Free webinar: memoQ Server skills for teams!

 

Note: this webinar has already taken place. A download link for the presentation slides (with links to unlisted instructional videos) is available below, as is some Q&A from the live session... there will be an online course offered soon for teams and project managers using memoQ Servers, so watch this blog for the announcement.

This Friday (April 23rd, 2021 at 2 pm Central European Time), I'll be giving an English-language talk via Zoom discussing my approach to using the memoQ Server and teaching others to do so for workflows involving small teams. These might be groups of collaborating independent service providers, in-house and freelance staff supporting translation and editing services in corporations or at boutique translation agencies, or university and continuing education courses with instructors and a group of student PMs and translators. This talk is not designed to cover the perceived needs of behemoths inhabiting the bulk market bog. 

I will discuss the use of the memoQ Server and the hosted memoQ Cloud service with particular attention on user management, permissions, project workflows and resource availability. The last point also includes ideas for using a memoQ server as a platform to make some working "light resources" available which may be beyond the scope of a particular project.

There is no charge for the live webinar, though there will be a fee for those who wish to obtain a downloadable copy later. The recording will also be part of the reference resources provided in a professional continuing education course to be announced soon after some details on certified hour credits are worked out with the relevant Portuguese labor authorities and their representatives.

Register for the webinar here:

(registration now closed - see below for the presentation slides and Q&A)

I welcome all of you who are able to join me this week, and any others who may attend the online server skills course later or have particular training or problem-solving needs in this area.

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Lecture slides can be downloaded HERE.

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Questions & answers from the session:

What does "CAL" mean for licenses?

These are "floating" licenses, not attached to a specific user unless you assign them. 

(from Ellen Singer) : CAL (Concurrent Access Licensing)

Does a separate translator login also work when you want to work in your local client and only have a PM license and Webtrans licenses for a memoQ cloud subscription, No Translator Pro?

In that case you can assign a CAL license for some period of time (see the screenshot above), and this will make it available for offline use in a desktop edition of memoQ. For a basic memoQ Cloud subscription with just the PM license, it would be that PM license assigned (presumably) to you.

What are the advantages of a privately-run / hosted MemoQ server, over MemoQ cloud?

Several perhaps.

• You have full control over all file paths. You don't have access to all file paths in memoQ Cloud. The only place I can see where that makes a real difference is when changing default resources as I described in my old blog post on that subject, but I think that is an important option for many company teams.
• Maybe some economic advantage in the short or long run. A memoQ Server at your site represents a significant capital investment, and there are maintenance fees (about 20% of acquisition cost, isn't it?) incurred each year for support and upgrades. A memoQ Cloud subscription is a fairly manageable expense if it's small, but with a lot of licenses or added options like Qterm, customer portal, etc. it can be a pretty hefty monthly expense, though one which can be adjusted up or down as needed. And memoQ Cloud subscriptions can be suspended or reactivated as needed. Really, you would have to model the costs of each approach in a spreadsheet (or similar manner of calculation) to compare and determine definitively which approach gives you the greatest advantage.
  
  I do believe that even for owners/operators of private memoQ Servers, the memoQ Cloud subscription (trial or paid) offers a superb platform for testing new versions, other "sandbox" work including development which will not endanger your production server and arms-length special projects with outside partners.

Can you create an unlimited number of Users, regardless of the number of licenses you purchased?

Indeed you can. Configured user logins can be configured in any number and have nothing whatsoever to do with any number of licenses you may have available. But if your access maximum for licenses has been reached at any given time, a configured user may have to wait some time until a current active (logged-in) user logs off the server so somebody else can get in to work.

We’ve been using mQ Server for a while now, and you tackled a few very interesting points. (Esp. concerning access control in case of PM accounts.)

With regard to access, I think there are two very important things to do, remember, configure, etc.

• Use separate logins for your work as a PM or administrator and any work you may do as a translator/reviewer. These can have the same password for your convenience if you like. But for God's sake, use TWO SEPARATE LOG-INS. This will help you "stay in your lane" for a given role and prevent accidents. If you are logged in using an account that has project manager or administrative access privileges, you cannot easily tell sometimes (or may overlook) where you ought not to be working, and this can lead to difficulties.
• "Permissions" can be used to restrict or enable access to any memoQ resources available on the server. This is not an easy topic to get your head around if you are unfamiliar with how permissions and access work in general on computers, especially in server environments, and anything you configure should be tested to ensure that you got the configuration right. The memoQ Help is rather good on this point and should be read and re-read and re-read and re-read carefully, and if there are doubts remaining, ask memoQ Support or other experts for advice.
  
  A useful example of using "permissions" might be to assign an individual "Review" privileges to a specific TM or term base, enabling that person to do many maintenance operations on that resource which might otherwise be possible only with PM or general "terminologist" access. This approach would give a specialist for a rare language access to the specified resource(s) at a higher level, but that person's access would be more limited for other, similar resources (assuming there is no relevant group membership assigned that would provide such access.

Is it possible to do bulk changes to the permissions of more than one server resource at once?

Yes. Select the resources desired by control-clicking (for a discontinuous group) or shift-clicking (for a range in the list) and choose the "Set permissions" command. Changes made should apply to all the resources selected.

You mentioned a book on MemoQ. If so, can you let me have the title.

The book I mentioned in this talk is Marek Pawelec's excellent guide to the use of machine translation resources - including the extremely valuable pseudotranslation function. Information on that guide can be found here.

Another look at Wordfast Anywhere

The Wordfast suite of applications has a long history, and through much of it I've had my eye on the tools but up to now never really found them up to the demands of my work. Wordfast Classic (back when it was the only Wordfast app) was brought to my attention by an enthusiastic manager of a German bank's translation team more than 15 years ago; he found that the "blacklist" feature for terminology (since adopted by others - for example in memoQ's "forbidden" terms) was extremely helpful to his translators in avoiding terms which might provoke branding controversies or which were simply inappropriate in a particular specialist context.

When Wordfast Pro came along, I was disappointed in the interoperability of its early versions and it being late to the party for supporting XLIFF formats (as were some other popular tools). That issue is solved in the meantime, so I suspect I might not be quite so unhappy were I to revisit the application.

But really, Wordfast doesn't come onto my radar very often, and when it does, it's not so much the application suite itself as it is the Wordfast creator - Yves Champollion, who follows in a way the family tradition of the famous French Egyptologist, Jean-François Champollion, translator of the Rosetta Stone, and who has earned his own fair share of praise for his many years of support for individual translators and their professional organizations. It would not surprise me if much of the loyalty I find among users of Wordfast is inspired by the personal qualities of Yves as much as by any technical features of his tools.

The least among these tools was, in my consideration, the web-based Wordfast Anywhere (WFA). I looked at it briefly in the early days and was unimpressed: too limited, I thought. And the idea of translating in a browser seemed dubious to me, and it remains so in many scenarios that are relevant to my work. WFA was a bit ahead of its time, before the scamming Gold Rush that targeted corporate clients for web-based solutions designed to wrest data and control away from translators. WFA wasn't welcome in that party: its focus on empowering individual translators is anathema to most of the web CAT solutions ones sees today.

My interest in Wordfast generally was revived recently when I saw that memoQ has integration plug-ins for Wordfast term bases and translation memories on servers. This inspired the thought that perhaps Wordfast Anywhere might function as a collaboration server here, sort of like some had hoped for the Language Terminal resources, but one that actually works perhaps. Alas no, or not yet at least; the memoQ plug-in cannot "see" the WFA server and an individual account. Oh, but if it could....

Collaboration and interoperability between translation environments have been topics of great interest for me since I began to use specialist tools for organizing translation resources some 19 years ago. And on those occasions when I want to share resources with someone who does not have a professional suite of desktop translation resources, I'm always a little uncomfortable with my default recommendations, because they are just a little too nerdy to work well with everyone. So I wondered... how well might WFA work with resources I prepare in SDL Trados Studio or memoQ and pass on to a colleague unequipped with those tools or other desktop solutions. I thought I remembered limits that would restrict such an effort, but either my memory is wrong or these limits changed.

WFA can accept files to translate which are up to 20 MB in size. I receive files that are sometimes larger than this, but not routinely, so this is not much of a restriction. But then I thought the limit on translation memory size would be the stumbling block, and indeed, when I tried to upload a 390 MB TM with about 330,000 translation units, I got an error message telling me that 300 MB (or rather 300000000 with no indication of units!) was the limit. Looking in the online documentation I found that 100,000 TUs is the limit for an individual translation memory in WFA. But you can attach multiple TMs and term bases (which can be much larger as I saw from the 800,000+ entry IATE termbase supplied by the environment). And most TMs that I see for mid-size companies are well under that size limit.

So I spent some time kicking the virtual tires again. Uploaded some damned big EU directives in various formats, including bilingual alignments in an XLIFF. No problem. Loaded a big memoQ XLIFF file: the *.mqxliff extension wasn't recognized, but I fixed that the usual way by changing it to *.xlf and it worked well, roundtripping perfectly back to memoQ and confirming that interoperability would work well enough for collaboration.

Indeed, the range of original file formats handled by this free online translation environment is impressive.

As I browsed through the options and customizing features of the WFA environment, my respect for its capabilities increased further. The thought occurred to me at one point that this might even be suited as an environment for a small company with limited translation needs to manage its language resources and make them available for in-house or external translators. With the several exchange formats available, translators and reviewers could easily perform their work with other translation environment tools or even word processors, and the results could be merged with the master records in the WFA account. This is probably the least expensive, secure way for a company to take its first steps toward central management of its translations and terminology resources. No big server investments needed, and later all resources can be migrated easily to more sophisticated environments, such as a memoQ Server, if necessary.

Some years ago, I opposed the use of Wordfast Anywhere in a local university program, arguing instead that more established professional tools like SDL Trados Studio and/or memoQ should be used instead, especially as the cost of doing so is negligible in teaching curricula. I take that back now. And my impression is that WFA is better suited to a teaching program than other, perhaps slicker web-based tools, because of the underlying philosophy of its design, which leaves translators and their partners in control of the data, not some third-party provider inclined to carry out dubious data mining and use the results to sell more dodgy commercial solutions.

Wordfast users also know that their desktop software can access translation memories and term bases on a WFA account as remote resources. My last look at Wordfast Pro showed me that the tool had come a long, long way since I last dealt with it to clean up some messes a French translator inflicted on an agency client of mine. It's been on my list to look at further for some time; I know it will likely not meet my criteria for the broad range of translation, quality assurance and consulting tasks I do, but it does do a good job of covering the real, practical needs of many colleagues, and it is important to me to understand other translation environments to facilitate collaboration with people who use them.

And for these cases of working together with a mix of environments, it seems to me that Wordfast Anywhere can be a productive bridge to bring partners together. To create a free account and start testing Wordfast Anywhere, click here.

Come to Terms in Amsterdam, June 30th

At end of June this year I'll be doing an expanded, in-person reboot of my occasional terminology workshop with new material and workflows for those who want to do more to control quality and improve communicative vocabularies in interpreting, translation and review projects.

Space is limited at the All-Round Translator event, but I hope you can join us to learn about

• Better teamwork through timely terminology sharing
• Faster, more effective discovery of frequently occurring specialist terminology
• Better access to critical terminology in many environments
• More efficient and accurate QA for terminology
• More accurate, efficient and fault-tolerant term use when translating with memoQ
• Greater flexibility to meet client terminology needs

The Early Bird rate for the workshop is €99 + VAT until the end of April, €120 + VAT  thereafter.

The content is applicable to work with many translation environments, but some segments will share particular tips for maximum productivity using the unbeatably practical memoQ environments.

memoQ Cloud subscriptions and credit card tribulations

Kilgray's memoQ Cloud service is a very convenient platform for learning and testing the latest features of the memoQ server and operating a server for small teams without the hassles of maintaining the server infrastructure and software in-house. For those considering a dedicated server for their company or institution, it offers an excellent opportunity for pilot testing at low or no cost depending on how long you use it. The first month is free; after that the monthly charges (to a credit card) currently start at EUR 160 or USD 175 for an account with one project manager license and 5 web access licenses (to which anyone with a licensed copy of memoQ can connect, without the need to include Translator Pro licenses in the subscription - these are needed only if users without a license will be connecting with the desktop editions of memoQ).

I use the memoQ Cloud server occasionally for shared projects, because it allows me to configure files and resources (of all kinds) more conveniently than file-swapping by e-mail or Dropbox folders and provide better support to my team members. For €160 per month in the months I need it I am on equal footing with any large agency with a memoQ server for the team sizes I want to work with. And I can even share the translation memory resources with colleagues who use SDL Trados Studio using the free Kilgray plug-in for that platform which enables access to any memoQ server online (with an access account created).

The only disadvantage of this service for me is Kilgray's annoying tendency to force upgrades much too soon in the release cycle. This won't matter at all to someone testing the memoQ Cloud server to evaluate the latest release; in fact, this is helpful to avoid the occasional server setup difficulties with new versions on which the paint has not yet dried so you can focus on evaluating features and general stability. But if you are in the middle of a big project, this can be a nuisance. More often now I assume, since Kilgray's current strategy involves more frequent minor version releases. If there is a compatibility problem between the latest release and a team member's memoQ software version, and that person isn't current with the annual maintenance and support plan (which includes free upgrades), they will be stranded for access from their memoQ desktop application until the missed annual fees are paid up.

But until today there was another mysterious hassle that I finally got sorted out. When I first started using memoQ Cloud, I paid the subscription with a US credit card from an old credit union account there. No problems. However, when I incorporated my business in my current country of residence and tried to use a card from my business account there, it never worked, and the explanation screen was displayed for only a brief time, with the text completely garbled due to an incorrect codepage specification for the web page. The first time this happened, I assumed the problem was Kilgray's, and after some back-and-forth with support, the company kindly made an inconvenient exception to their "credit card only" rule and sent me a normal invoice to pay by bank transfer. This isn't a usual thing as I have learned from some frustrated potential corporate customers who don't want to pay by credit card, so I am grateful that something was worked out in that case so I could get on with some urgent teamwork.

After a break of six months or so, the need for a cloud server arose again, and again I had the same trouble with my business credit card. After grumbling briefly to a friend at Kilgray who had sorted the mess out before, I decided to call my bank, because in the meantime my reading skills had improved enough that I was fairly sure that the trouble had nothing to do with Kilgray. Indeed.

The credit card verification and approval service used by Kilgray for web payment is 3-D Secure. In the case of my bank, this service is not available for credit card payments unless its activation is specifically requested. Such a thing never occurred to me, because I use the same card with Amazon and others to order dictionaries and other work materials. As the technician at my bank's help desk explained, there are several different payment approval systems for web transactions with a credit card, and it's merely a coincidence that the others I have dealt with haven't used 3-D Secure. He activated the service immediately (no cost), and five minutes later my memoQ Cloud subscription was renewed with the means of payment I preferred to use.

So it was in fact not Kilgray's problem at all, but it's probably a good idea for their support staff to take note of this scenario, because I am surely not the only one who got tripped up by 3-D Secure not being activated for my card. I am sort of embarrassed that I didn't think of this possibility earlier, but I don't do a lot of shopping online, and for minor stuff if one card fails for reasons unknown, I just shrug and use another. In fact, I think the same problem may have occurred with an airline ticket last spring, but I never associated that with my earlier troubles.

So now I'm up and running with the server version 8.2.5 on the memoQ Cloud, hoping I can finish my training project on that version before the impending release of memoQ 8.3 and the possibility of an upgrade before I get the work done. Tick, tick, tick....

"Coming to Terms" workshop materials for terminology mining

I recently put together a two-hour online workshop to teach some practical aspects of terminology mining and the creation and management of stopword lists to filter out unwanted word "noise" and get to interesting specialist terminology faster.

A recording of the talk as well as the slides and a folder of diverse resources usable with a variety of tools are available at this short URL: https://goo.gl/qvwJbf. The TVS recording file can be opened and played by the free TeamViewer application.

The discussion focuses primarily on Laurence Anthony's AntConc and the terminology extraction module of Kilgray's memoQ.

Shortcuts to managing bitext corpora and terminologies in free Google Sheets

When I presented various options for using spreadsheets available in the free Google Office tools suite on one's Google Drive, I was asked if there wasn't a "simpler" way to do all this.

What's simple? The answer to that depends a lot on the individual. Yes, great simplicity is possible with using the application programming interface for parameterized URL searches described in my earlier articles on this topic:

• Free shareable, searchable glossaries for collaboration with anyone
• Build your own online reference TM for a team or anyone!

The answer is yes. However, there will be some restrictions to accept regarding your data formats and what you can do with them. If that is acceptable, keep reading and you'll find some useful "cookie cutter" options.

When I wrote the aforementioned articles, I assumed that readers unable to cope with creating their own queries would simply ask a nerdy friend for five minutes of help. But another option would be to used canned queries which match defined structures of the spreadsheet.

Let's consider the simplest cases. For anything more complicated, post questions in the comments. One can build very complex queries for a very complex glossary spreadsheet, but if that's where your at, this and other guns are for hire, no checks accepted.

You have bilingual data in Language A and Language B. These can be any two languages, even the same "language" with some twist (like a glossary of a modern standard English with 19th century thieves' cant from London). The data can be a glossary of terms, a translation memory or other bitext corpus, or even a monolingual lexicon (of special terms and their definitions or other relevant information. The fundamental requirement is that these data are placed in an online spreadsheet, which can be created online or uploaded from your local computer and that Language A be found in Column A of the spreadsheet and Language B (or the definition in a monolingual lexicon) in Column B of the spreadsheet. And to make things a little more interesting we'll designate Column C as the place for additional information.

Now let's make a list of basic queries:

1. Search for the text you want in Column A, return matches for A as well as information in Column B and possibly C too in a table in that order
2. Search for the text you want in Column B, return matches for B as well as information in Column A and possibly C too in a table in that order
3. Search for the text you want in Column A or Column B, return matches for A/B and possibly C too in a table in that order

Query 1: searching in Column A

The basic query could be: SELECT A, B WHERE A CONTAINS '<some text>'

Of course <some text> is substituted by the actual text to look for enclosed in the single straight quote marks. If you are configuring a web search program like IntelliWebSearch or the memoQ Web Search tool or equivalents in SDL Trados Studio, OmegaT or other tools, the placeholder goes here.

If you want the information in the supplemental (Comment) Column C, add it to the SELECT statement: SELECT A, B, C WHERE A CONTAINS '<some text>'

The results table is returned in the order than the columns are named in the SELECT statement; to change the display order, change the sequence of the column labels A, B and C in the SELECT, for example:  SELECT B, A, C WHERE A CONTAINS '<some text>'

Query 2: searching in Column B

Yes, you guessed it: just change the column named after WHERE. So 

SELECT B, A, C WHERE B CONTAINS '<some text>' 

for example.

Query 3: searching in Column A or Column B (bidirectional search)

For this, each comparison after the WHERE should be grouped in parentheses: 

SELECT A, B, C WHERE (A CONTAINS '<some text>') OR (B CONTAINS '<some text>')

The statement above will return results where the expression is found in either Column A or Column B. Other logic is possible: substituting AND for the logical OR in the WHERE clause returns a results table in which the expression must be present in both columns of a given record.

And yes, in memoQ Web Search or a similar tool you would use the placeholder for the expression twice. Really.

Putting it all together

To make the search URL for your Google spreadsheet three parts are needed:

1. The base URL of the spreadsheet (look in your browser's address bar; in the address https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bm_ssaeF2zkUJR-mG1SaaodNSatGdvYernsE7IJcEDA/edit#gid=1106428424 for example, the base URL is everything before /edit#gid=1106428424.
2. The string /gviz/tq?tqx=out:html&tq= and
3. Your query statement created as described above

Just concatenate all three elements:

{base URL of the spreadsheet} + /gviz/tq?tqx=out:html&tq= + {query}

An example of this in a memoQ Web Search configuration might be:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bm_ssaeF2zkUJR-mG1SaaodNSatGdvYernsE7IJcEDA/gviz/tq?tqx=out:html&tq=SELECT B, A WHERE (A CONTAINS '{}') OR (B CONTAINS '{}')

and here you can see a search with that configuration and the characters 'muni' :  https://goo.gl/D5cQmh

Adding custom labels to the results table

If you clicked the short URL given as an example above, you'll notice that the columns are unlabeled. Try this short URL to see the same search with labels: https://goo.gl/3zJQqK

This is accomplished simply by adding LABEL A 'Portuguese', B 'English' to the end of the query string.

If you look at the URL in the address bar for any of the live web examples you'll notice that space characters, quote marks and other stuff are substituted by codes. No matter. You can type in clear text and use what you type; modern browsers can deal with stuff that is ungeeked too.

To do more formatting tricks, RTFM! It's here.

Free shareable, searchable glossaries for collaboration with anyone

Some years ago I suggested a procedure using Google spreadsheets for glossary collaboration in projects. Many people do this sort of thing now.

What I do not think most are doing, however, is accessing these web-based term lists efficiently as terminology resources in their work. It's hard to compete with the efficiency of integrated termbases, TMs, web search features, etc.

... unless of course you integrate a web search for those online spreadsheets which returns just the few data of interest.

Matches found for German "ladepresse" in a glossary of a few thousand hunting terms

This is fairly straightforward using Google's visualization API with a simple query. A parameterized URL can be built to perform custom searches of your own data or data shared by colleagues or clients. "Canned" queries can be easily incorporated in custom searches from many tools, including memoQ Web Search, IntelliWebSearch and others.

Building a custom search URL for your Google spreadsheet is fairly simple. In the example above it consists of three parts:

{base URL of the spreadsheet} + /gviz/tq?tqx=out:html&tq= + {query}

The red bit invokes the Google visualization API and specifies that the query results be returned as HTML (for display in a browser). The query language is similar to SQL, but if you use a prepared query for a given spreadsheet table structure, you don't need to learn any of that. Queries can be made which also return definitions, images, context examples or anything else that might reside in columns of interest in the online spreadsheet.

Using a tool like IntelliWebSearch or integrated extensions of OmegaT, memoQ and other tools, users working with any sort of tools can share a live glossary. Google Spreadsheets also have some permissions/security features which can be investigated if needed.

Of course other data can be shared this way, including TMs or XLIFF data as well as monolingual information. A little study of the relevant Google documentation reveals many possibilities :-)

SDL Trados Studio in Lisbon – January 22, 2015 – possibilities, experience and expectations

SDL TRADOS - PAST EXPERIENCES,

PRESENT POSSIBILITIES AND FUTURE EXPECTATIONS

Thursday 22 January 2015, Auditório 2, piso 3, Torre B, FCSH

The Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon is pleased to invite you to a day of talks on SDL Trados, with special guest speaker Paul Filkin, Director of Client Communities for SDL Language Solutions.

Event schedule (subject to updates)

10:00 Welcome 

10:15 – 11:30 “SDL Open Exchange” with Paul Filkin 

11:30 – 13:00 “Voice Recognition (Portuguese and English) and CAT Tools for translation and PEMT” with David Hardisty, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. This session will show how to use voice recognition to post-edit machine translation, how voice recognition is available in Portuguese, and how it can be used to cope with physical disability (such as cerebral palsy). 

LUNCH !!!

14:00 – 15:40 “SDL Trados Clinic” with Paul Filkin. In this session Paul will invite the audience to raise common issues they have with Trados, and cover other common issues and solutions. 

16:00 – 17:00 “SDL Trados and Interoperability with other CAT Tools” with Kevin Lossner. This session will present various ways to use SDL Trados to work successfully with those who have other translation environment tools such as memoQ, OmegaT, etc.

Presenters

Paul Filkin has worked for SDL Language Solutions since 2006. His main focus is evangelizing and helping users of SDL technology get the most out of their investment and is often found on social media providing advice wherever needed.  His blog “Multifarious” describes some of the practical challenges for translators and translation companies and how to resolve these with SDL technology in the mix.

Kevin Lossner has a healthy skepticism of translation technologies where it is not clear if they serve their users or the other way around. His blog “Translation Tribulations” discusses SDL Trados Studio, memoQ and more and is the ultimate authority on chocolate chip cookies in Évora, Portugal.

David Hardisty has taught Translation Tools at FCSH/UNL to undergraduate and postgraduate students since the inception of the Translation Programmes at FCSH. He has also worked with Technology in the teaching of ELT and in the last 25 years has co-authored five books published by Oxford University Press.

Isabel Rocha is a Spanish to Portuguese translator with thirty years of experience. She has completed the curriculum component of the Masters in Translation at Lisbon University and preparing to write her thesis.

Joana Bernardo is a Masters Student at FCSH/UNL. She has also studied Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the same university. She became interested in Translation after a summer internship at a subtitling company.

All professionals and students with an interest in modern translation technologies and working methods are welcome to attend this free event. For more information, please contact: David Hardisty [david1610.dh (at) gmail.com] – or just surprise us with your smiling face at the door.

Where the heck is this?

Click this graphic to see the location using Google Maps!

Mice Like Us

Among my great passions are myths and children's stories. The transformative, symbolic qualities of the good ones carry forward ideas, moral and ethical concepts in ways few classrooms can, and even bad ones may communicate at a level many a gifted orator cannot.

In many ways, the translators I know are like mice. They see themselves as small compared to the great Bridges Lying Across their peripatetic professional paths, easy prey for the More Ravenous, to be consumed perhaps by HAMPsTr hordes or Transformed Perfectly into thepigturds polluting the waters of roadside ditches.

The Merchants of the Machine - and you know who they are - have a story line consumed gladly by those who, placing presumed balance sheet profits ahead of real producers and lacking a long-term commitment to service and the interests of those from whom they extract toil and cash, position themselves as transformers of communication and translation, surfing the Big Wave of Big Data to a Bigger Future. Humans are fallible, alas, but the miraculous Machine in its comprehensible simplicity shall save us from the messy human mystery and lead us to a calculable future, a Thousand Years of Grace and Prosperity for the Chosen in control of the channels of distribution and marketing magic. But real life isn't like that.


We need a different narrative. As Dr. Bronowski said, "We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act." In alternative narratives, the mouse is not always the easy prey to the CAT, nor to any other creature. It's a matter of attitude, and sometimes organization.

From the simple act of kindness in Aesop's tale to the complex world of Redwall, we mice can read examples of how those seen as small and insignificant can in fact be the key to survival and triumph. Lacking the bluster and flames of the Great Beasts of our "industry" we must instead rely on those most essential tools, our brains, to come out ahead in the asymmetric competition.

Technology is, in fact, on our side as translators when it is used in conjunction with BAT*. There are Open Source tools available for organizing the work of individual translators or teams which, in clever hands, can compete at most every level with the finest of commercial technology. OmegaT, Rainbow and GlobalSight are just a few of a long list of these. And for the less "clever" (or those who prefer a bigger slice of normal life) there are simple software service offerings like Kilgray's memoQ cloud, which puts my freelance team on equal footing with any agency or corporate department using the latest and greatest technologies for their language processes. All this for a fraction of what my monthly phone bill used to be in the days before flatrates and Skype.

So what will it be? Will you be willing meat for some weasel's pot?

Caught in a trap of your own denial, uninformed belief and fear, listening to naught but Common Nonsense?


Or, like the mice of Redwall, will you gather your strength and skills, apply them in concert with like-minded professionals in your own interest and the interest of the public you serve and partake of the great feast on a table set for all who will come?

* Brain-assisted translation

memoQ cloud: a team server "on tap"

This afternoon, Kilgray CEO István Lengyel held one of the best webinars I've seen him do yet to describe the convenient new hosted server facilities known as memoQ cloud, which I reviewed recently.

In the webinar, he explained the company's evolution of thought for online computing and how concerns about security were finally resolved to create a more sustainable offering than the more support-intensive "honeymoon" server solution.

He made it clear how existing desktop licenses for the Project Manager and Translator Pro editions can be used in combination with concurrent access licenses (CALs) for the server, as well as how cloud services can be suspended for periods in which they are not needed, saving considerable costs for those with only occasional needs to work in a coordinated online team.

Backing up the server configuration can be done quickly and easily from a Language Terminal account, so if cloud service is dormant for more than three months (after which data are deleted from the server), everything can be restored quickly when needed.

The webinar also included a demonstration of the integrated translation in web browsers, memoQ WebTrans. This is one way of providing access to the server for others who do not have installed copies of memoQ or working on your server when using other computers. Of course this interface also works in web browsers under other operating systems, such as MacOS or Linux. (Click on the graphic below to get a full-sized view of the web translation interface.)

Access to Kilgray's premium terminology server qTerm and memoQ server APIs is also available for an additional subscription fee. Subscribed services can be changed at any time as your needs evolve.

In the webinar, István showed how in about the same time it takes to enjoy a cup of coffee, one can get a free Kilgray Language Terminal account and register with a credit card for a month's trial of the memoQ cloud server (with any services available) for just €1/$1. If you are trying out services which you will not want beyond the trial period (like the API, qTerm or extra licenses), these can be set to cancel at the end of the trial period to avoid unwanted charges.

The embedded video below is a 20-minute tour of how simple it is to set up and manage projects in memoQ cloud. Use the icon at the lower right of the video frame to watch this on your full screen.


This is a good overview of the process, although the licenses aren't explained very well, and the project type recommendation is bad advice in many cases, as I pointed out in my post on server projects on segmentation and projects with desktop documents. Everything else in the video is good, but it's often very important to allow segmentation to be changed or corrected, particularly if the segmentation rules used in the project do not cover abbreviations which may split sentences in very unfortunate ways. If you need to have instantaneous access to work from other team members by using online documents, the the segmentation will need to be checked very carefully and corrected before the project begins to avoid difficulties.

Those testing the memoQ cloud server or using desktop editions of memoQ may also want to check out various free configuration resources on Language Terminal. These include special QA profiles, AutoCorrect files, import filters that are not part of the shipping product and auto-translation rules for easier translation of number and date formats, etc. Language Terminal offers other facilities which may be of interest even to those who do not use memoQ, such as the free InDesign server, which can create PDF previews of InDesign documents (very useful for reviews before delivery) or convert InDesign files of any type to XLIFF for translation in many different environments.

UPDATE:
The memoQ cloud webinar is now available to watch on Kilgray's page for recorded webinars; it can be accessed directly here or viewed in the embedded video below.

Stridonium's Third Way: freelance translation teams

On September 30th, Stridonium will host its second professional education workshop in Holten in the Netherlands, The Third Way, to discuss practical strategies for teams of freelance language service providers to overcome the barriers of distance and technology and keep pace with the latest demands for service in a rapidly evolving market. Participants can arrive the night before the workshop for a relaxed networking dinner, enjoying the venue's outstanding cuisine and a good night's rest (a limited number of rooms are available at no additional charge to early registrants as part of the workshop package) before the the 9:00 am start the next day with a discussion led by Chartered Linguist Christina Guy and Helen Gibbons on the benefits and practicalities of working in teams and the TagTeam concept.

"The three-course lunch ... was the best I
have experienced at a conference venue."

Demonstrations and hands-on practice with tools such as TeamViewer for coaching and work collaboration alone or in combination with other media will follow with Christina on-site and me at a remote location, and after lunch I will continue teaching how free online applications can be used for restricted sharing of reference resources for group work, including translation memories and terminologies. Novel possibilities for dynamic group translation and review - almost like translation management servers but without platform restrictions - will be presented for discussion and testing. The early afternoon session will also include a brief overview of interoperable file formats for different combinations of translation environment tools among team members.

After the afternoon tea break, colleague Riccardo Schiaffino will join us remotely from Colorado in the USA to present ideas for creative, collaborative thinking in distributed teams. Riccardo is a technical translator, language consultant and teacher with long experience in managing team processes for translation and developing cost-effective, intelligent solutions to challenges expected and spontaneous. I've followed him particularly over the years for his good advice on SDL Trados and tools such as ApSIC Xbench (a QA tool which I think he knows more about than anyone else in my circles... check out his Xbench training page!).

The workshop fee, including the hotel room Sunday night (but excluding the cost of dinner) is €250 (€225 for Stridonium members) ex VAT. The availability of rooms included in the workshop fee is limited, so book early. Further information and updates can be found on the Stridonium events page, which also includes a button link for registration and payment ("Register for the Holten Lectures 2").

Attendees should bring a WLAN-capable laptop to use for the practical exercises.

The workshop is designed for freelance translators, language resource managers and others interested in effective teamwork strategies and looking to optimize workflow and keep options open for flexible language teams.

CPD points have been applied for with Bureau BTV in the Netherlands. (Update: 6 CPD points have been awarded.)

TeamViewer as a collaboration tool

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2013, the twentieth anniversary celebration conference for the Dutch training company Teamwork. The best part for me was that I could do so from home in another country.

I was the remote half of a presentation at the conference by my colleague (Chartered Linguist) Christina Guy, a Dutch to English legal translation specialist and founder of Stridonium, a private site for professional exchange and support for translators now also exploring new alternatives for large project cooperation with its TagTeams to better serve translation buyers tired of being mauled by agency lions who often use inferior grades of "vendors" as so much cheap meat and try to hide the stench of their roadkill translations by redefining quality as whatever they can get away with.

As part of the conference session on team collaboration, we demonstrated how we have used TeamViewer software in the past two years for troubleshooting, CAT tool instruction and work together on editing and copywriting projects.

In our interactive TeamViewer sessions, we are able to view remote screens on any monitor of the presenter's workstation, switch the presentation from one workstation to another, use audio to discuss the project, send text messages in a "chat" field and even allow the other person to exercise remote control of a presenting workstation. When the person viewing a remote screen wants to indicate some part of the screen requiring attention, a click at that spot causes a big blue "nag arrow" to appear (as it does in the screenshot of the pretranslation dialog for memoQ shown above). This has been very useful in tutorial sessions I have conducted for a number of people.

Christina's presentation showed how TeamViewer served as a critical tool for overcoming many challenges for working together interactively on projects over great distances in a way less likely to light fuses through misunderstanding a description or question. We showed brief examples of tutorial exchanges, review of a bilingual press release and work on a PowerPoint presentation - just a few of the many tasks for which TeamViewer has proved useful. Judging from the comments she received about her presentation afterwards, the idea was extremely well received.

I am, on the whole, quite skeptical of online presentation formats, particularly the much-loved "webinars". Certainly I have seen a number of excellent web-based presentations, and the opportunity to watch the masterful staging of such events behind the scenes with Kilgray's head of development, Gábor Ugray some months ago did a lot to address my objections and increase the likelihood that I might use conventional webinars as a communication vehicle myself some day, but on the whole, TeamViewer is a tool more to my taste. The logistics of using it are much simpler, and I feel it allows more focused, personal and effective presentations that fit the way I like to work and teach. Someone familiar with the Citrix presentation technologies and TeamViewer would probably object that I am not really comparing like with like here, and that objection would be correct. The real point is that I prefer more spontaneous, personal interaction with individuals or a small group, and TeamViewer is better suited to that.

TeamViewer played an important role in the development of many of the tutorials in my book of memoQ tips, and after the many good experiences using it to work with Christina and others it inspired me to develop some new approaches to software tutorials for corporate clients. I think that today's presentation at the Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2013 may inspire the translators in attendance to explore possibilities for using this tool to solve their own remote communication challenges. Why not try it yourself? It takes just a few minutes to download the software, and use for non-commercial purposes (like explaining some hellish Trados import filter to a bewildered colleague) is free. Go to the TeamViewer site to download it or see the many options available.

Terminology collaboration with Google Docs: new twists

A few years ago, I put a notice in this blog about a colleague's interesting use of Google Docs to share terminology with faraway colleagues in a project. Earlier this year I enjoyed a similar collaboration with a Google Docs spreadsheet used to exchange and update terminology on a very time-critical annual report with translators using two different versions of Trados, memoQ and no CAT tools at all.

Sharing information via Google Docs was quite easy, and we were able to configure the access rights without a lot of trouble. But at the time I still had a bit of extra, annoying effort to get the data imported into my working environment for frequent updates.

Tonight another colleague contacted me with basically the same problem. Her client manages data in an Excel spreadsheet, which gets updated and sent out frequently. She already had the idea that this might work better in Google Docs, and I agreed.

But I kept thinking about that annoying update problem....

One can, of course, export Google Docs spreadsheet data in various formats:

I've marked a few of the export ("download") formats which are probably useful for a subsequent import into a translation environment too. But the downloaded data still won't be in the "perfect" format in many cases, and there will be extra steps involved in matching it up to the fields in your term base.

One way to simplify this problem is to create another online spreadsheet in Google Docs and link it to the original, shared spreadsheet. In this second spreadsheet, which is your "personal" copy for use in your favorite tool, you reformat the data so they will export in a form that makes your later import to your tool's termbase easier.

In my case, I use memoQ, so I created a Google Docs spreadsheet with the first row containing the default field names of interest from the CSV export of my memoQ termbase:

I linked the columns in my personal online spreadsheet with the shared spreadsheet using the ImportRange command. It has two arguments, both of which have to enclosed in quotes. The first one (argument #1 above) is the key for the online spreadsheet to be referenced; it is shown in the URL of the online spreadsheet (just look in the address bar of your browser and you will see it). The second one specifies the sheet and the range of cells to copy. I put this formula in one cell and it copied the entire column for me.

I could, if I wanted to, use conditional (IF) statements and other tricks to transform some data in columns of the other sheet and build the semicolon-delimited term properties list (Term_Info) that memoQ uses to keep track of gender, capitalization enforcement, forbidden status, etc. But none of that is needed for simple sharing of terms, definitions and examples for instance.

I simply export my personal Google Docs spreadshit as CSV, then import it into my desired termbase in memoQ. If I have IDs set for the term entries in the online spreadsheet, I could even choose ID-based updates of my local termbase when I do the import.

Those who use other tools, such as Trados, OmegaT or WordFast can set up their spreadsheets and do exports as best suits their needs.

This approach enables you to take source data in nearly any format in an online spreadsheet and rework it for the greatest convenience in the tool of your choice. Although not a "perfect" solution, it is perhaps a convenient one until better resources are commonly available for dynamic, cross-platform translation collaboration.

So what do I recommend my friend to try as a first step? Maybe take the client's latest spreadsheet, copy and paste it into Google Docs and share it with the client and others on the team. Then it's already "up there" for everyone's convenience (local XLSX copies can be downloaded any time), and she can get on with creating a convenient "view" of this shared data in her personal spreadsheet, which can be exported for local use any time. That personal sheet could also be shared (read only access recommended) with other team members using the same translation environment tool.

Clients get the translators they deserve

A guest post by Valerij Tomarenko 

How can a client benefit from a translator’s advice? How can s/he achieve best results when working with translators? 

Since I studied music and was educated as a musician (apart from graduating from another Russian university as a philologist/translator/foreign language teacher), a music analogy came to my mind: a relationship between composer and performer. They say Bach’s last works were meant neither for instruments nor voices, they were intended to be studied rather than heard. A “normal” composer, however, creates music for a specific instrument/voice or a group of instruments or voices in mind. By studying orchestration, a composer gets to know various instruments and learns how to best use them to produce the desired results. That goes hand in hand with, generally, making life easier for the performer. A composition should be playable, an instrument player fretting over ridiculously complicated fingering is not a good ally. The comparison might be somewhat new, but what I am driving at isn’t: it is common advice for authors of technical or corporate documentation to keep in mind that, for eventual translation, they’d better produce translatable text. Without getting into details of writing conventions or localisation guidelines, I would urge caution on too much corporate lingo or, on the other hand, too heavy, even if seemingly natural, idioms. To translate the German “0815” is not a problem, but please bear in mind that a German “Punkt in Flensburg” would hardly sound that short in any target language (my spellchecker just tried to make a “Punk” out of “Punkt”, but anyway, the most commonplace examples to this effect are not German, but American, e.g. baseball idioms in American everyday language.

I will not discuss the technicalities of preparing documents for translation, since I expect others will do so. But again, another thing which came to my mind has to do with relationships. Kevin’s request to share some ideas and advice coincided with my leafing through the pages of “Ogilvy on Advertising”. The book, first published 30 years ago, still holds true not only for the advertising industry. After all, advertising is about convincing (or call it persuasion) and so is, to a large extent, our translation business (think writing skills). Chapter 6 of Ogilvy’s book is called “Open letter to a client in search of an agency”. Much of his advice is applicable to translators. (I don’t mean translation agencies, rather freelance translators.)

One piece of advice I’d rather quote verbatim:

“Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself. Any fool can write a good advertisement, but it takes a genius to keep his hands off a good one. I had just finished showing a new campaign to Charlie Kelstadt, the Chairman of Sears Roebuck, when his Comptroller came into the room, started to read my copy – and took a fountain-pen out of his pocket. ‘Put that pen back into your pocket’, snapped Kelstadt.” 

Ogilvy’s situation, I am afraid, rings familiar bells for many fellow translators. Whereas you outsource a translation job to a freelancer (or an agency, for that matter), your company may have native speakers of the respective language. (Or your CEO’s family has an au pair from this or that country, of all things.) Sometimes it is a good idea to ask their opinion, but more often than not I, in such a situation, had to correct the correction again and, embarrassing for both sides, explain mistakes. More often than not, there was no need for internal correction or censorship altogether. Trust your translator, if you care about motivation.

“Even the best copywriters are preternaturally thin-skinned”, Ogilvy says. It is true of many translators. So, when explaining things, don’t be overwhelmingly paternalistic. As a rule, experienced freelance translators are both knowledgeable and also capable of thinking out of the box (that is to say they are probably less susceptible to corporate tunnel vision than some of your staff).

As regards motivation, Ogilvy suggests insisting (!) on paying more that what the agency normally charges. “The extra percent won’t kill you... and you will get better service.” I think it also enhances trust and confidence on both sides. Translation is not a commodity. For a serious translator, it is important to feel that the client is well aware of this fact. Very often, when the first (and only) question from a potential client is about my “per unit“ price (words, lines or pages), I’m inclined to ask whether this potential client also considers price to be the most important (or only) reason for his/her own products or services.

And, last but not least, I think that building a longtime relationship with the translator (your very special, not easily replaceable translator) really pays off as s/he is gaining ever more experience and knowledge of your company. In the end it all boils down to the ancient advice about treating your translator as you wish to be treated yourself. It is in the Bible and, as the rabbis say, the rest is commentary.

****

Valerij Tomarenko is an established colleague for Russian, German and English translation and interpreting based in Hamburg, Germany. His blog, Anmerkungen des Übersetzers, is often a source of useful insight in both German and English as well as of his delightful photography.

As part of a small article I was researching, I asked several colleagues whose professional experience in language services extends far longer and usually deeper than my own if they could summarize their best advice for translation buyers in 50 words or less. My intent was to see what different points these experts chose to emphasize, what they had in common and where they differ. The responses so far are quite interesting and will be shared in various ways in the future. Few have managed to stick to the 50 word brief, and my friend Valerij has been a particularly egregious violator of that concept. But as is so often the case in my exchanges with him, I can't find a word to cut which would not detract from the quality of a message worth sharing, so with his kind permission I have adapted this private correspondence for the blog, because I feel these points are really worth contemplation.

-- Kevin Lossner

Where are they NOW with interoperability?

Inquiring minds want to know. Will we see real, practical and lossless data sharing between the major translation environment tools in our lifetimes, or will users continue to submit to the tyranny of incompatibilities driven by market greed and developer whims? My observations this year are not encouraging.

I dream of human-assisted machine translation

Reading in bed has a number of hazards, particularly for those who require some assistance to maintain their oxygen supply during sleeping hours and are prone to nodding off, book in hand. And woe to those whose choice of reading may cause uneasy stirrings of the mind, leading it down paths best untraveled. Since purchasing a Kindle just over a year ago I have had many unrestful nights as I read classics neglected in my youth, Dracula and Frankenstein being two of the happier examples. But little did I expect that reading a retrospective review of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 film Robocop would prove my final undoing....

They say that only two things are inevitable: death and taxes. They are wrong.

In the wake of the euro's collapse following the final meltdown of the Greek economy and its last government, German banks were faced with the problem of recouping their losses from people able to offer little more than a moderate supply of transplant organs for the ravenous Chinese market, and concerns among tour operators at the sudden increase of menus offering "long pig" indicated that international medical markets were in a state of oversupply and savory alternatives were too often the order of the day - and occasionally served as unasked-for appetizers.

Clearly, more sustainable engines of value were needed to drive the economy and extract returns from those who benefit from the strength and protection of the state. Fortunately, the persons closest to our enlightened, modern governments are ever active in the pursuit of advances in efficiency to enhance the return on the great investments made in the citizenry.

My life, or more precisely my economic utility after life, was saved by the wondrous results of a joint research project of governments, university medical centers and TAUS members determined to eliminate the exorbitant and unnecessary expense of human translation and post-editing. Although enormous progress had been made in convincing people of the progress of machine translation in its 70 year history, throughout that time the actual perfection of the results remained a maddening five years distant, the gap never quite closing as the faithful knew it should.

Some apostates among MT believers claimed that the technology could never achieve its full potential without the collaboration of qualified linguists, but these specialists remained stubborn for the most part in their resistance to using their brains for linguistic garbage recycling. Resistant, that is, until their brains became part of the recycling effort, offering value-added new "life" for the benefit of bottom lines.

A little-noticed provision of the 2014 tax reforms introduced by the Merkel government in the Germany and emulated by its subjects and acolytes around the world was conditional relief based on the reversion to the state of corporeal assets after the cessation of autorespiratory processes. And those who noticed... well, the comforting comparison with reverse mortgages and the lesser associated asset risk usually put their minds at ease.

The first indication I had that something was different was when I reached for my Kindle and found that it was no longer beside me, that in fact I could discern no "side". After a few moments' confusion, my vision cleared, and I was presented with a screen of text:

Crucial for the occurrence of a merger is the cross section, the measure of the probability that the colliding nuclei react. Sufficiently large, the cross section is usually only when the two cores with high energy collide. Which is necessary to overcome the Coulomb barrier, the electrical repulsion between the positively charged nuclei. However, the cross section is also less impact energy due to the tunneling effect is not zero. Reach the nuclei at a distance of only about 10-15 m from each other, they bind together the strong interaction, the nuclei have merged.

WTF? A timer appeared above the text, accompanied by a message to begin postediting. Huh? I stared at the jumble of words with no little confusion, wondering what their purpose could be. Colliding nuclei? Merger? Something to do with nuclear fusion perhaps, but hard to tell from this gurgled mess. I continued to stare at the text as the timer counted down. The message to begin began to flash, slowly at first, then more intensely. The countdown reached zero, and the message changed: target not achieved.

As I felt the electric surge convulse my body, I realized that I had no mouth with which to scream. But every part of my not-present body screamed for me as nerve centers received their reinforcing, teaching stimulus.

TRY AGAIN

flashed briefly before my eyes, and the text reappeared.

My unseen fingers moved across an unfelt keyboard. The cross section is critical for determining the probability that colliding nuclei will react and fusion occur....