memoQ Inside Out: Templates for Translators

In the summer of 2021, I was coaching a group of project managers and translators at a Portuguese service company, helping them to develop processes to overcome some rather complicated filtering and configuration challenges for recurring project types. It was clear to me that some of their difficulties could be overcome with the use of templates, but I had only recently begun to use these productively myself, and my attempts to communicate the subject matter overwhelmed the group for the most part, and examining the sample templates provided with memoQ installation simply made matters worse.

After several frustrating tutorial sessions and the failed acceptance of a template that I had developed which was tailored to a rather long wish list of automation that came out of our discussions, I decided that the only way to make the value of templates clear to this group of professionals was to wipe the slate clean, forget about all the myriad "wishes" and build a few simple templates which did just a few simple things. Starting from a new configuration with nothing at all. Surprisingly, less was indeed more, and the frustrated people began to "get it".

At almost the same time, my friend and colleague Marek Pawelec, a gifted teacher whom I often refer to quite objectively as "a consultant's consultant", mentioned that he was thinking of writing a book on memoQ templates, because he found that most people were unable to avoid the problems in the example templates provided with memoQ installation, nor were they able to work out most difficulties encountered when making their own templates. I could understand this very well, because the user interface in the configuration dialog for a template is not a stellar example of clarity, and it took me years to make proper sense of much of it. Disappointing, really, because I had been part of the chorus begging for something like templates for years, but when they were delivered, little about them made obvious sense to a dummy like me.

He sent me a chapter he had drafted, where I noted that he had adopted the same reductionist approach to getting started. A template with just a pick list or two for meta data to avoid the problem I've had for years of accidentally using different designations for the same clients, subjects, domains, etc. He had come to the same conclusion independently that the best approach to helping people use templates effectively is to start with one or two simple things they do all the time but often mess up.

That interesting draft chapter took time to evolve into a full-fledged guide of nearly 70 pages, with many practical, relatable examples of the kinds of challenges that individual translators (and many other service providers) often face in configuring translation projects. The topics cover the full range of options, from very simple tasks to extremely complex workflows involving pre-import scripts for preparing translation data and post-processing to recreate the original data formats. At every stage he offers clear examples and guidance on how to make things work in cases I have seen time and again in more than two decades of commercial translation work.

I had the pleasure to edit two drafts of this work as it neared completion. And pleasure really is the right word to use here. Marek has a very different explanatory style than mine, but one which I prefer for my own education. He manages very well the deep dive into messy details without drowning the reader in jargon and other unhelpful complexity. His guide gives valuable suggestions and information for every level of expertise. Much of the content can be understood and applied by unsophisticated new users of memoQ, but some of the details on content connectors and scripting can light a chandelier full of bulbs in the heads of alleged experts like myself.

Templates for Translators is an essential reference work for all memoQ users in my opinion, the sort of thing which ought to have been provided seven years or so ago when templates were introduced. Instead we got some imperfect examples which too often - especially in the hands of under-trained PMs at translation agencies - result in unworkable projects with 50+ translation memories and term bases grinding performance to a halt or a lot of mysterious and unwanted automation that does stupid shit like write unfinished and defective translations directly into one's master TM.

In addition to explaining clearly how to create your own helpful project shortcuts and automation from scratch, Marek included a great  chapter in which he describes in detail the templates provided for local projects, what works in them and what doesn't, and how to fix any issues so things work right for you. Even if you are a server user working primarily with online projects, there is a wealth of material in this version of the templates guide to help you work more effectively with templates for online projects. A second edition is planned for later this year, which will cover the additional features of templates for memoQ Server projects, but the real problems of most people working with those are covered in the basics presented in the "translators" edition, not in a lack of guidance on the many extra event "triggers" for online projects or other details. So if you are a server user, don't wait for the later edition, get this guide now, read every damned page and try to contain your exuberance as you finally understand a lot of stuff that has been confusing the Hell out of most of us for a long time. Then when the "server edition" of the guide is published, you'll be better prepared to absorb the increment of information it offers.

This book is now a valued part of my teaching "arsenal", and I recommend it without reservation to every memoQ user who aspires to work independently and create more effective processes for the special needs of various clients and subject matter. If you are a consultant or trainer at a serious level, it could well be considered malpractice to train without some of the information you'll find in Templates for Translators. But that's just what I see too often: discussions of templates glibly use the few defective examples installed with memoQ with little consideration given to how many translators should work in the real world with real, common client projects. This book is a welcome aid to move beyond all that and improve our satisfaction with the routine of translation in memoQ.

So for less than the cost of half an hour of consulting, the €30 invested here will save nearly anyone a large multiple of that and continue to pay dividends for a very long time, even if you understand and apply only 10% of the material presented. I charge far, far more to teach people less than that.

memoQ Inside Out: Templates for Translators is available for purchase at https://payhip.com/b/agrxM

Understanding and mastering tags... with memoQ!

Everything you need to know... in 36 pages!

Following up on the success of his excellent guide to machine translation functions in memoQ, Marek Pawelec (Twitter: @wasaty) has now published his definitive guide to tag mastery in that translation environment. In a mere 36 pages of clearly written, engaging text, he has distilled more than a decade of personal expertise and exchanges with other top professionals in language services technology into simple recipes and strategies for success with situations which are often so messy that even experienced project managers and tech support gurus wail in despair. Garbage like this, for example:

This screenshot is taken from the import of The PPTX from Hell, which a frustrated PM asked for help with just as I began reviewing the draft of Marek's book about a month ago. It contained nearly 32,000 superfluous spacing tags and was such a mess that it choked all the best professional macros usually deployed to deal with such things. Last year, I had developed my own way of dealing with these things that involved RTF bilingual exports and some search and replace magic in Microsoft Word, but when I shared it with Marek, he said "There's a better way", and indeed there is. On page 23 of this book. It was much cleaner and faster, and in a few minutes I was able to produce a clean slide set that was much easier to read and translate in the CAT tool. A page that costs 50 cents (of the €18 purchase price of the guide) earned me a 140x return and saved hours of working frustration for the translation team.

The book covers a lot more than just the esoterica of really messed up source files. It is a superb introduction to dealing with tags and markup for students at university and for those new to the translation profession and its endemic technologies, and it has sober, engaging guidance at every level for experienced professionals. I consider it an essential troubleshooting work for those in support roles of internal translation departments and, quite honestly, for my esteemed colleagues in First Level Support at memoQ. Marek is a superb trainer and an articulate teacher, with a humility that masks expertise which very often surprises, delights and informs those of us who are sometimes thought to be experts.

I am also particularly pleased that in the final version of his text he addresses the seldom discussed matter of how to factor markup into cost quotations and service charges for translations. memoQ is particularly well designed to address these problems, because weighting factors equivalent to word or character counts can be incorporated in file statistics, offering a simple, transparent and fair way of dealing with the frustrations that too often leave project managers screaming and crying in frustration shortly before... or after planned deliveries.

Whatever aspect of tags may interest you in translation technology and most particularly in memoQ, this book will give you the concise, clear answers you need to understand the best actions to take.

The PDF e-book is available for purchase here: https://payhip.com/b/tHUDx

A memoQ must-have: the definitive guide to MT use!

People who know me and my work know that I have a very low opinion of machine translation use in most language service situations. Even in the best scenarios, it offers no value to me in my routine work as a translator of scientific and intellectual property texts (patent filings and litigation mostly). So why am I totally excited about the new e-book by my friend and colleague Marek Pawelec? For several reasons.

• MT discussions bore the crap out of me. But when Marek asked me to review a pre-release copy, I was actually entertained by his clear, concise writing and the superb way he explained basic concepts of resource management in general that most memoQ users still don't master. I was shocked at how much fun I had reading about a subject I hate!
• He talks about more than just how to configure memoQ to use DeepL, Gargle Trashlate or some other MT engine. He details strategies and best practices for effective use that many people might not be aware of. He talks about how to circumvent prohibitions on MT use and how to catch people who do that. And more. I didn't learn something on every page, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say I did on every other one.
• Pseudo-translation using a special plug-in for the Pre-translation step is covered in wonderful detail. This technique has been very important to my work for nearly 20 years now. I use it to identify hard-coded interface strings in software I translate and to check and quote large documents that might have paragraphs or whole pages scanned and inserted as graphics that look like editable text - or charts whose text can be selected in the document but never show up on the memoQ working grid after import. Marek also discusses other uses of pseudo-translation I never thought of (layout checks, for example) which could have saved me a lot of grief over the years.

The only complaint I have about this book is that it's too cheap. The author teaches me more in its 36 pages than most can in 200 pages, and the learning is worth a Hell of a lot more to my business than fifty cents per page. Anyone else would probably have written much more and communicated far less of value, but that's a special gift that Marek has. Long ago, his talk at a memoQ Fest was the first time that regular expressions (regex) made any sense to me (as a casual programmer for about 40 years at the time I had approached the topic many times and mostly just found confusion). There aren't many people in this world who can take complex topics and make them seem simple and interesting to nearly anyone. Marek can. Richard Feynman could. I can't name many more on that list.

So... all I can really add is to tell you to go spend €18 here: https://payhip.com/b/tF62

The value you'll receive as a memoQ user at any level, even if you never use machine translation, is a large multiple of that price.

~

Update 2021-03-22
The Polish version of the book is now available at: https://payhip.com/b/RWcC

Update 2022-05-05

There are now editions available in Dutch and French:

Dutch: https://payhip.com/b/XaZSU

French: https://payhip.com/b/ltMwQ

memoQ Courses, Resources & Consulting at Translation Tribulations Tech

The new online school offers a variety of resources for new and experienced users of desktop and server editions

For many years now, I have advocated for better professional education for users of translation process support software at every level. I have tested curriculum delivery platforms, better ways of making information more accessible to those who need it, and more. In a limited scope, this has been a successful effort.

My greatest hope in these efforts was to encourage professional associations, technology providers and universities to do better by their clientele. I would judge the success there as mixed, at best. The wind of change discussed, for many of them, could fill one's sails... for a voyage off the edge of their flat Earth. Their reluctance to provide even minimal indexes for navigating copious video content is simply baffling, as an example.

Even with the current pandemic, I have seen little progress, though that may be as much for reasons such as those which kept me largely silent last year. It's hard to think about doing things better when you have to ask honestly which of the people you care for will be lost because of the refusal of so many national governments to do so.

In any case, I've always been one to advocate more personal involvement. If a person says they're hungry, give them food and listen to their stories. Cash may not be the answer. The courses, consulting and resources offered through my license of the Teachable platform will cover much of issues and assistance for which I have been an advocate in the translation sector for two decades. I also hope to involve other language service educators to offer their unique and valuable approaches in this venue. This is not to compete with any existing associations or companies, but rather to continue to show them how we can all work together to help users develop the competence and confidence so often needed and not found.

This, like all of us, is a work in progress. Check out Translation Tribulations Tech (here, or by clicking the school graphic at the top) and see if anything there provides missing elements for your professional toolkit.

Some of the initial offerings include:

• re-released help guides I've written for learning memoQ, including some material in Portuguese. The link provided here is for a bundle which includes books and courses.
• a course with quick tips for maximizing terminology leverage in memoQ
• consulting which provides quick, affordable glossary building support for projects
• a special memoQ ergonomics course to improve user experience and efficiency 

Additional courses, consulting and tools for

• regular expressions as an aid for translation of patterned information like currency expressions, dates, legal citations, coded information, etc.
• better source document segmentation in projects
• memoQ server basics for collaborating groups and small companies
• memoQ and other technology for legal translation

will be available soon.

This platform provides a long-needed mechanism for providing more detailed learning assistance than I have enjoyed with this blog and my YouTube channel, and future publication habits on my part will reflect that. I'm excited about many ideas for moving ahead in quick and quicker steps with memoQ and so many other resources that many of us depend on for professional relief and productivity.

My favorite library: Project Gutenberg

I've been fond of Project Gutenberg since I first became aware of it long, long ago. However, since acquiring an e-book reader I have become especially appreciative of this resource. Time and again it has had exactly what I'm looking for in classic literature, and the portable library I've built with it has been a fine companion in my travels and on long nights when I need good words to send me to sleep.

The recent discovery of Andrew Lang's fairy books has been quite an interesting thing, and when my Portuguese teacher recently recommended José Maria Eça de Queirós as a good author to familiarize myself with dialog, I was delighted to find many of his works available there in the original language.

Why not have a browse yourself if you haven't been to the site for a while, and if you get much out of it as I do, consider making a donation to support this good work.

A tale for Halloween, perfectly horrifying!

The night of terror began with a puzzling tweet in the afternoon:

 

I clicked the link and read the latest on Susan Bernofsky's Translationista blog,which gave an update on some of her recent work. An upcoming release of her translation of Kafka's The Metamorphosis was mentioned; that caught my eye since I had reread it in German very recently, and I find the variations in its translation quite interesting. I made a note to look at her version when it comes out in January.

Her blog post also mentioned the release last week of her translation of Die schwarze Spinne by a 19th century Swiss pastor writing under the name of Jeremias Gotthelf. The Black Spider? I grew up in a basement  bedroom well-stocked with black widow spiders, so the title had a certain creepy, nostalgic fascination for me. I was unaware of the high regard this novella was held in by so many, but the description of the tale on the blog and in the Wikipedia articles I read intrigued me, so I checked in at Amazon.de and bought a Kindle copy of the new translation. For good measure, I grabbed a copy of the original tale in German and treated myself to an atmospheric introduction of the story with the LibriVox audio recording by what sounds like an old guy with a Swiss German accent, like the grandfather who relates this moralistic tale of mortal terror.

The German audio recording was a bit fatiguing, gave me a claustrophobic feeling with its heavy diet of adjectives and too-familiar village custom. I began to feel a flashback the the Brandenburg hellhole I escaped from earlier this year and the suffocating customs of its denizens. With some desperation, I abandoned my plan to finish the entire work in German before starting Bernofsky's translation, so with a little twitch of guilt, I grabbed my bag and headed off to the cantinho for dinner in a quiet corner with my Kindle. Her translation started off with very much of a period feel, over-rich with its double serving of adjectives and long sentences that reminded me of my first encounters with John Stuart Mill in the tenth grade. I began to get the same claustrophobic feeling I had from the German reading, yes, I was back in Oberkrämer in Brandenburg and that's enough horror for one evening, thank you.

But gradually without realizing the art with which her well-crafted English drew me into the Swiss Calvinist spirit of the tale I was caught in a well-paced story that kept my interest and made me wonder if I would enjoy the original as much in some parts. And so I was drawn, unwitting, into the open jaws of Evil, which closed slowly about my torso and squeezed the breath out of me, leaving me gasping more than once and failing to notice that the liter of sangria had gone too fast before I ordered more to quench the burning horror unfolding. The walk home was too long, and the way could not be lit well enough.

At home I paused for a while, centered my mind by translating a deadly dull document with terms and conditions for purchase, went on a safer bug hunt in the latest beta version of memoQ and then, feeling that the house was much too dark, I screwed up my courage and lay down to sleep... well no, to read just a bit more, because those jaws were still closed around me, and the several dull pains about my sternum and spine made me wonder if my heart and bones would last to the end of the tale. Don't be so dramatic I thought, and I wasn't, really, the real drama was before my eyes, transfixing me in terror as wished the dogs would lie heavier on my legs and chest and distract me from the dark corners of the room I could not see because my eyes were on the shadows in the book and what waited so terribly in them.

This is a damned good translation. Maybe. Let me put it this way: I hope the original tale can live up to what I read tonight. But I'm not going to make the mistake of finding that out in the dark again.

Two years with an e-book reader

Nearly two years ago I acquired my first e-book reader, an Amazon Kindle like the one shown here. I had various thoughts of using it professionally but was in any case delighted with the fact that I could read text without eyestrain on it, even without my reading glasses. Some colleagues shared their experiences, and one was kind enough to mention Calibre, which I use periodically to convert file formats for better use in e-book readers or other media.

So what's the score after two years? On the professional side not so hot, because other distractions have prevented me from exploring all the possibilities of converting reference data for use on my reader. It's possible, but I'm still tweaking the technology to get exactly what I want with formatted, searchable RTF and HTML from terminology exports from my many CAT tool termbases. I could do that all along without much trouble using SDL Trados MultiTerm and various XSLT scripts, but I went down the rabbit hole of trying to make these solutions more accessible to colleagues who don't like a lot of technical fiddling, and though I think the problems are solved, I haven't had time to share most of the solutions or implement them on a large scale myself.

I do read literature related to the translation profession with some frequency. Found in Translation by Jost Zetzsche and Nataly Kelley gave me many pleasant, entertained hours with its Kindle version, attempts to read texts in PDF format by others have been less successful because of display issues, and the current version of my own book with memoQ tips is not a happy experience on a small black-and-white ebook reader. The latter has me thinking about what information might work in formats for e-book readers and smartphones, and the latter has been one of the motivations for my recent experimentation with short video tutorials on YouTube. Not only should we consider the current trends in media such as e-book readers, tablets, smartphones and whatnot for our own professional leaning and teaching needs, but also how our clients and prospects may use these media to create content which we might be asked to translate. This has already begun to happen with me in a small way, and those projects were possible only because of things I learned in my teaching experiments shortly before.

I also copy web pages into text or HTML files "to go" when I want to read up on a subject in the park while my dogs play or in a local café somewhere. My reader has a web browser, but many sites are difficult to view in a way that is friendly to a smaller screen. It's easier to grab what I want in separate files and organize these into a "collection" I can refer to easily later.

I never have done any proofreading or review with my Kindle, though I have used texts on it to translate manually (in a separate notebook) on occasion. However, that's not really compatible with most of the texts I work on.

What I have done most with my e-book reader is carry a growing library of world literature with me, familiar and unfamiliar old works and some new. I still hear some people talk about how they could not imagine reading without the heft of the book and the feel of the paper pages turned by their fingers. I'm just as caught up in the sensuality of a dusty old library as any other obsessive bibliophile, but the heft and feel don't mean much when accumulated nerve damage means that the book is more a source of pain than pleasure after ten minutes in your hands, and my once excellent eyesight has now decided that its term is served and I can find my own way with small type and lousy lighting conditions: there, the e-book reader is gift of great value.

Most important to me, however, are the words. The finest binding, gold-edged pages and elegant type mean nothing if the words mean nothing. Words of beauty and power are worth straining to read in weathered stone inscriptions, on crumbled clay tablets written before the founding of Rome or on crumbling acid-paper pages in books forgotten in an attic. How much better then to have these same words in a legible format on your reader in minutes after a short search in an online database and a quick download or a purchase and transfer.

The Velveteen Rabbit had the same nursery magic on the Kindle in the cantinho last night as it would on the delicate old pages of the original edition, but I didn't have to worry about spilling my sangria on it. In the two years since I received my Kindle I have re-read many books that were lost as my library of thousands was slowly dispersed in my many relocations. Hundreds of new books from classic literature in two languages have come to me, go with me in my small, black volume with its Cloud-based backup, and this library will likely not be lost again wherever I go and no matter how lightly I travel. 

Kilgray offers 101% Support & a free book in February!

During the month of February, Kilgray has been running a special promotion featuring 101% support (i.e. the usual above and beyond the call of duty assistance), which this time also includes a free copy of my memoQ 6 in Quick Steps guide.

If you already own a copy, you can share that special promotional gift with a friend in need as many others have done already with full-priced copies.

I would like to thank Kilgray and my readers for all the kind support of my methods research  and efforts to find better ways for all of us to work together with the often complex software intended to support our efforts. It has been a pleasure and an honor to assist so many of you in recent years.

This special promotion ends on Thursday; if you have recently renewed your support contract it will merely add another 12 months to your remaining term of free support and upgrades.

Clich HERE to extend your Kilgray memoQ Support and Upgrade contract and receive your free code to get the memoQ 6 in Quick Steps book at no cost.

Damn the stinking "captcha" technology

This afternoon I tried to post the following note on my Facebook page:

Recently, I blogged about my new Kindle (http://goo.gl/JJF0q) and some of the personal and professional possibilities I saw for it. Since then, various friends and colleagues have raised the "compatibility" and monopoly issues for published eBook formats. I have found that Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) is an excellent way to overcome this by easily converting between all formats and managing your electronic library. It also does great news compilations.

After a few dozen failures at reading and retyping things like

 

I had to conclude that the idiots programming for Facebook must never have considered the possibility of two links in one comment. In any case, I resent being asked to do security checks on my own page. Even the "audio captcha" attempts were failures.

This form of verification technology is extremely intrusive and makes me less concerned with security, not more. Really, there must be a better way.

Oh, yes... Calibre is an excellent tool for eBook management and seems to overcome many of the barriers which concern some colleagues and friends. And there's nothing Amazon can do about it.

Kindled spirits

It was during discussions in the breaks at the recent TM Europe conference in Warsaw that I began to think the previously unthinkable. Later, as the son of a conference organizer showed me his Amazon Kindle, shortly before my dog knocked it into a pond and stole the boy's lunch, and others present told me how well the device worked for them, I decided to go against my grain and get the gadget to celebrate the old GDR's Day of the Republic.

I'm glad I did. I used to be quite a gadget freak in my younger days, an early adopter of generations of electronic organizers before the Sharp Wizard was a twinkle in a corporate marketer's eye. But the volumes of electronic junk to be disposed of in my various moves, as well as the grinding pace of 'e-progress', has made me deeply skeptical of the value of most technology.

The Kindle has made reading easy again for me. I was very surprised to find that no one was deluded in telling me that the screen contrast and reflectivity are much like paper, and with my little leather case and its integrated reading light, I can even enjoy a quiet read in the dark of night up in my loft. I can adjust the size of the fonts to read comfortably with or without my glasses. On my most recent excursion to escape intrusive neighbors and veterinary horrors to get a bit of recuperative quiet and perhaps accomplish some work, I carried a small library of dozens of classic literary works, some familiar, some not, my favorite newspapers, dictionaries, a few blogs and a vampire novel all in my half-pound Kindle, and I enjoyed more relaxed reading than I have in the past six months. It's a godsend.

I've found a few freeware tools for converting documents to readable formats for the Kindle, and I plan to convert some of my important translation glossaries for reference purposes. I have a notion that this little piece of technology might assist me in taking more of certain kinds of translation work off the technology grid to savor it like a fine wine in a more traditionally influenced but integrated working mode. I'm quite a late adopter in this case; when I ask, it seems that quite a few translating colleagues have such devices. But do they use them in some way professionally? Do you?