Substack in #xl8 & #l10n

 As related in my last post, I've been testing the Substack platform as an alternative means for distributing and managing the kind of information I've published for many years now on this blog, professional sites and social media, course authoring platforms, YouTube, Xitter, Mastodon and probably a few other channels I've forgotten. And I'm quite surprised to find any expectations I had to be exceeded at this point. On the whole I can do a better job of creating accessible tutorials and other reference information there, and there is far less effort involved with maintenance, style sheet fiddling and whatnot.

All my various projects there can be found here on my profile page.

Currently, these are the

• Translation Tribulations Substack, a general blog for the language services sector and the
• memoQuickies Substack, with content related to the memoQ TMS platform in one way or another.

Other plans include The Diary and Letters of Charles Berry Senior, a US Civil War veteran from Yorkshire, England, who participated in Sherman's march to the sea and who is my great-great grandfather. Some of his records exist in very deteriorated form in a university archive in the United States and can be found online, but much is missing, and I am in possession of the complete transcript prepared by one of the man's daughters more than 100 years ago when the family feared the information would be lost to the forces of material decay. I'll be preparing clean text from her handwritten record (the typescript done by a cousin about 50 years ago was lost and probably contains more errors) and probably an audio reading. There's some hard stuff there, as well as some surprises and interesting lessons in how our world has changed in the past 160 years.

And at some point I'll probably share some of my culinary obsessions as well as what life was like traveling on the other side of the Iron Curtain sans papers or in dingy Paris bookshops and refugee hotels 40 years ago and more.

This past week, I've done a big blitz on memoQ LiveDocs, for which there are still another dozen or so drafts to be finished, and a lot of stuff from my CAT tools resource online class from last year should be appearing there in updated form in due course. There isn't a lot of translation-related activity that I've found on Substack, at least not for the technical side of things, but a lot of historians and authors I follow are very present there, so I'm hoping the better half of my translation technologist friends will join the Substack party at some point.

Most of my new text, video and teaching content will appear on those Substack channels. It's simply far easier to manage, and there you won't have the same RSS headaches you might have here. And the damned editor of Google Blogger just keeps accumulating bugs I don't have to cope with in Substack. And don't get me started on bloody Wordpress!

I hope to see you in my Substack channels soon! I think there will be something like a memoQ QA course there before the summer is over....

A change of platform?

 

As some readers of this blog may already know, recently I have begun to use the Substack platform for some of my writing. But why?

This blog and my YouTube channel have become, over the course of about 16 years now, leading sources of information for a variety of technology topics related to translation and localization, not all of them having to do with memoQ. As well as a venue for other personal and professional expression. I've also got a presence on a few e-learning platforms and sporadic participation in several microblogging platforms.

The online professional landscape for language services has evolved so much in the past two decades that it is often rather difficult to determine the best messaging venues for educational content for working professionals, Quersteiger aspirants and students. To a large and unfortunate extent, a lot of the relevant discussions take place on commercial platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, where the content is quickly buried in the infamous, often preposterous noise of those spaces. There is also the problem of curation, which was one of the reasons this blog was founded back in 2008 after Proz dot comjob lost its value as a professional space with the imposition of extreme censorship and expulsion of its most experienced and helpful community members, many of them former moderators.

Because of this fragmentation of the translation information space, I often find myself spending too much time digging up old (free) information for people with limited search skills or motivation, and in doing so I recognize time and again how much user interfaces for my professional tools have changed over the years, which also poses navigation problems for those who wish to apply the lessons. Menus are now ribbons, many functions have been renamed or moved to other places in the application, or new features have made some of the old solutions less relevant except for those still using very old software (and there are still many of these, which is why I am careful about "updates").

And several times in the past year, I've been contacted by blog readers who had difficulties getting an RSS feed for this blog, which is apparently a rather oldtimey thing now.

So... in the past few years, I noticed that several authors whom I follow use the Substack platform (the historians Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson, also professor Marco Neves at Universidade Nova de Lisboa FCSH, whom I think of as a "Portuguese John McWhorter", and John McWhorter himself). A brief investigation on my part revealed several advantages to this, including fairly painless ways to organize a mix of free and paid content. So I decided to experiment.

After a month now, I would say I am largely pleased as a user of the website and iPhone app. I am still learning the best practices for using insertable buttons and unexpected features like "Notes" and "Threads", probably making more mistakes than I realize, but this does appear to be a good platform for tying together the rather scattered educational content I've been producing for more than two decades now and adding updates to these summaries. And perhaps the venue will prove more useful for discussions, more so than social media where they are quickly buried in platform noise.

I'm not abandoning this blog nor YouTube. There will still be content posted on both which may never appear in any form on the Translation Tribulations Substack. But that's probably the best place to look for now if you need current overviews of language service technology topics or you want a peek at some of my course content tests or textbook-related projects. I may post occasional pointers here on the blog to content on Substack, but the (free) subscription mechanism there is really a much better way (than RSS here, for example) to keep up to date.

So won't you join me?

Last chance: memoQ project management. And the translator training course.

Note: This post has been updated to reflect a planning change. The five-day trainer training course has been replaced with a two-day (eight hour) course for translators to master key memoQ features.

 

The CETAPS institute at Universidade Nova de Lisboa FCSH has planned a week-long (20-hour) memoQ online project management training course and a two day (8-hour) course on memoQ mastery for translators in the latter part of January 2024 which might be of interest. 

The first course (from January 22nd to 26th) will be for those in project management roles or similar functions using memoQ TMS servers; it will begin with a day of intense review and instructional guidance for memoQ basics in online projects from a translator and reviewer perspective and proceed from there to topics such as online project creation and administration, rights and resource management, template use, optimal preparation workflows, mid-project updates and more as well as participant-specific issues. The cost is €480.

The second course (from January 29th to 30th) is aimed at translators and reviewers, who want to better understand and handle project workflows for both their own projects and agency-created ones. This will include resource customization, project management, project templates, file import filters, and project navigation, including some regular expressions magic. The cost is €90.

Further information on the course and an enrollment form can be found HERE. The registration period has been extended and enrollments will be accepted through January 5th. Questions regarding the program and enrollment can be directed to Prof. Marco Neves (e-mail: mfneves@fcsh.unl.pt).

Certificates will be issued to all participants completing the courses. Course availability is subject to sufficient enrollment.

memoQ "Auto-translation Roundup": 14 September 2023 at 15:00 CET

 

This week's public lecture for the "memoQuickies Resource Camp" on Thursday, September 14, 2023, at 3:00 p.m. Central European Time (2:00 p.m. Lisbon time) will be a summary of currently available auto-translation rules on the course pages which are open to everyone (enrolled or not) and those restricted to registered participants. This is all about getting to work now with stuff that is ready to go, and how to adapt that stuff for clients with different requirements.

So if you want to get right  down to productive work using available memoQ auto-translation rulesets in translation, review and quality assurance without wasting time on learning bloody regex, this is for you.

Be there or be square....

A recording of the talk will be available to all registered course participants afterward.

Last week's lecture, "Auto-translation Rules for Everyone", is available here.

Oh, and next week at the same time we'll be talking about the memoQ Regex Assistant and all the cool libraries available for QA, filtering, find & replace and other tasks.....

memoQ Regex Assistant workshops re-run

The series of three workshops on the use of regex resources in memoQ, with a particular emphasis on the integrated Regex Assistant library, has been updated and will be offered again on March 9, 16 and 23 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 Lisbon time (4:00 pm to 5:30 pm CET, 10:00 am-11:30 am EST).

You can register here to attend any or all of the three sessions:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpde-sqTkvGtCdMsrBl825tFrpDQ98FkAI

This is an evolving course, with the content continuously adapted in response to new questions, workflow challenges and process research as well as interoperability studies with other tools. Participants in the last series asked quite a number of interesting things during and after the talks, and their questions provided excellent material for new examples and approaches, and I hope for the same experience in this round.

The memoQ Regex Assistant is a unique library tool introduced in its current form in memoQ version 9.9. The little bit of public discussion there has been about this tool is quite misleading. Contrary to the "pitch" from memoQ employees and nerdy fans in the user base, this isn't really a tool for learning regular expressions. There are much better means for doing that. And I have strong personal objections to the idiotic statements I hear so often that "everyone should learn some regex". What utter nonsense.

What everyone should do is take advantage of the power regular expressions offer to simplify time-consuming tasks of translation, review, quality assurance and more to ensure accuracy and consistency in language resources and translations. The Regex Assistant helps with this by providing a platform where useful "expressions" can be collected and organized with readable names, labels and descriptions in any language. These libraries can be sorted, exchange with other users and applied for filtering, find and replace operations, QA checks, segmentation improvements, structured translation of dates, currency expressions, bibliographic information, legal citations and more or exported and converted to formats for easy use in other tools such as Trados Studio, Phrase/Memsource, Transtools+ and more. All without the need to learn any regular expression syntax!

An exported Regex Assistant library converted to a readable format by XSLT

My objective is not to teach regex syntax. It is to empower users to take more control of their work environment and save time and frustration for their teams and enjoy more life beyond the wordface. To help with that, I provide some usable examples in a follow-up mail after each sessions: resources that you can use in your own work and share freely with colleagues. 

And in this next round of workshops, available for purchase, there will be some additional high value resources to help achieve better outcomes for work in particular language pairs and particular specialties, such as financial translations. These complex resources were developed over a period of years, sometimes at great cost. In the last session I'll be getting "down and dirty and a little nerdy" to show you my way of maintaining complex resources like these auto-translation rules and others in a very effective, sustainable way that enables you to adapt quickly to changing requirements and style guides.

Sign up free to join the fun here.

Note-taking for Remote Simultaneous Interpreting: webinar on 21 August 2021

 On Saturday, August 21st at 14:00 UTC, the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) will present a special webinar on note-taking as a critical differentiation skill in the competitive field of remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI), a staple of international communication in our pandemic times and likely thereafter. The presentation is free for members, with a small fee for members of partner associations (€22) and non-members (€25). Send your registration request by e-mail to: info.request@iapti.org!

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.

Tweeting away....

Got up this morning to not altogether unexpected good news that the Empire of MAGATs has fallen:

 

Sometimes you wake up in the morning, and sometimes... it seems that a country wakes up with you. From nightmares.#fuckthenazis#fucktrump#MAGA2020 #EatThisMAGAts pic.twitter.com/JsKskALOdP

— Kevin Lossner (@GermanENTrans) January 6, 2021

Yeah. Life is starting to feel normal again despite the usual continued death and destruction. But what does one do with babies if not put them in cages? 

A course announcement for terminology users in memoQ (i.e. any sensible user):

Course re-opened for enrollment:#memoQuickies: On Better Terms with #memoQ

The real deal for better #terminology leverage in #translation#xl8 #translate #l10n #Localization #LocalEyeshttps://t.co/bxpu6FhT1U pic.twitter.com/KtmmqW3OFU

— Kevin Lossner (@GermanENTrans) January 6, 2021

... which leads one to ask: How do I get there? Well, try this:

Check out the CAT skills courses and consulting services at #Translation Tribulations Tech. #1 in #memoQ productivity on desktops and servers.#l10n #xl8 #translate https://t.co/76kcL1UAgK pic.twitter.com/xMa3iBuGNK

— Kevin Lossner (@GermanENTrans) January 6, 2021

Best Practices in Translation Technology - summer school in Lisbon (July 2019)

UPDATE: The course registration deadline is Sunday, June 23rd!
 
Once again this year, I'll be team teaching a course with David Hardisty and Marco Neves (in English, open to all, with enrollment limited) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (the New University in Lisbon, Portugal) on topics for best practice applying technology for more efficient and effective translation processes.

Click the graphic above to go to the Portuguese information page!

Details for costs (about €150 for those not enrolled at the university) are available here in English; the course instructors will assist those who cannot read Portuguese registration pages to register and handle other details as needed.

This year's topics include:

– Good translation workflows. 
– Using voice recognition in translation. 
– Using machine translation in a humane, intelligent way. 
– Using checklists to improve communication in translation. 
– Using glossaries, bilingual texts and other references in multiplatform environments. 
– Good practices for using terminology and reference texts in the target language. 
– Planning and creating lists for "autotranslatables" and the basics of "regular expressions" for filters.

There are some unannounced extras, but those will remain secret for now :-) And as time permits, individual challenges of course participants can also be addressed by the experts leading the course.

This is about as good as it gets for training costs; the university tuition is ridiculously low, and the 25 hours of instruction during the week of 15 to 20 July cost less than most half-day workshops while delivering far more. If it were up to me, I would probably increase the cost ten-fold, but that's because I'm a practical business person who understands commercial value, not a university administrator :-)

The course requires a basic knowledge of memoQ in advance, but much of the material goes well beyond that CAT tool. As always, integrated work with other environments, such as SDL Trados Studio and Wordfast is taught and emphasized.

The complete cost information (in Portuguese) is here: http://fcsh.unl.pt/formacao-ao-longo-da-vida/escola-de-verao/inscricoes

The direct registration page in Portuguese (where you will need to mark "Boas Práticas de Tecnologia para Tradução/Best Practices in Translation Technology" at the bottom) is here: http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/formacao-ao-longo-da-vida/escola-de-verao/inscricoes/escola-de-verao

We hope you can join us!

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

Do you know Anki?

It began with a short DM last night, which I misunderstood at first:

Oh? Gábor must have read my mind. Just recently someone introduced me to Fotografia de Aves em Portugal, a public Facebook group for bird photography in Portugal, and I was thinking about making some sort of flashcard set to learn the bird names in Portuguese and English and maybe to do the same for all the mushrooms that I encounter at the quinta and out in the fields hunting. In fact, when I looked up the description of the desktop computer program Anki and its iOS mobile app companion, I realized that this is really what I have hoped to find for quite a long time for various learning tasks.

The computer app developed by Damien Elmes and its online server and synchronization site AnkiWeb are free; the charge for the iOS mobile app helps to support the development of all platforms. There is also a free compatible Android app by a different author. I like the idea of being able to coordinate my "learning decks" between devices and access them from anywhere. And a quick look at the import features tells me that it's not hard to send the content of some of my personal study term bases in memoQ to this application.

I assume this is an app he came across in his quest to learn Chinese; in fact, he did say that it's a tool that helps give one a fighting chance to learn all the myriad characters needed for basic literacy. And further research on my part showed that this is a popular tool for review in medical school and many other areas.

I downloaded and installed the app; the initial view was a little puzzling:

But within a few minutes I got my bearings and downloaded a few of the many "shared decks" online to familiarize myself with how the app works:

Pretty simple, really. Thank you, Gábor!

Technology for legal and financial translation: lecture video

memoQfest 2018, held this year in Budapest from May 31 to June 1, was a great event as I noted in my recent discussion of how Kilgray – or rather "memoQ" as the company is now called – is on track with changes to the product and additions to its development and support teams in the broadest sense. This year, I spoke on some of the benefits of technology in general and memoQ technology in particular for translating specialists for law and finance. This was, in part, an abbreviated and updated version of my talk last year at the translation program in Buenos Aires University's law faculty and it is of course simply an overview of possibilities with some examples. This is a subject which could easily make up a full course for a semester or year, and in less than an hour one can only discuss a few bones of the concept, much less the full skeleton or the vital and varied body of modern practice.

The recording of the talk was released recently on the memoQ YouTube channel, so here it is embedded for those who missed it and want to see what was said:


I'll be giving a similar talk at the end of this in Valencia, Spain at IAPTI's international conference this year, though from a little different perspective. I hope to meet some of you there.

Webinar: Sichere Basis-Workflows in memoQ (am 17.10.2018)

Nach dem Webinar über Auto-Übersetzungsregeln in memoQ, geht die deutsche Vortragsserie nun am 17. Oktober weiter mit einer praktischen Einführung in sichere, umfassende Basisverfahren für typische Projekte auf dem lokalen Rechner. Schritt für Schritt wird gezeigt, wie man bei einem größeren Projekt vorgehen kann, um Probleme zu vermeiden und wichtige Ressourcen zu erstellen und pflegen.

In den geplanten zwei Stunden dieser kostenlosen Präsentation, werden Sie u.a. erfahren wie

• die technische Machbarkeit einer Lieferung der Übersetzungsergebnisse bestätigt wird,
• der Umfang des Textes sicher geprüft und bestätigt wird,
• wichtige Kundenressourcen im Projekt vielleicht besser eingesetzt werden können, 
• die häufige Sonderterminologie im Projekt ermittelt werden kann,
• neue Textversionen während der Arbeit effizient in die Bearbeitung einfliessen können, 

und einiges mehr.

Das Webinar findet am 17. Oktober 2018 um 15 Uhr MEZ statt und läuft bis zu 2 Stunden. Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, aber registrierungspflichtig. Registrieren können Sie sich hier.

Falls Sie sich für weitere memoQ-Onlineschulungen interessieren, geht es hier zu der relevanten Umfrage.

Adding time codes to YouTube videos

For years now, I have advocated the use of tables of contents for long instructional videos, recorded webinars and suchlike. I saw these in a few instances, but it was never clear how the indices were produced, so I suggested merely writing a list of relevant points and their play times and scrolling manually. Understandably, not many adopted this suggestion.

Then I discovered that my video editor (Camtasia) could create tables of contents for a video automatically when creating a local file, an upload to YouTube or other exports if timeline markers were added at relevant points. The only disadvantage for me with this approach was the limit on the length of the descriptive text attached to the markers. Worse than Twitter in the old days.

But when I accidentally added a marker I didn't want and removed it from the YouTube video description (which is where a TOC resides on YouTube), I saw that things were much simpler than I imagined. And a little research with tutorials made by others confirmed that any time code written at the beginning of a line in the video's description will become a clickable link to that time in the video.

So I've begun to go through some of my old videos with a text editor opened along side. When the recording gets to a point that I want to include in the table of contents, I simply pass the cursor over the video, take note of the time, and then write that time code into the text file along with a description of any length.

Afterward, I simply paste the contents of that text file into the description field in YouTube's editor. When the Save button at the top right is clicked, the new description for the video will be active, and viewers can use the index to jump to the points they want to see. Because only a few lines of the description text are visible by default, I include a hint at the beginning of the text to let people know that the live table of contents is available if they click the SEE MORE link.

If Kilgray, SDL, Wordfast and others involved with the language services sector would adopt techniques like this for their copious recorded content on the Web, the value and accessibility of this content would increase enormously. It would also be very simple then to create hot links to important points in other environments (PowerPoint slides, PDF files, etc.) to help people get to the information they need to learn better.

Not to do this would truly be a great waste and a shame in many cases.

What's missing in most training videos: found!

Five years ago more or less I wrote a post in which I optimistically declared that if I ever did a one-hour webinar I would edit it down to perhaps twenty minutes. The real problem for me was that there was an ever-growing catalog of video instructional material from Kilgray, SDL and other sources but that it was virtually impossible to find parts of a video with specific points of interest without wasting a lot of time. Long teaching videos need a time index.

In a few blog posts after that, I created some manual indices for some of my videos, but all of these required manual scrolling to get to a particular point. And then, while using TechSmith Camtasia to touch up the recording of a recent webinar I did on PDF handling with iceni InFix, I stumbled across a menu item I had not noticed before:

Timeline markers? Hmmmm. Why would something like that be needed? Unless maybe one could build an index with them? And indeed that is the case.

When exporting a local MP4 video file or uploading a video production to YouTube, for example, the dialogs contain options to use these markers and their labels (the blue texts seen in the screenshot above on the video editing timeline) to build a table of contents.

Wow. This is exactly what I wanted to do for years. And Camtasia is used by a lot of people I know, so I wonder why nobody ever mentioned this possibility or how they could all overlook it. The result looked like this on YouTube:

All the blue number codes are hotlinks that jump the video to exactly that play time. This makes it easy to refer quickly to some important point of interest and skip the rest. Now I'm not going to go back and rework all of my old translation tool tutorial videos, but I'll use this feature for any new recordings, and I hope others do the same.

The video of the PDF talk is embedded below, but as you can see, the TOC isn't available with embeddings.


But there is sort of a workaround for that problem, using sharing links that include the starting time:

Click this graphic to go to 21:42 in the video

But that won't control an embedded video in a web page - like the one above. If anybody has a solution for that, I would love to hear it.

Ferramentas de Tradução - CAT Tools Day at Universidade Nova de Lisboa

The Faculty of Sciences and Humanities held its first "CAT Tools Day" on June 16, 2018 with a diverse program intended to provide a lusophone overview of current best practices in the technologies to support professional translation work. The event offered standard presentation and demonstrations in a university auditorium with parallel software introduction workshops for groups of up to 18 persons in an instructional computer lab in another building.

The day began with morning sessions covering SDL Trados Studio and various aspects of speech recognition.

Dr.  Helena Moniz explains aspects of speech analysis.

I found the presentation by Dr. Helena Moniz from the University of Lisbon faculty to be particularly interesting for its discussion of the many different voice models and how these are applied to speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. David Hardisty of FCSH at Universidade Nova also gave a good overview of the state of speech recognition for practical translation work, including his unobtrusive methods for utilizing machine pseudo-translation capabilities in dictated translations.

Parallel introductory workshops for software tools included memoQ 8, SDL Trados Studio 2017 and ABBYY FineReader - two sessions for each.

Attendees learned about ABBYY FineReader, SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in the translation computer lab

The ABBYY FineReader session I attended gave a good overview in Portuguese of basics and good practice, including a discussion of how to avoid common mistakes when converting scanned documents in a number of languages.

The afternoon featured several short, practical presentations by students, discussions by me regarding the upcoming integrated voice input solution for memoQ and the preparation of PDF files for reference, translation, print deadline emergencies and customer relations.

Rúben Mata discusses Discord

The final session of the day was a "tools clinic" - an open Q&A about any aspect of translation technology and workflow challenges. This was a good opportunity to reinforce and elaborate on the many useful concepts and practical approaches shown throughout the day and to share ideas on how to adapt and thrive as a professional in the language services sector today.

Hosts David Hardisty and Marco Neves of FCSH plan to make this an annual event to exchange knowledge on technology and best practices in translation and editing work in discussions between practicing professionals and academics in the lusophone community. So watch for announcements of the next event in 2019!

Some of the topics of this year's conference will be explored in greater depth in three 25-hour courses offered in Portuguese and English this summer at Universidade Nova in Lisbon. On July 9th there will be a thorough course on memoQ Basics and workflows, followed by a Best Practices course on July 19th, covering memoQ and many other aspects of professional work. On September 3rd the university will offer a course on project management skills for language services, including the memoQ Server, project management business tools, file preparation and more. It is apparently also possible to get inexpensive housing at the university to attend these courses, which is quite a good thing given the rapidly rising cost of accommodation in Lisbon. Details on the housing option will be posted on this blog when I can find them.

Getting on Better Terms with memoQ

The pre-event webinar for the terminology workshop in Amsterdam on June 30th was held yesterday; for those who missed it, the recording is here, with a few call-outs added toward the end to make it easier to find information on other matters mentioned:


On the whole, I think the new presentation platform I'm using – Zoom – works well. I was particularly happy to discover when my Internet router died suddenly and mysteriously about 50 minutes into the talk that the recording was not lost, and when the talk resumed a few minutes later with a different router connection, a recording of that part was made in a separate folder, so the parts could be joined later in a video editor without much ado.

I've held perhaps a dozen online meetings with clients since I licensed Zoom recently, and I'm very pleased with its flexibility, even though the many options have tripped me up in embarrassing ways a few times. So, time permitting, I'll try to do at least one talk like this each month on some aspect of translation technology in the interests of promoting better practice. The next will be held on June 21st and will cover various PDF workflows using iceni technology. Suggestions for later presentations are welcome.

The talk yesterday on terminology in memoQ was just a quick (ha ha - one hour) overview of possibilities; much more detail on these matters will be provided in the Amsterdam workshop and summer courses at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, which are open to the public at very reasonable rates (about €130 for 25 hours of instruction). There will be a lot more in this topic area in the future in various venues; right now there are some very interesting developments afoot with memoQ and other matters at Kilgray, and other providers also have good things in the works. So stay tuned.

Best Practices in Translation Technology: summer course in Lisbon July 16-21

As usual each year, the summer school at Universidade Nova de Lisboa is offering quite a variety of inexpensive, excellent intensive courses, including some for the practice of translation. This year includes a reprise of last year's Best Practices in Translation Technology from July 16th to 21st, with some different topics and approaches.

The course will be taught by the same team as last year – yours truly, Marco Neves and David Hardisty – and cover the following areas:

• Good translation workflows.
• Using voice recognition in translation.
• Using machine translation in a humane, intelligent way.
• Using checklists to improve communication in translation.
• Using glossaries, bilingual texts and other references in multiplatform environments.
• Good practices for using terminology and reference texts in the target language.
• Planning and creating lists for auto-translation rules and the basics of regular expressions for filters.

Some knowledge of the memoQ translation environment and translation experience are required.

The course is offered in the evening from 6 pm to 10 pm Monday (July 16th) through Friday (July 20th), with a Saturday (July 21st) session for review and exams from 9 am to 2 pm. This allows free days to explore Lisbon and the surrounding region and get to know Portugal and its culture.

Tuition costs for the general public are €130 for the 25 hours of instruction. The university certainly can't be accused of price-gouging :-) Summer course registration instructions are here (currently available only in Portuguese; I'm not sure if/when an English version will be available, but the instructors can be contacted for assistance if necessary).

Two other courses offered this summer at Uni Nova with similar schedules and cost are: Introduction to memoQ (taught by David and Marco – a good place to get a solid grounding in memoQ prior to the Best Practices course) from  July 9–14, 2018 and Translation Project Management Tools from September 3–8, 2018.

All courses are taught in English and Portuguese in a mix suitable for the participants in the individual courses.

Zooming inside iceni InFix for PDF translation: web meeting on 21 June 2018

Over the course of the last nine years, I have published a few articles about ways that I have found the PDF editor iceni InFix useful for my translation and terminology research work. Throughout that time iceni has continued to improve that product as well as develop other technologies for PDF translation assistance, such as the online TransPDF service now integrated with memoQ.

It's one thing to have a tool and in many cases quite another thing to know how to make the best use of it. This situation is further complicated by the very wide range of scenarios in which an editor like iceni InFix might be useful and the great differences one often finds in the needs and expectations of the clientele from one translator to another. In the product's early days I followed the commentaries of José Henrique Lamensdorf, a Brazilian engineer with long experience in technical translation, desktop publishing and other fields, and while I consider him to be among the most useful sources of good technical information for me in my early days as a commercial translator, his project needs were very different from mine, and most of the things he mentioned a decade or more ago, though very relevant to people heavily involved with publishing, weren't a fit for my clientele.

That changed as iceni expanded the feature set over the years and I began to encounter many cases where OCR and a full Adobe Acrobat license did not quite do what I needed in a simple way.

Some weeks ago I had an online meeting scheduled with a client company to discuss the advantages of certain support technologies with that company's translation and project management staff. We tried to use TeamViewer for the discussion, but unfortunately my license could not accommodate the 6+ people involved, and I was reluctant to fork over the extra cash needed for a 15 or 25 participant license, especially because some other clients had issues with TeamViewer which I never clearly understood, leading their IT departments to ban it. And the TVS recording files, while generally quite decent for viewing and of manageable size due to an excellent compression CODEC, are a nightmare to convert cleanly to MP4 or other common video formats. Just as I was caught in this dilemma, my esteemed Portuguese to UK English translation colleague and gifted instructor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, David Hardisty, enthusiastically re-introduced me to Zoom videoconferencing.

I had seen Zoom before briefly when IAPTI decided to ditch the Citrix conferencing solutions and use it for webinars and staff meetings, but at the time I was too distracted by other matters to remember the name or notice the details. And, as we know, there one finds the Devil.

Zoom is powerful and flexible. For about €13 a month for my Pro license, I can invite up to 100 people for a web meeting, with quite a few useful options that I am still getting a grip on. Being used to the relative simplicity of TeamViewer, I am a little overwhelmed sometimes, and I have had a few recorded client meetings where the video was flawed because I got the screen sharing options mixed up. But the basics are actually dead simple if one pays a bit of attention.

A Zoom "web meeting", by the way, is what I would call a webinar, but that term means something else in Zoomworld, involving up to 50 speakers and something like 10,000 participants for some monthly premium. Not my thing. If the crowd is bigger than 10 in an online or a face-to-face class, I start to feel the constrictions of time and individual attention like an unruly anaconda around me.

But in any case, for someone who has spent many years looking for better teaching tools, Zoom is looking pretty good right now. And it enables me to share what I hope is useful professional information without dealing with the organizational nonsense and politics often associated with platforms licensed by some companies and professional associations. All for the monthly price of a cheap lunch.

So I've decided to do a series of free public talks using Zoom, not only to share some of a considerable backlog of new and exciting technical matters for translators, translation project managers and support staff and language service consumers, but also to get a better handle on how I can use this tool to support friends, colleagues and students around the world. Previously I announced a terminology talk (on May 24th, mostly about memoQ); now I have decided to share some of the ways that iceni InFix helps me in my work and what it might do for you too.

Soon Thursday, June 21st at 16:00 Central European Time (15:00 Lisbon time) I'll be talking about how you can get your fix of useful PDF handling for a variety of challenging situations. You are welcome to join me for this.

The registration link is here.