Technology for Legal Translation

Last April I was a guest at the Buenos Aires University Facultad de Derecho, where I had an opportunity to meet students and staff from the law school's integrated degree program for certified public translators and to speak about my use of various technologies to assist my work in legal translation. This post is based loosely on that presentation and a subsequent workshop at the Universidade de Évora.

Useful ideas seldom develop in isolation, and to the extent that I can claim good practice in the use of assistive technologies for my translation work in legal and other domains it is largely the product of my interactions with many colleagues over the past seventeen years of commercial translation activity. These fine people have served as mentors, giving me my first exposure to the concepts of platform interoperability for translation tools, and as inspirations by sharing the many challenges they face in their work and clearly articulating the desired outcomes they hoped to achieve as professionals. They have also generously and frequently shared with me the solutions that they have found and have often unselfishly shared their ideas on how and why we should do better in our daily practice. And I am grateful that I can continue to learn with them, work better, and help others to do so as well.

A variety of tools for information management and transformation can benefit the work of a legal translator in areas which include but are not limited to:

• corpus utilization,
• text conversion,
• terminology management,
• diverse information retrieval,
• assisted drafting,
• dictated speech to text,
• quality assurance,
• version control and comparison, and
• source and target text review.

Though not exhaustive, the list above can provide a fairly comprehensive basis for education of future colleagues and continued professional development for those already active as legal translators. But with any of the technologies discussed below, it is important to remember that the driving force is not the hardware and software we use in technical devices but rather the human mind and its understanding of subject matter and the needs of the particular task or work process in the legal domain. No matter how great our experience, there is always something more and useful to be learned, and often the best way to do this is to discuss the challenges of technology and workflow with others and keep an open mind for new approaches with promise.

Reference texts of many kinds are important in legal translation work (and in other types of translation too, of course). These may be monolingual or multilingual texts, and they provide a wealth of information on subject matter, terminology and typical usage in particular contexts. These collections of text – or corpora – are most useful when the information found in them can be read in context rather than isolation. Translation memories – used by many in our work – are also corpora of a kind, but they are seriously flawed in their usual implementations, because only short segments of text are displayed in a bilingual format, and the meaning and context of these retrieved snippets are too often obscure.

An excerpt from a parallel corpus showing a treaty text in English, Portuguese and Spanish

The best corpus tools for translation work allow concordance searches in multiple selected corpora and provide access to the full context of the information found. Currently, the best example of integrated document context with information searches in a translation environment tool is found in the LiveDocs module of Kilgray's memoQ.

A memoQ concordance search with a link to an "aligned" translation

A past translation and its preview stored in a memoQ LiveDocs corpus, accessed via concordance search

A memoQ LiveDocs corpus has all the advantages of the familiar "translation memory" but can include other information, such as previews of the translated work as well. It is always clear in which document the information "hit" was found, and corpora can also include any number of monolingual documents in source and target languages, something which is not possible with a traditional translation memory.

In many cases, however, much context can be restored to a traditional translation memory by transforming it into a "document" in a LiveDocs corpus. This is because in most cases, substantial portions of the translation memory will have its individual segment records stored in document order; if the content is exported as a TMX file or tab-delimited text file and then imported as a bilingual document in a LiveDocs corpus, the result will be almost as if the original translations had been aligned and saved, and from a concordance hit one can open the bilingual content directly and read the parts before and after the text found in the concordance search.

Legal translation can involve text conversion in a broad sense in many ways. Legal translators must often deal with hardcopy or faxed material or scanned files created from these. Often documents to translate and reference documents are provided in portable document format (PDF), in which finding and editing information can be difficult. Using special software, these texts can be converted into documents which can be edited, and portions can be copied, pasted and overwritten easily, or they can be imported in translation assistance platforms such as SDL Trados Studio, Wordfast or memoQ. (Some of these environments include integrated facilities for converting PDF texts, but the results are seldom as suitable for work as PDF or scanned files converted with optical character recognition software such as ABBYY FineReader or OmniPage.)

Software tools like ABBYY FineReader can also convert "dead" scanned text images into searchable documents. This will even work with bad contrast or color images in the background, making it easier, for example, to look for information in mountains of scanned documents used in legal discovery. Text-on-image files like the example shown above completely preserve the layout and image context of the text to be read in the best way. I first discovered and used this option while writing a report for a client in which I had to reference sections of a very long, scanned policy document from the European Parliament. It was driving me crazy to page through the scanned document to find information I wanted to cite but where I had failed to make notes during my first reading. Converting that scanned policy to a searchable PDF made it easy to find what I needed in seconds and accurately cite its page number, etc. Where there is text on pictures, difficult contrast and other features this is often far better for reference purposes than converting to an MS Word document, for example, where the layouts are likely to become garbled.

Software tools for translation can also make text in many other original formats accessible to translators in an ergonomically simpler form, also ensuring, where necessary, that no text is overlooked because of a complicated layout or because it is in an easily overlooked footnote or margin note. Text import filters in translation environments make it easy to read and translate the words in a uniform working environment, with many reference tools and other help available, and then render the translated text back into its original format or some more useful bilingual format.

An excerpt of translated patent claims exported as a bilingual table for review

Technology also offers many possibilities for identifying, recording and controlling relevant terminology in legal translation work.

Large quantities of text can be analyzed quickly to find the most frequent special vocabulary likely to be relevant to the translation work and save these in project glossaries, often enabling that work to be organized better with much of the clarification of terms taking place prior to translation.  This is particularly valuable in large projects where it may be advisable to ensure that a team of translators all use the same terms in the target language to avoid possible confusion and misunderstanding.

Glossaries created in translation assistance tools can provide terminology hints during work and even save keystrokes when linked to predictive, "intelligent" writing features.

Integrated quality checking features in translation environments enable possible deviations of terminology or other issues to be identified and corrected quickly.

Technical features in working software for translation allow not only desirable terms to be identified and elaborated; they also enable undesired terms to be recorded and avoided. Barred terms can be marked as such while translating or automatically identified in a quality check.

A patent glossary exported from memoQ and then made into a PDF dictionary via SDL Trados MultiTerm

Technical tools enable terminology to be shared in many different ways. Glossaries in appropriate formats can be moved easily between different environments to share them with others on a team which uses diverse technologies; they can also be output as spreadsheets, web pages or even formatted dictionaries (as shown in the example above). This can help to ensure consistency over time in the terms used by translators and attorneys involved in a particular case.

There are also many different ways that terminology can be shared dynamically in a team. Various terminology servers available usually suffer from being restricted to particular platforms, but freely available tools like Google Sheets coupled with web look-up interfaces and linked spreadsheets customized for importing into particular environments can be set up quickly and easily, with access restricted to a selected team.

The links in the screenshot above show a simple example using some data from SAP. There is a master spreadsheet where the data is maintained and several "slavesheets" designed for simple importing into particular translation environment tools. Forms can also be used for simplified data entry and maintenance.

If Google Sheets do not meet the confidentiality requirements of a particular situation, similar solutions can be designed using intranets, extranets, VPNs, etc.

Technical tools for translators can help to locate information in a great variety of environments and media in ways that usually integrate smoothly with their workflow. Some available tools enable glossaries and bilingual corpora to be accessed in any application, including word processors, presentation software and web pages.

Corpus information in translation memories, memoQ LiveDocs or external sources can be looked up automatically or in concordance searches based on whole or partial content matches or specified search terms, and then useful parts can be inserted into the target text to assist translation. In some cases, differences between a current source text and archived information is highlighted to assist in identifying and incorporating changes.

Structured information such as dates, currency expressions, legal citations and bibliographical references can also be prepared for simple keystroke insertion in the translated text or automated quality checking. This can save many frustrating hours of typing and copy revision. In this regard, memoQ currently offers the best options for translation with its "auto-translation" rulesets, but many tools offer rules-based QA facilities for checking structured information.

Voice recognition technologies offer ergonomically superior options for transcription in many languages and can often enable heavy translation workloads with short deadlines to be handled with greater ease, maintaining or even improving text quality. Experienced translators with good subject matter knowledge and voice recognition software skills can typically produce more finished text in a day than the best post-editing operations for machine pseudo-translation, with the exception that the text produced by human voice transcription is actually usable in most situations, while the "gloss" added to machine "translations" is at best lipstick on a pig.

Reviewing a text for errors is hard work, and a pressing deadline to file a brief doesn't make the job easier. Technical tools for translation enable tens of thousands of words of text to be scanned for particular errors in seconds or minutes, ensuring that dates and references are correct and consistent, that correct terminology has been used, et cetera.

The best tools even offer sophisticated tools for tracking changes, differences in source and target text versions, even historical revisions to a translation at the sentence level. And tools like SDL Trados Studio or memoQ enable a translation and its reference corpora to be updated quickly and easily by importing a modified (monolingual) target text.

When time is short and new versions of a source text may follow in quick succession, technology offers possibilities to identify differences quickly, automatically process the parts which remain unchanged and keep everything on track and on schedule.

For all its myriad features, good translation technology cannot replace human knowledge of language and subject matter. Those claiming the contrary are either ignorant or often have a Trumpian disregard for the truth and common sense and are all too eager to relieve their victims of the burdens of excess cash without giving the expected value in exchange.

Technologies which do not assist translation experts to work more efficiently or with less stress in the wide range of challenges found in legal translation work are largely useless. This really does include machine pseudo-translation (MpT). The best “parts” of that swindle are essentially the corpus matching for translation memory archives and corpora found in CAT tools like memoQ or SDL Trados Studio, and what is added is often incorrect and dangerously liable to lead to errors and misinterpretations. There are also documented, damaging effects on one’s use of language when exposed to machine pseudo-translation for extended periods.

Legal translation professionals today can benefit in many ways from technology to work better and faster, but the basis for this remains what it was ten, twenty, forty or a hundred years ago: language skill and an understanding of the law and legal procedure. And a good, sound, well-rested mind.

*******

Further references

Speech recognition 

Dragon NaturallySpeaking: https://www.nuance.com/dragon.html
Tiago Neto on applications: https://tiagoneto.com/tag/speech-recognition
Translation Tribulations – free mobile for many languages: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2015/04/free-good-quality-speech-recognition.html
Circuit Magazine - The Speech Recognition Revolution: http://www.circuitmagazine.org/chroniques-128/des-techniques
The Chronicle - Speech Recognition to Go: http://www.atanet.org/chronicle-online/highlights/speech-recognition-to-go/
The Chronicle - Speech Recognition Is in Your Back Pocket (or Wherever You Keep Your Mobile Phone): http://www.atanet.org/chronicle-online/none/speech-recognition-is-in-your-back-pocket-or-wherever-you-keep-your-mobile-phone/

Document indexing, search tools and techniques

Archivarius 3000: http://www.likasoft.com/document-search/
Copernic Desktop Search: https://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/
AntConc concordance: http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/
Multiple, separate concordances with memoQ: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2014/01/multiple-separate-concordances-with.html
memoQ TM Search Tool: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2014/01/the-memoq-tm-search-tool.html
memoQ web search for images: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2016/12/getting-picture-with-automated-web.html
Upgrading translation memories for document context: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2015/08/upgrading-translation-memories-for.html
Free shareable, searchable glossaries with Google Sheets: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2016/12/free-shareable-searchable-glossaries.html

Auto-translation rules for formatted text (dates, citations, etc.)

Translation Tribulations, various articles on specifications, dealing with abbreviations & more:
http://www.translationtribulations.com/search/label/autotranslatables
Marek Pawelec, regular expressions in memoQ: http://wasaty.pl/blog/2012/05/17/regular-expressions-in-memoq/

Authoring original texts in CAT tools

Translation Tribulations: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2015/02/cat-tools-re-imagined-approach-to.html

Autocorrection for typing in memoQ

Translation Tribulations: http://www.translationtribulations.com/2014/01/memoq-autocorrect-update-ms-word-export.html

Corpus Linguistics and AntConc in the 2016 US Presidential Contest

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

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

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

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

Better ways to search the Internet while translating

When Kilgray introduced memoQ Web Search a few years ago, I was unimpressed, because I was fairly efficient at working with the several tabs of my favorite sites to search for information during translation projects and I couldn't imagine much value to be had from an "integrated" search in a stripped-down custom browser. And the buggy example templates shipped with the memoQ release (several search setups are incorrect) didn't help much. It was only when I began to take a careful, systematic look at this feature to document it for my memoQuickies guide to configuration that I realized how straightforward it really was, and since then, despite ongoing bugs in the feature which sometimes lead to crashes, it has become one of the most important practical features of the product for me. Being able to select a text in the source or target and hit a hot key to search multiple sites at once really does save me time. Lots of it.

There has, of course, been another product around which does that too, which works in more or less any Windows environment and which is far more configurable. But when I took my first look at IntelliWebSearch (IWS) years ago, I was put off and confused by the nerdishness of the presentation, and I just wasn't ready to be told how many damned options I had when I was trying to get my head around the simplest basics. Recently, however, I have beome increasingly irritated at little things with memoQ Web Search, including the impossibility of adding my user credentials to turn off ads on some sites I use, and I began to wonder if IWS might not be worth another look. And indeed it is.

I am a big fan of multiple concordance search sets in integrated translation environments- this isn't a feature in any of them as far as I know, but it is accomplished easily enough. In memoQ I use the integrated concordance feature to search all the translation memories and corpora attached to a project for my "primary" concordance search set. The memoQ TM Search Tool is configured to search another set of TMs, including some with languages other than those in my project. And for blockbuster TM concordance searches with massive resources like the DGT data sets I have TMLookup. That is three differently configured concordance searches available at a keystroke in my working environment, and you can do the same thing in your favorite CAT tool as well.

So why not try this with web searches? Searching too many tabs at once tends to be slow, which is why I generally recommend no more than a few favorites be used with the integrated memoQ feature. IWS, unlike my usual tool, offers the possibility of configuring multiple "search groups", all of which can be accessed from anywhere with a hot key combination you assign. So I tried this for a few special sites that I usually don't want in my memoQ Web Search but which are a nuisance to deal with manually when I need them. It took me just a few minutes to install IWS, and with the help of a couple of short tutorial videos on the tool's web site, I had my custom searches set up(the configuration wizard to do this is dead easy and user friendly), and in about 10 minutes I was happily invoking special web searches on multiple tabs of my default browser (where I have configured some sites to shut off the damned ads) while I worked in the memoQ translation and editing grid.

So IntelliWebSearch today isn't nearly as difficult to figure out as it seemed years ago. Whether the product has improved or my head is just a little less cluttered now I'm not sure. But it's a very useful tool and a good extension of my working environment which I can recommend with more confidence. I can do useful things without drowning in the depth of its product features.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't mind a guided tour from someone with more of a clue than I have. And later this summer I have exactly such an opportunity. Colleague Michael Farrell, the Italian to English translator who created IntelliWebSearch for all of us, is giving two webinars sponsored by IAPTI, which offer a thorough grounding in the basics of this productivity booster. Information with links (click the images!) is below. I'll be there and hope you'll join me and learn useful things to help in your research of monolingual and multiplingual information sources on the Internet.

The Invisible Hand of memoQ LiveDocs - making "broken" corpora work

Last month I published a post describing the "rules" for document visibility in the list of documents for a memoQ LiveDocs corpus. Further study has revealed that this is only part of the real story and is somewhat misleading.

I (wrongly) assumed that, in a LiveDocs corpus, if a document was visible in the list its content was available in concordance searches or the Translation Results pane, and if it was not shown in the list of documents for the corpus in the project, its content would not be available in the concordance or Translation Results pane. Both assumptions proved wrong in particular cases.

In the most recent versions of memoQ, for corpora created and indexed in those versions, all documents in a corpus shown in the list will be available in the concordance search and the Translation Results pane as expected. And the rules for what is currently shown in the list are described accurately in my previous post on this topic. However,

• if there are documents in the corpus which share the same main language (as EN-US and EN-UK both share the main language, English) but are not shown in the list, these will still be used for matching in the memoQ Concordance and Translation Results and
• if the corpus was created in an older version of memoQ (such as memoQ 2013R2), documents shown in the list of a corpus may in fact not show up in a Concordance search or in the Translation Results. 

This second behavior - documents shown in the list but their content not appearing in searches - has been described to me recently by several people, but it could not be reproduced at first, so I thought they must be mistaken, and statements that "sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't" made these pronouncements seem even more suspect. Except that they happen to be true and I now (sort of) understand why.

Prior to publishing my post to describe the rules governing the display of documents for a LiveDocs corpus in a project, I had been part of a somewhat confusing discussion with one of my favorite Kilgray experts, who mentioned monolingual "stub" documents a number of times as a possible solution to content availability in a corpus, but when I tried to test his suggestion and saw that the list of documents on display in the corpus had not expanded to include content I knew was there, I thought he was wrong. But actually, he was right; we were talking about two different things - visibility of a document versus availability of its content.

For purposes of this discussion, a stub document is a small file with content of no importance, added only to create the desired behavior in memoQ LiveDocs. It might be a little text file - "stubby.txt" - with any nonsense in it.

I went back to my test projects and corpora used to prepare the last article and found that in fact for the main languages in a project all the content was available from the corpora, regardless of whether the relevant documents were displayed in the list. In the case of a corpus not offered in the list for a project because of sublanguage mismatches in the source and target, adding a stub document with either a generic setting (DE, EN, PT, etc.) or sublanguage-specific setting for the source language or the correct sublanguage setting for the target (DE-CH, EN-US, etc.) made all the corpus content for the main languages available instantly. (In the project, documents added will have the project language settings; use the Resource Console for any other language settings you want.)

Content of a test corpus before a stub document was added. Viewed in the Resource Console.

The test corpus with the document list shown in my project; only the stub document is displayed, but
all the indexed content shown above is also available in the Concordance and Translation Results.

It is unfortunate that in the current versions of memoQ the document list for a corpus in a project may not correspond to its actual content for the main languages. Not only does this preclude accessing a document's content without a match or a search, it also means that binary documents (such as one of the PDF files shown in the list) cannot be opened from within the project. I hope this bug will be fixed soon.

Since a few of my friends, colleagues and clients were concerned about odd behavior involving older corpora, I decided to have a look at those as well. Kilgray Support had made a general recommendation of rebuilding these corpora or had at least suggested that problems might occur, so I was expecting something.

And I found it. Test corpora created in the older version of memoQ (2013 R2) behaved in a way similar to my tests with memoQ 2015 - although the "display rules" for documents in the list differed as I described in my previous blog post, the content of "hidden" documents was available in Concordance searches and in the Translation Results pane. But....

When I accessed these corpora created in memoQ 2013 R2 using memoQ 2015, even if I could see documents (for example, a monolingual source document with a generic setting), the content was available in neither the Concordance nor the Translation Results until I added an appropriate stub document under memoQ 2015. Then suddenly the index worked under memoQ 2015 and I could access all the content, regardless of whether the documents were displayed in the list. If I deleted the stub document, the content became inaccessible again.

So what should we do to make sure that all the content of our memoQ corpora are available for searches in the Concordance or matches in the Translation results?

If you always work out of the same main source language (which in my case would be German or "DE", regardless of whether the variant is from Germany, Austria or Switzerland), then add a generic language stub document for your source language to all corpora - old and new - under memoQ 2015 and all will be well.

If your corpora will be used bidirectionally, then add a generic stub for both the source and target to those corpora or add a "bilingual stub" with generic settings for both languages. This will ensure that the content remains available if you want to use the corpora later in projects with the source and target reversed.

Although it's hard to understand the principles governing what is displayed, when and why, following the advice in the red text will at least eliminate the problem of content not being available for pretranslation, concordance searches and translation grid matches. And the mystery of inconsistent behavior for older corpora appears to be solved. The cases where these older corpora have "worked" - i.e. their content has been accessible in the Concordance, etc. - are cases where new documents were added to them under recent versions of memoQ. If you just keep adding to your corpora, doing so particularly from a project with generic language settings, you'll not have to bother with stub documents and your content will be accessible.

And if Kilgray deals with that list bug so we actually see all the documents in a corpus which share the main languages of a project, including the binary ones, then I think the confusion among users will be reduced considerably.

A quick trip to LiveDocs for EUR-Lex bilingual texts

Quite a number of friends and respected colleagues use EUR-Lex as a reference source for EU legislation. Being generally sensible people, some of them have backed away from the overfull slopbucket of bulk DGT data and built more selective corpora of the legislation which they actually need for their work.

However, the issue of how to get the data into a usable form with a minimum of effort has caused no little trouble at times. The various texts can be copied out or downloaded in the languages of interest and aligned, but depending on the quality of the alignment tool, the results are often unsatisfactory. I've been told that AlignFactory does a better job than most, but then the question of how best to deal with the HTML bitexts from AlignFactory remains.

memoQ LiveDocs is of course rather helpful for quick and sometimes dirty alignment, but if the synchronization of the texts is too many segments off, it is sometimes difficult to find the information one needs even when the (bilingual) document is opened from the context menu in a concordance window.

EUR-Lex offers bi- or tri-lingual views of most documents in a web page. The alignments are often imperfect, but the synchronization is usually off by only one or two segments, so finding the right text in a document's context is not terribly difficult. So these often imperfect alignments are usually quite adequate for use as references in a memoQ LiveDocs corpus. Here is a procedure one might follow to get the EUR-Lex data there.

The bilingual text of a view such as the one above can be selected by dragging the cursor to select the first part of the information, then scrolling to the bottom of the window and Shift+clicking to select all the text in both columns:

Copy this text, then paste it into Excel:

Then import the Excel file as a file for "translation" in a memoQ project with the right language settings. Because of quirks with data access in LiveDocs if the target language variants are specified and possibly not matched, I have created a "data conversion project" with generic language settings (DE + EN in my case as opposed to my usual DE-DE + EN-US project settings) to ensure that data stored in LiveDocs will be accessed without trouble from any project. (This irritating issue of language variants in LiveDocs was introduced a few version ago by Kilgray in an attempt to placate some large agencies, but it has caused enormous headaches for professional translators who work with multiple sublanguage settings. We hope that urgent attention will be given to this problem soon, and until then, keep your LiveDocs language data settings generic to ensure trouble-free data access!)

When the Excel file is added to the Translations file list, there are two important changes to make in the import options. First, the filter must be changed from Microsoft Excel to "multilingual delimited text" (which also handles multilingual Excel files!). Second, the filter configuration must be "changed" to specify which data is in the columns of interest.

The screenshot above shows the import settings that were appropriate for the data I copied from EUR-Lex. Your settings will likely differ, but in each case the values need to be checked or set in the fields near the arrows ("Source language" particularly at the top and the three dropdown menus by the second arrow below).

Once the data are imported, some adjustments can be made by splitting or joining segments, but I don't think the effort is generally worth it, because in the cases I have seen, data are not far out of sync if they are mismatched, and the synchronization is usually corrected after a short interval.

In the Translations list of the Project home, the bilingual text can be selected and added to a LiveDocs corpus using the menus or ribbons.

The screenshot below shows the worst location of badly synchronized data in the text I copied here:

This minor dislocation does not pose a significant barrier to finding the information I might need to read and understand when using this judgment as a reference. The document context is available from the context menu in the memoQ Concordance as well as the context menu of the entry appearing in the Translation results pane.

A similar data migration procedure can be implemented for most bilingual tables in HTML files, word processing files or other data sources by copying the data into Excel and using the multilingual delimited text filter.

Doing the deed with the DGT

Several years ago a legal translator in my circles began to use memoQ for her work, and I was asked to help with the migration of data from her old environment. When she was introduced to memoQ LiveDocs, she was delighted to learn that she was able to view the original document text or bitext of concordance hits for content saved in a LiveDocs corpus.

Because her work involved a lot of references to EU directives and other information sources from the EU, the parallel corpora from the DGT had great value to her work. These are enormous bodies of data, totaling several million translation units and growing constantly. Many translators in the EU use this data, but the sheer bulk of it tends to be burdensome to many translation environments, and the lack of context often limits the value of information retrieved from these corpora when stored in translation memories.

So she decided that LiveDocs was the medium in which the DGT data were to be stored, and because the DGT translation memories contain their data in sequential document order, the document context of any concordance hits can be viewed using the context menu in the memoQ concordance:

Thanks to the expansion of file types which can be included in LiveDocs since that time, it is easier than ever to import data from parallel corpora like the EU DGT and use these to support translation work. Using the LiveDocs approach, the extraction of a single large bilingual TMX file from the many zipped data collections is also completely unnecessary (in fact, the extreme quantity of data in those single files inevitably causes memory problems). To build reference corpora for concordancing or the construction of predictive typing resources such as Muses in memoQ, it is simply necessary to unpack the individual zip files into folders full of small TMX files and then import these folder structures into memoQ:

Include only TMX files in the LiveDocs corpus import:

Selecting the desired languages extracts the bilingual data from the individual TMX files, which contain data in all the official EU languages. If a particular file does not contain the desired pairing a corresponding message will be displayed. Don't worry about it.

This approach of loading smaller TMX files into LiveDocs overcomes the memory problems which may occur with gigantic files. And once these smaller files are in a LiveDocs corpus, they can be selected en masse and exported to one or more translation memories.

In fact, this approach is useful to get around the current inability of memoQ translation memories to import more than one TMX file directly at a time. This may be helpful, for example, to OmegaT users who want to migrate their many TMX translation memories (one from each project!) if they start using memoQ.

"Upgrading" translation memories for document context

Translation memories are in a way the Zombie Apocalypse of our profession. Dead data walking, with rotting bits falling off and lying out of context in a concordance for the reader to puzzle over, wondering where that bit of wordflesh one fit in the whole.

How often in my Dark Days as a Trados User did I look at some concordance hit and wonder just how stoned the translator was, corrected the "mistake" and discovered later it was quite right in context? Context matters, but with translation memories it's like the Invisible Hand at best, with a few missing fingers.

I once was lost, but now I found memoQ LiveDocs, and I

1. export my context-free or -invisible TMs to TMX, then
2. import the TMX to LiveDocs

where I now can go directly from a concordance hit to the translation unit with LiveDocs, which can be read in document context if that chunk of text was in fact written to the TM in the sequential order of the document, which is often the case.

Multiple, separate concordances with memoQ

In the comments of my recent post on the memoQ TM search tool, I mentioned a possibility for using that feature to "de-junk" and simplify concordance searches.

In the example above, for example, I am searching the 2 million translation unit EU DGT TM using text selected in a memoQ 6.2 project. Working this way offers me the following advantages:

• I can separate the concordances for my project from a big reference dataset I only need for certain lookups.
• A simple copy command (Ctrl+C) automatically looks up text in either language in the TM search tool.
• If I want to avoid any possibility of unintended "leakage" of data from certain TMs in the project, selecting them for use in the memoQ TM search tool ensures that their content will never be "accidentally" inserted as an ordinary TM match as I work.

Note also that I am using a feature of memoQ 2013 R2 (6.8) to do searches while working in an older version of memoQ. I could do the same if I were working in a web translation interface for memoQ (which does not allow me to attach my own TMs) or any other translation environment.

I remember an argument with a translation agency owner about a year and  half ago. The man told me quite insistently about his intent to force even translators with memoQ to use the web translation interface so that he could restrict them to the use of the client-specific TMs he maintained. With the use of the TM search tool, a reasonable compromise is achieved for TM data at least. (LiveDocs and termbase access remains a bit more cumbersome, however, though by setting up a dummy project with termbases, corpora and particular TMs attached, one could actually use three separate concordance sets. That could be interesting.)

In any case, the possibility of a separate concordance for handling large data volumes separately from one's main TMs and the possibility of doing this even while using older versions of memoQ may be a reason why those who do not yet want to do their routine work in the latest version or cannot do so can still benefit from upgrading now and installing the latest version alongside the old version(s).

Translation tool concordances compared

A recent experience when tutoring a new memoQ user started me thinking about the way concordance searches work in various translation environment tools and how the results are displayed. The user, who was quite experienced with OmegaT, kept telling me that memoQ could not find examples of a term's use in the TM and she had to do all her searches in OmegaT. I was somewhat puzzled by that, and when I looked at her screen with the memoQ concordance dialog, I saw something like this:

The memoQ version 5 concordance dialog

Looks like the term ("Inverkehrbringen") was found. So what was the problem? For years she had looked at this concordance view:

The OmegaT concordance dialog

The differences in layout and the lack of highlighting of the key term (which was aligned in the center of the memoQ concordance window in the ancient KWIC display tradition) were unexpected and confusing to the new user.

This inspired me to have a look at how various other tools display concordance results. I was not very happy with some of what I discovered, especially with some of today's leading commercial tools. I took a look at the TWB translation memories in SDL Trados 2007, concordancing in SDL Trados Studio 2009, Wordfast Pro (very limited test due to a demo license and my inability to load my TMX test data), memoQ and OmegaT.

In terms of overall performance, the best results were obtained with OmegaT and "Trados Classic" (2007). Searching a huge TM gave results in a flash. Concordance searches with SDL Trados Studio 2009, on the other hand, really sucked with a big TM (EU data, about 400,000 TUs). I vacuumed my entire apartment and fed the dog while I waited for the result, and I wasn't even told how many hits were found. Unfortunately, my favorite working environment, memoQ, performed worst with the same big data set: it simply gave an error message. Further testing revealed that this error was due to the very large number of hits. (This would have been obvious had I paid enough attention to read the dialog title in the first place.)

memoQ error message from too many concordance hits

So it looks like some development attention may need to be directed here. (Update: Kilgray's develops are actively working to remove this restriction.) Of all the tools I was able to test with a large concordance, memoQ was the only one to fail this way. My personal TM with about 10 years of my work in it is nearly as long as my German/English EU legal test database, but concordance searches in it using memoQ are not unduly slow.

Other concordance views looked like this:

The concordance in SDL Trados 2007 - hits limited compared to OmegaT (see above)

SDL Trados 2009 - perhaps the easiest to read, but slower than molasses

Wordfast Pro - format not bad, but the test was limited due to the demo license

The Déjá Vu X concordance hasn't changed significantly in appearance in the latest version (DVX2). Once again, Victor Dewsbery was kind enough to provide me with screenshots of the two "scan" options for searching the translation memory. The initial scan produces only fairly close matches, while the "power scan" is more like the usual concordance with the term embedded in a larger body of text (the non-matching parts being crossed out)

DVX2 scan (first click)

DVX2 Power Scan (second click)

I do have a license for the older version of DVX, but I didn't attempt any stress testing. While its performance with large TMs has always been good (my personal "Big Mama" is about 330,000 TUs), import and export of such data volumes are painfully slow. We're talking overnight. I hope the new version is better in that respect. There I must really give kudos to the OmegaT developer: loading the TM was even faster than with Trados Workbench, which for me has always been a benchmark of speed to aspire to. All you have to do to add a TMX file to the TM of an OmegaT project is to drop it in the "TM" folder of the project. Very nice :-)

I also received a screenshot of a search in Transit NXT from colleague Hans Lenting in the Netherlands. He searched the term "Inverkehrbringen" in the German/Dutch EU dataset from the DGT:

STAR Transit NXT concordance search

As you can see, there are many ways to display data from a concordance search. Which do you find easiest to deal with? Personally, I love the insertion features of the memoQ concordance, but for readability I think some of the other tools are better. And I do like to know how many results I can expect from my data, and I might even want to view them all.