent on reliable, high bandwidth internet connectivity at all times to fulfill its key promises. In fact, it's a good and easy place to start for many, perhaps more so than the rival memoQ Cloud at present, which suffers sometimes from limited capacities (at the same data center used by memSource and others!) during peak use. Unlike the barbed-wire, unstable and unfriendly solution Across, which has achieved some popularity in its native Germany and elsewhere through sales tactics relying on fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding illusionary or delusional data security, memSource works, works well, and the data are portable elsewhere if a company or individual makes another choice some day.
But damn... it's just not very efficient for professional work, especially not for those of us who have amassed considerable personal work resources and become habituated to other tools like SDL Trados Studio, Déja Vu or memoQ like a carpenter is to his time- and work-tested favorite tools. Trading one of these for the memSource desktop editor or, God forbid, the browser-based translation interface feels worse than being forced to do carpentry with cheap Chinese tools cast from dodgy pot metal. Riccardo mentions a few of the disadvantages, and I could fill pages with a catalog of others. But compared to some other primitive tools, it's not so bad, and for those with little or no good experience with leading translation environment tools, it may seem perfectly OK. You don't miss a myriad of filtering options to edit text or sophisticated QA features if you are still amazed that a "translation memory" can spit out a sentence you translated once-upon-a-time if something similar shows up six months later.
And as mentioned, memSource - or some other tool - may indeed be the best solution on the project management side. So what's a professional translator to do if an interesting project is on offer but that platform is unavoidable? Riccardo's tips on how to process the MXLIFF files from memSource in memoQ offer part of a possible good solution which would work almost equally well in most other leading tools as well these days. One additional bit is needed in the memoQ Regex Tagger filter to handle the other tag type (dual curly brackets) in memSource, but otherwise the advice given will allow safe translation of the memSource files in other environments. I can even change the segmentation in memoQ if, as usual, the project manager has failed to create appropriate segmentation rules in memSource to accountfor some of the odd stuff one often sees in legal or financial texts, and this does not damage or change the segmentation seen later when the working file is returned to memSource.
Even concerns about the "lack" of access to shared online resources in memSource if an MXLIFF is translated elsewhere are easily addressed. A few useful things for this include:
pretranslation of the memSource files to put matches into the target before transferring to other environments,
leaving the browser-based or desktop editor for memSource open in the background for online term base or TM look-ups, and
occasionally exporting and synchronizing the MXLIFF in memSource to make the data available to team members working in parallel on a large project - this takes just a minute or two and allows one as much time as needed for polishing text in the other environment.
The last tip is particularly helpful to calm the nerves of project managers who are like mother hens on a nest of eggs which they fear might in fact be hand grenades and who panic if they don't see "progress" on their project servers days before anything is due. One can show them "progress" every twenty minutes or so without much ado if so inclined.
I am past the point where I recommend any translation memory management server in particular for agency and corporate processes. There are advantages to each (except Across, where these are actually hallucinations) and disadvantages, and where I see real problems, it is seldom due to the choice of platform but rather the lack of training and process knowledge by those responsible for the processes. The bright and shining prospects of a translation server are easily sold with a slick tongue, but without an honest analysis and recommendation of needs for initial and ongoing staff training these too often end up being bright and shining lies. I think very often of a favorite German customer who invested heavily in such a system four or five year ago and has not managed one single successful project with the system in all that time. This makes me sick to think of the waste of resources and possibilities.
So on the project management and process ownership side, memSource may be a great choice. Certainly some of my clients think so, and the improvements in their business often back this belief up. And for those who work with gangs of indigent, migrant or sharecropping translators whose marginal existences make the investment in professional resources like SDL Trados Studio or memoQ seem difficult or undesirable, it may be all that is needed by anyone.
The good news for those who depend on the efficiency of a favored tool, however, is that with a few simple steps, we need not compromise and can get full value from our better desktop tools while supporting interesting projects based in memSource. So each side of the translation project can work with what works best for them, without loss, compromise, risk or recriminations.
And the translating quail who start out in a dark box with a stunting lack of possibilities can look forward to the real possibilities of work liberation in a larger environment richer in healthy possibilities and rewards.
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.
The day started inauspiciously for me, with a TomTom navigation system determined to keep me from the day planned at Lisbon's New University to discuss SDL Trados Studio and its place in the translation technology ecosphere. When the fourth GPS location almost proved a charm, and I hiked the last kilometer on an arthritic foot, swearing furiously that this was my last visit to the Big City, I found the lecture hall at last, an hour and a half late, and managed to arrive just after Paul Filkin's presentation of the SDL OpenExchange, an underused, but rather interesting and helpful resource center for plug-ins and other resources for SDL Trados Studio victims to bridge the gap between its out-of-the-box configurations and what particular users or workflows might require. There are a lot of good things to be found there - the memoQ XLIFF definition and Glossary Converter are my particular favorites. Paul talked about many interesting things, I was told, and there is even a plug-in created for SDL Trados Studio by a major governmental organization which has functionality much like memoQ's LiveDocs (discussed afterward but not shown in the talk I missed, however). In the course of the day, Paul also disclosed an exciting new feature for SDL Trados Studio which many memoQ users have been missing in the latest version, memoQ 2014 R2 (see the video at the end).
I arrived just in time for the highlight of the day, the demonstration of Portuguese speech recognition by David Hardisty and two of his masters students, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. Speech recognition is perhaps one of the most interesting, useful and exciting technologies applied to translation today, but its application is limited to the languages available, which are not so many with the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking application from Nuance. Portuguese is curiously absent from the current offerings despite its far more important role in the world than minor languages like German or French.
Professor Hardisty led off with an overview of the equipment and software used and recommended (slides available here); the solution for Portuguese uses the integrated voice recognition features of the Macintosh operating system. With Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac it can be used for Windows applications such as SDL Trados Studio and memoQ as well. Nuance provides the voice recognition technology to Apple, and Brazilian and European Portuguese are among the languages provided to Apple which are not part of Nuance's commercial products for consumers (Dragon Naturally Speaking and Dragon Dictate).
Information from the Apple web site states that
Dictation lets you talk where you would type — and it now works in over 40 languages. So you can reply to an email, search the web or write a report using just your voice. Navigate to any text field, activate Dictation, then say what you want to write. Dictation converts your words into text. OS X Yosemite also adds more than 50 editing and formatting commands to Dictation. So you can turn on Dictation and tell your Mac to bold a paragraph, delete a sentence or replace a word. You can also use Automator workflows to create your own Dictation commands.
Portuguese was among the languages added with OS X Yosemite.
Ms. Bernardo began her demonstration by showing her typing speed - somewhat less than optimal due to the effects of disability from cerebral palsy. I was told that this had led to some difficulties during a professional internship, where her typing speed was not sufficient to keep up with the expectations for translation output in the company. However, I saw for myself how the integrated speech recognition features enable her to lay down text in a word processor or translation environment tool as quickly as or faster than most of us can type. In Portuguese, a language I had thought not available for work by my colleagues translating into that language.
A week before I had visited Professor Hardisty's evening class, where after my lecture on interoperability for CAT tools, Ms. Rocha had shown me how she works with Portuguese speech recognition as I do, in "mixed mode" using a fluid work style of dictation, typing, and pointing technology. She said that her own work is not much faster than when she types, but that the physical and mental strain of the work is far less than when she types and the quality of her translation tends to be better, because she is more focused on the text. This greater concentration on words, meaning and good communication matches my own experience, but I don't necessarily believe her about the speed. I don't think she has actually measured her throughput. My observation after the evening class and again at the event with SDL was that she works as fast as I do with dictation, and when I have a need for speed that can go to triple my typing rate or more per hour.
In any case, I am very excited that speech recognition is now available to a wider circle of professionals, and with integrated dictation features in the upcoming Windows 10 (a free upgrade for Windows 8 users), I expect this situation will only improve. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this technology for improving the ergonomics of our work. It's more than just leveling the field for gifted colleagues like Joana Bernardo, who can now bring to bear her linguistic skills and subject knowledge at a working speed on par with other professionals - or faster - but for someone like me who often works with pain and numbness in the hands from strain injuries, or all the rest of you banging away happily on keyboards, with an addiction to pain meds in your future perhaps, speech recognition offers a better future. Some are perhaps put off by the unhelpful, boastful emphasis of others on high output, which anyone familiar with speech recognition and human-assisted machine pseudo-translation (HAMPsTr) editing knows is faster and better than what any processes involving human revision of computer-generated linguistic sausage can produce, but it's really about working better and doing better work with better personal health. It's not about silly "Hendzel Units".
It has been pointed out a few times that Mac dictation or other speech recognition implementations lack the full range of command features found in an application like Dragon Naturally Speaking. That's really irrelevant. The most efficient speech recognition users I know do not use a lot of voice-controlled command for menu options, etc. I don't bother with that stuff at all but work instead very comfortably with a mix of voice, keyboard and mouse as I learned from a colleague who can knock off over 8,000 words of top-quality translation per short, restful day before taking the afternoon off to play with her cats or go shopping and spend some of that 6-figure translation income that she had even before learning to charge better rates.
Professor Hardisty also gave me a useful surprise in his talk - a well-articulated suggestion for a much more productive way to integrate machine translation in translation workflows:
David Hardisty's "pre-editing" approach for MpT output
The approach he suggested is actually one of the techniques I use with multiple TM matches in the working translation grid where I dictate - look at a match or TM suggestion displayed in a second pane and cherry-pick any useful phrases or sentence fragments and simply speak them along with selected term suggestions from glossaries, etc. and do it right the first time, faster than post-editing. This does work, much better than the sort of nonsense pushed too often into university curricula now by the greedy technotwits and Linguistic Sausage Purveyors, who in their desire for better margins and general disrespect of human service providers and employees fail to understand that good people, well-treated and empowered with the right tools, will beat the software and hardware software of "MT" and its hamsterized process extensions every time. Hardisty's approach is the most credible suggestion I have seen yet for possibly useful application of machine pseudo-translation in good work. Don't dump the MpT sewage directly into the target text stream like so many do as they inevitably and ignorantly diminish the level of achievable output quality.
After the lunch break, Paul Filkin gave an excellent Q&A clinic on Trados Studio features, showing solutions for challenges faced by users at all levels. It's always a pleasure to see him bring his encyclopedic knowledge of that difficult environment to bear in poised, useful ways to make it almost seem easy to work with the tools. I've sent many people to Paul and his team for help over the years, and none have been disappointed according to the feedback I have heard. The Trados Studio "clinic" at Universidade Nova reminded me why.
Finally, in the last hour of the day, I presented my perspective on how the SDL Trados Studio suite can integrate usefully in teamwork involving colleagues and customers with other technology and how over the years as a user of Déja Vu and later memoQ as my primary tool, the Trados suite has often made my work easier and significantly improved my earnings, for example with the excellent output management options for terminology in SDL Trados MultiTerm.
I spoke about the different levels of information exchange in interoperable translation workflows. I have done so often in the past from a memoQ perspective, but on this day I took the SDL Trados angle and showed very specifically, using screenshots from the latest build of SDL Trados Studio 2014, how this software can integrate beautifully and reliably as the hub or a spoke in the wheel of work collaboration.
The examples I presented using involved specifics of interoperability with memoQ or OmegaT, but they work with any good, professional tool. (Please note that Across is neither good nor a professional translation tool.) Those present also left with interoperability knowledge that no others in the field of translation have as far as I know - a simple way to access all the data in a memoQ Handoff package for translation in other environments like SDL Trados Studio, including how to move bilingual LiveDocs content easily into the other tool's translation memory.
Working in a single translation environment for actual translation is ergonomically critical to productivity and full focus on producing good content of the best linguistic character and subject presentation without the time- and quality-killing distractions of "CAT hopping", switching between environments such as SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, memSource, etc. Busy translators who learn the principles of interoperability and how to move the work in and out of their sole translation tool (using competitive tools for other tasks at which they may excel, such as preparing certain project types, extracting or outputting terminology, etc.) will very likely see a bigger increase in earnings than they can by price increases in the next decade. On those rare occasions where it might be desirable to use a different tool or to cope with the stress of change from one tool to another, harmonization of customizable features such as keyboard shortcuts can be very helpful.
I ended my talk with a demonstration of how translation files (SDLXLIFF) and project packages (SDLPPX) from SDL Trados Studio can be brought easily into memoQ for translation in that ergonomic environment, with all the TMs and terminology resources, returning exactly the content required in an SDLRPX file. Throughout the presentation there was some discussion of where SDL and its competitors can and should strive to go beyond the current and occasionally dubious levels of "compatibility" for even better collaboration between professionals and customers in the future.
For those planning to attend the upcoming university event for SDL technology in Lisbon, be aware that the imams and imamas of the bulk market bog have issued a fatwa against it for the dangerous agitation expected among wordworkers in attendance, who may discover better ways to master a leading translation environment tool and free themselves from the local piecework slavelancing conditions. In particular, revelations that one can collaborate with users and abusers of other translation tools and challenge the divine infrastructure of Linguistic Sausage Producers in orgies of interoperability caused considerable controversy in meetings of Board Members Without Boundaries and Transwordling, who have worked hard to spread the needed money and manure in the field to ensure rich corporate yields for years to come. His Hendzelness the First and Only, pope of the Premium Church of Translation, decried this and other heresies, such as calls for professional translators associations freed of the commercial guidance of their betters at the production of linguistic sausage, in his New Year's sermon to an admiring crowd of underage Czech and Bulgarian colleagues. Those who hope to have a real future should boycott events such as the one planned at Universidade Nova de Lisboa on January 22nd and instead do some real good for the world and volunteer free translation of materials to inform the world that Robert Mugabe is the greatest defender of African dignity against colonialist aggression.
It's been two years and two days since my first arrival at The End of the Earth, prodigal Portugal, immersed in the agony of grief over its lost colonies, where the people still stubbornly refuse to understand how worthless an Agrarland is and that the world needs the machines made in small German villages to run at the tempo dictated by the Bundesbank, Siemens et alia, and flawed human hearts still beat in defiance of the better-engineered alternatives implanted in Merkel and her cronies. Since my transplantation to this Unworthy Place of sun, sangria and sex, I have conspired with other unworthies to continue producing the propaganda of futile resistance to the Borg juggernaut of machine pseudo-translation and the undeniable value it offers as evidenced by the breathless exclamation of leading translation technologits that some translators are actually using it.
In the spirit of that tradition, in 2015 Translation Tribulations hopes to expand its range of heresies to include cartoons honoring the Prophet Mohammed, thepigturd, Mantis/Orbe, Lyingbridge and other Great Leaders who show us how life can be if only we would submit. To that end, the office at Quinta Branca is working to acquire two young goats to provide the necessary therapy for those who dispute the power of the pen as opposed to Le Pen.
Comfort for a frustrated artist forbidden to draw people, about to embark on a new career as a wannabe terrorist
