memoQ LiveDocs: What Good Is It, Anyway? (webinar, 23 April 2019)

I'll be presenting a free webinar on the uses, advantages, and quirks of memoQ's often underestimated and misunderstood LiveDocs module: everything you always needed to know about its features and corpora but never thought to ask.

When? On 23 April 2019 at 3:00 PM Lisbon time (4:00 PM Central European Time, 7:00 AM Pacific Standard Time); webinar attendance is free, but advance registration is required. The URL to register is:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/d83de9818dce3cf87c24e00bf0acd2b8 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation e-mail containing information about joining the presentation.

Particular questions regarding the subject matter or challenges you face with it are welcome in advance via e-mail, LinkedIn or other social media contact. I'll try to incorporate these in the presentation.

Accessing full bilingual document context in an alignment in LiveDocs from the memoQ Concordance

Bilingual Excel to LiveDocs corpora: video

A bit over three years ago, I published a blog post describing a simple way to move EUR-Lex data into a memoQ LiveDocs corpus so that the content can be used for matching and concordance work in translation and editing. The particular advantage of a LiveDocs corpus versus a translation memory is that the latter does not allow users to read the document context for concordance hits.

A key step in the import process is to bring the bilingual content in an Excel file into a memoQ project as a "translation document" and then send that content to LiveDocs from the translation files list. Direct import to a LiveDocs corpus of bilingual content using the multilingual delimited text import filter is still not possible despite years of asking the development team for memoQ to implement this.

This is irritating, though in the case of a EUR-Lex alignment which may be slightly out of sync and need fixing, it is perhaps all for the best. And in some other situations, where the content may be incomplete and require filtering (in a View) before sending it to the corpus, it also makes sense to bring the file in as a translation document first to use the many tools available for selecting and modifying content. However, in many situations, it's simply a nuisance that the files cannot be sent directly to a LiveDocs corpus.

In any case, I've now done a short (silent) video to make the steps involved in this import process a little clearer:

All-round Translator Terminology Workshop Pre-event Webinar

As previously announced, on June 30th in Amsterdam, the All-round Translator (ART) is offering the workshop "Coming to Terms: Mining & Management" covering a range of practical topics for applied corpus linguistics, optimizing terminology management and efficient sharing of terms in teams. This technical workshop will cover a range of tools and techniques as described on the ART event page.

A month before the Amsterdam workshop I will be presenting a free webinar offering an overview of some of the material planned for June as well as related topics with a particular focus on one of the tools I use most - memoQ - with highlights of recent improvements in its terminology features with memoQ versions 8.3 and 8.4.

This webinar is open to anyone interested regardless of whether or not they plan to attend the June workshop. The talk will use Zoom, which I adopted for remote teaching of corporate clients and others because of its greater versatility and superior recording facilities compared to my old favorite, TeamViewer. (Technically it's also a "meeting", not a "webinar" in Zoom-speak, but that's a distinction without a difference for people who don't feel up to 50 simultaneous speakers and 10,000 viewers.) The platform is free for participants to use, and if I'm not mistaken, a web browser can also be used, though interaction is more limited via that medium. (Don't ask me how, I am still gathering experience with this tool and its myriad options.)

The presentation (approximately one hour, starting at 4 pm Central European Time = 3 pm Lisbon time on May 24th) is free, but registration is required: the link for that is here.

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.

NOW is not the National Organization of Words...

... but with over 4 billion of them, that interpretation of the News on the Web corpus at Brigham Young University would be plausible. BYU is known for its high quality research corpora available to the public. The news corpus grows by about 10,000 articles each day, and its content can be searched online or downloaded.

The results are displayed in a highlighted keyword in context (KWIC) hit list with the source publications indicated in the "CONTEXT" column:

As a legal translator, I find the BYU corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions more useful. It displays results in a similar manner:

It is difficult or impossible to configure a direct search in these corpora using memoQ Web Search, IntelliWebSearch or similar integrated web search features in translation environments. However, these tools can be used as a shortcut to open the URL, and the search string can be applied once the site has been accessed. Since I perform searches like this to study context infrequently, a standalone shortcut with IWS serves me best; if I were using this to study usage in a language I don't master very well, like Portuguese (yes there is a Portuguese corpus at BYU - actually, two of them, one historical), then I might include the URL in a set of sites which open every time I invoke memoQ Web Search or a larger set of terminology-related sites in an IntelliWebSearch group.

One great benefit of using such corpora as a language learner, is that context and collocations (words that occur together with a particular word or phrase) can be studied easily, better than with dictionaries, enabling one to sound a bit less like an idiot in a second, third, fourth or fifth language. Or for many perhaps, even their first language :-)

Translation alignment: the memoQ advantage

The basic features for aligning translated texts in memoQ are straightforward and can be learned easily from Kilgray documentation such as the guides or memoQ Help. However, there are three aspects of alignment in memoQ which I think are worth particular attention and which distinguish it in important ways from alignments performed with other translation environment tools or aligners.

Aligning the content of two folders with source and target documents; automatic pairing by name

The first is memoQ’s ability to determine alignment pairs automatically based on the similarity of names. This has the advantage, for example, that large numbers of files can be aligned automatically, with the source and target documents matched based upon the filenames. This can be done with individual files or with entire folders with perhaps hundreds of files. Thus if source files are contained in one folder and the translated files in the target language are in a different folder and the source and target file names are similar, the alignment process for a great number of files can be set up and run in a matter of minutes. Note in the example screenshot above that different file types may be aligned with each other.

The second important difference with alignment in memoQ is that it is really not necessary to feed the aligned content to a translation memory. memoQ LiveDocs alignments essentially function as a translation memory in the LiveDocs corpus, with one important difference: by right-clicking matches in the translation results pane or a concordance hit list, the aligned document can be opened directly and the full context of the content match can be read. A match or concordance hit found in a traditional translation memory is an isolated segment, divorced from its original context, which can be critical to understanding that translated segment. LiveDocs overcomes this problem.

A third advantage of alignment in memoQ is that, unlike environments in which aligned content can only be used after it is fed to a translation memory, a great deal of time can be saved by not “improving” the alignment unless its content has been determined to be relevant to a new source text for translation. If an analysis shows that there are significant matches to be found in a crude/bulk alignment, the specific relevant alignments can be determined and the contents of these finalized while leaving irrelevant aligned documents in an unimproved state. Should these unimproved alignments in fact contain relevant vocabulary for concordance searches, and if a concordance hit from them appears to be misaligned, opening the document via the context menu usually reveals the desired target text in a nearby segment.

Concordance lookup in memoQ with direct access to an aligned document in a LiveDocs corpus

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

CAT tools for weapons license study

More than a decade ago I found a very useful book on practical corpus linguistics, which has had perhaps the greatest impact of any single thing on the way I approach terminology. Among other things, it discusses how to create special text collections for particular subjects and then mine these for frequently used expressions in those domains. It has become a standard recommendation in my talks at professional conferences and universities as well as in private consultations for terminology.

Slide from my recent talk at the Buenos Aires University Facultad de Derecho

In the last two weeks I had an opportunity to test my recommendations in a little different way than the one in which I usually apply them. Typically I use subject-specific corpora in English (my native language) to study the "authentic" voice of the expert in a domain that may be related to my own technical specialties but which differs in its use of language in significant ways. This time I used it and other techniques to study subject matter I master reasonably well (the features, use and safety aspects of firearms for hunting) with the aim of acquiring vocabulary and an idea of what to expect for a weapons qualification test in Portugal, where I have lived for several years but have not yet achieved satisfactory competence in the language for my daily routine.

It all started two weeks ago when I attended an all-day course on Portugal's firearm and other weapon laws in Portalegre. Seven and a half solid hours of lecture left me utterly fatigued at the end of the day, but it was an interesting one in which I had a lot of aha! moments as I saw a lot of concepts presented in Portuguese which I knew well in German and English. Most of the time I looked up words I saw in the slides or in the course textbook prepared by the PSP and made pencil notes on vocabulary in my book.

Twelve days afterward I was scheduled to take a written text, and in the unlikely event that I passed it, I was supposed to be subject to a practical examination on the safe use of hunting firearms are related matters.

Years ago when I studied for a hunting license in Germany I had hundreds of hours of theoretical and practical instruction in a nine-month course concurrent with a one-year understudy with an experienced hunter. Participants in a German hunting course typically read dozens of supplemental books and study thousands of sample questions for the exam.

The pickings are a little slimmer in Portugal.

There are no study guides in Portuguese or any other language which help to prepare for the weapons tests that I am aware of except the slim book prepared by the police.

There are, however, a number of online forums where people talk about their experiences in the required courses and on the tests. Sometimes there are sample questions reproduced with varying degrees of accuracy, and there is a lot of talk about things which people found particularly challenging.

So I copied and pasted these discussions into text files and loaded them into a memoQ project for Portuguese to English translation. The corpus was not particularly large (about 4000 words altogether), so the number of candidates found in a statistical survey was limited, but still useful to someone with my limited vocabulary. I then proceeded to translate about half of the corpus into English, manually selecting less frequent but quite important terms and making notes on perplexing bits of grammar or tricks hidden in the question examples.

A glossary in progress as I study for my Portuguese weapons license

The glossary also contained some common vocabulary that one might legitimately argue does not belong in a specialist glossary, but since these were common words likely to occur in the exam and I did not know them, it was entirely appropriate to include them.

Other resources on the subject are scarce; I did find a World War II vintage military dictionary for Portuguese and English which can easily be made into a searchable PDF using ABBYY Finereader or other tools but not much else.

Any CAT tool would have worked equally well for my learning objectives - the free tools AntConc and OmegaT are in no way inferior to what memoQ offered me.

On the day of the test, I was allowed to bring a Portuguese-to-English dictionary and a printout of my personal glossary. However, the translation work that I did in the course of building the glossary had imprinted the relevant vocabulary rather well on my mind, so I hardly consulted either. I was tired (having hardly slept the night before) and nervous (so that I mixed up the renewal intervals for driver's licenses and hunting licenses), and I just didn't have the stamina to pick apart some particularly long, obtuse sentences), but in the end I passed with a score of 90% correct. That wouldn't win me any kudos with a translation customer, but it allowed me to go on to the next phase.

Practical shooting test at the police firing range

In the day of lectures, I dared to ask only one question, and I garbled it so badly that the instructor really didn't understand, so I was not looking forward to the oral part of the exam. But much to my surprise, I understood all the instructions on exam day, and I was even able to joke with the policeman conducting the shooting test. In the oral examination in which I had to identify various weapons and ammunition types and explain their use and legal status, and in the final part where I went on a "hunt" with a police commissioner to demonstrate that I could handle a shotgun correctly under field conditions and respond appropriately to a police check, I had no difficulties at all except remembering the Portuguese word for "trigger lock". All the terms I had drilled for passive identification in the written exam had unexpectedly become active vocabulary, and I was able to hold my own in all the spoken interactions - not a usual experience in my daily routine.

The use of the same professional tools and techniques that I rely on for my daily work proved far better than expected as learning aids for my examination and in a much greater scope than I expected. I am confident that a similar application could be helpful in other areas where I am not very competent in my understanding and active use of Portuguese.

If it works for me, it is reasonable to assume that others who must cope with challenges of a test or interactions of some kind in a foreign language might also benefit from learning with a translator's working tools.

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.

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.

Words in music: what vocabulary and languages tell us about leading musicians

Corpus linguistics has been a passion of mine since an article published by three colleagues about a decade ago showed me the possibilities of "mining" collections of text in a subject area to determine its critical vocabulary, what sorts of words belong together in specialist language, etc. The public webinar offered tomorrow by the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) is a new take on this familiar subject, exploring the use of vocabulary by popular musicians and relating these to things like mastery of multiple languages or commercial success. A familiar subject, sort of, but nonetheless something completely different.

It is this kind of reimagination of things we "already" know which can open our minds to knew possibilities of many kinds which are available now, but which nobody expects and therefore nobody sees. So I will enjoy hearing what Mr. Jewalikar has to say at 3 pm UTC tomorrow, October 10th and look forward to the new ideas this may stir up in my head. And if you would like to join us in the presentation, you can register by sending a short e-mail request to info.request@iapti.org; there is no charge to participate.

This event is the sort of professional information with fresh perspectives and a clear focus on the needs and interests of individual professionals - not the linguistic sausagemakers and exploiters - that I have come to expect from this organization. While others sell out to the commercial interests of the bulk market bog to turn language professionals and aspiring professionals into "input" for their post-edited machine sausage of words, IAPTI and a very few other groups keep the focus on stimulating content of real professional worth.

Medienbruch.

For years now, I've watched the German term Medienbruch and derivatives like medienbruchfrei seep their way into various, well, media. And the results are, by and large, linguistically discontinuous and/or broken :-)

The screenshot above shows a sampling from the "feast" of bilingual web alignment offered by Linguee, one which those who are familiar with the service realize must be enjoyed with some care to avoid the odd bits of broken glass and strychnine that may be found in its sometimes machine-translated, sometimes Bulgarian-inspired English. Some of the more thoughtful marketers in the translation profession may use the site as a source to research firms desperately in need of better translators rather than merely pan its buckets full of linguistic swamp sediment in desperation to find the few flakes of gold which might have settled there. Not to say that Linguee is not a valuable working tool, but its use requires a great deal of professional judgment in most cases and often further research is one is on unfamiliar ground. It is a tool, and a fool with a tool remains a fool. Like the often criticized Wikipedia, it is often a good starting point but seldom the journey's end.

Why not just Google "media discontinuity", for example, and see how often the particular phrase occurs? Uh huh. You got 8,100 results, did you? Sounds pretty authoritative, right? Look again at where the sources are. Ah, you say, Kevin ought to have used Google's advanced search options to narrow it down. Have a look at the garbage on the first page again, and tell me with a straight face that better sources will somehow rise to the top of that like tasty cream.

At this point, a colleague less overcaffeinated might point out that I'm going about this all wrong and that I might do better searching some of the monolingual corpora available free online, such as the British National Corpus (which is great for making Americans believe that Brits really do say "at the weekend" most of the time or the BYU Corpus of Global Web-based English, which allows those who master the arcana of its search rules to compare Indian weekends with those in Canada or Kenya. But these text collections, for all their value for a general understanding of common language use, are seldom satisfying for specialized use and neologisms.

A cooler head might point out the terrible bias in my approaches so far and encourage me to consider the context in which this word has occurred while percolating into my awareness in recent years. Hm. Well, usually when some German public authority decides to bring its information management practices up to 20th century standards. Since they usually follow well behind practice in English-speaking countries for this sort of things (I still see German government texts that put "E-Mail" in quotes as if it were something new and exotic), it's a good bet that a corpus of texts from similar institutions in the UK or US might reveal some interesting and useful and even natively acceptable possibilities. (That's how I learned years ago that a usual and proper term in English for Vieraugenprinzip is "dual review", not the "four-eyes principle" that some so happily click their heels to. In the elementary schools I attended, that was the principle based on which bullies punched my friends with glasses in the face.)

Juliette Scott, who writes a rather nice blog mostly concerned with legal translation issues, has done some nice (NIFTY) work as part of her doctoral thesis using monolingual corpora to study patterns of use in target languages and suggest useful strategies for building collections of specialized text. Good, perhaps even obvious stuff which applies to any domain I can think of, though the practice of building focused corpora from carefully selected sources is still far too rare among those of us who use the label "translator" or "language professional". I certainly need to do that more often.

Ah, but if I have just a monolingual corpus to understand proper use of terms in the target language, how will I know what the right translation is? That's a hard one. One that perhaps I can't answer. At least not without the use of a BAT* tool. But if that's too hard, I know just the place to go: proZ.com, where "certified pros" compete for points on KudoZ and offer mutual reinforcement and enlightenment to those who run rapidly on their wheels to keep pace with changing expectations of quality.

I could of course take one of the accepted "solutions" from Linguee and feed the same sort of self-recycling GIGO loop that Google now admits to be an ever-growing part of its searched wisdom.

So what is your solution to the Medienbruch? Or are you part of the problem?