10 Tips to Term Base Mastery in memoQ! (online course)

Note: the pilot phase for this training course has passed, free enrollment has been closed, and the content is being revised and expanded for re-release soon... available courses can be seen at my online teaching site: https://transtrib-tech.teachable.com/

In the past few years I have done a number of long webinars in English and German to help translators and those involved in translation processes using the memoQ environment work more effectively with terminology. These are available on my YouTube channel (subscribe!), and I think all of them have extensive hotlinked indexes to enable viewers to skip to exactly the parts that are relevant to them. A playlist of the terminology tutorial videos in English is available here.

I've also written quite a few blog posts - big and small - teaching various aspects of terminology handling for translation with or without memoQ. These can be found with the search function on the left side of this blog or using the rather sumptuous keyword list.

But sometimes just a few little things can get you rather far, rather quickly toward the goal of using terminology more effectively in memoQ, and it isn't always easy to find those tidbits in the hours of video or the mass of blog posts (now approaching 1000). So I'm trying a new teaching format, inspired in part by my old memoQuickie blog posts and past tutorial books. I have created a free course using the Teachable platform, which I find easier to use than Moodle (I have a server on my domain that I use for mentoring projects), Udemy and other tools I've looked at over the years.

This new course - "memoQuickies: On Better Terms with memoQ! 10 Tips toward Term Base Mastery" - is currently designed to give you one tip on using memoQ term bases or related functions each day for 10 days. Much of the content is currently shared as an e-mail message, but all the released content can be viewed in the online course at any time, and some tips may have additional information or resources, such as videos or relevant links, practice files, quality assurance profiles or custom keyboard settings you can import to your memoQ installation.

These are the tips (in sequence) that are part of this first course version:

1. Setting Default Term Bases for New Terms
2. Importing and Exporting Terms in Microsoft Excel Files
3. Getting a Grip on Term Entry Properties in memoQ
4. "Fixing" Term Base Default Properties
5. Changing the Properties of Many Term Entries in a Term Base
6. Sharing and Updating Term Bases with Google Sheets
7. Sending New Terms to Only a Specific Ranked Term Base
8. Succeeding with Term QA
9. Fixing Terminology in a Translation Memory
10. Mining Words with memoQ

There is also a summary webinar recorded to go over the 10 tips and provide additional information.

I have a number of courses which have been developed (and may or may not be publicly visible depending on when you read this) and others under development in which I try to tie together the many learning resources available for various professional translation technology subjects, because I think this approach may offer the most flexibility and likelihood of success in communicating necessary skills and knowledge to an audience wider than I can serve with the hours available for consulting and training in my often too busy days.

I would also like to thank the professional colleagues and clients who have provided so much (often unsolicited) support to enable me to focus more on helping translators, other translation project participants and translation consumers work more effectively and reduce the frustrations too often experienced with technology.

memoQ filter for MS Outlook e-mail

A few days ago I was preparing screenshots in memoQ for lecture slides. As I tried to select a PDF file to import, the defective trackpad on my laptop caused a file farther down in the list to be selected, and I got a surprise. Not believing my eyes, I tried again and saw that, yes, what I saw was indeed possible...

... saved Microsoft Outlook MSG files (e-mail) are imported to memoQ with all their graphics and attachments! Kilgray created a filter some time ago and simply forgot to document its existence publicly. As of the current versions of memoQ you won't see this in the documentation or the filter lists of the interface, but memoQ can "see" MSG files, and if they are selected, this hidden filter will appear in the import dialog.

And this also works for LiveDocs.

At the time of this discovery, I was working on a little job for a friend's agency, and her project manager had sent me a list of abbreviations in an e-mail. I was too lazy to make the entries in my termbase, so I simply imported the mail to the LiveDocs corpus I maintain for her shop so that it would show up in concordance searches:

So when people tell you memoQ is good, don't believe them. It's actually better than that, but the truth is a well-kept secret :-)

OTM: starting and completing projects from e-mail

There are a number of instructional videos put together by LSP.net which show the broad range of features in the Online Project Manager (OTM). These are great if you want an overview of the environment's many features from the perspectives of a project manager, end client and service provider (such as a translator), but with all the possibilities presented, it's easy to get overwhelmed, and the basic simplicity of a typical project can be overlooked. I made the video tutorial below to show the workflow I usually go through for simple projects.

An e-mail arrives from a customer with an attached file to translate and a request for a delivery date. I produce a quotation, send it, wait for the order (or not if it's already given in the initial e-mail), then translate and deliver the job, invoice it and close the project. When I'm not making a video of the steps, they typically take me less than five minutes, but here you can see it all in "slow motion". More details on this process are found in my other posts on this blog about OTM.



  

This tutorial was recorded with the Google Chrome browser and the Open Source recording tool CamStudio. Try it in full-screen mode using the icon at the lower right of the playing window.

Free fax to e-mail service

While browsing the blogs of various colleagues, I ran into an interesting note from Céline Graciet mentioning her use of a free fax to e-mail service as part of a planned move to the UK. I followed the link out of curiosity and decided to give it a try. Signing up took a few minutes, then I was give a local telephone number to use for receiving faxes. However, the web page that communicated this information didn't say where it was local. My best guess was somewhere in the UK, so I tried faxing from my real landline fax number, adding the +44 prefix to the number from the web page.

It worked. In just a few minutes I could see TIFF files for the faxes on the account area on the web site. A few minutes later I received copies of the faxes as e-mail attachments.

I haven't looked into the security issues with the site yet; I'll probably be appalled when I do. Maybe not. It's an interesting application and one for which I can see some integration possibilities with other applications I use, such as LSP.net's Online Translation Manager. I can see this being useful when I'm travelling or to save me the trouble of re-scanning faxes for OCR purposes. I used to use a fax modem many years ago for similar reasons, but faxes have become such a rare thing in my business over the past decade that I haven't bothered about such solutions in a long time.