Filtering formatted text in Microsoft Office files

 Recently, I shared an approach to selecting text in a Microsoft Word file with editing restricted to certain paragraphs. This feature of Microsoft Word is, alas, not supported by any translation tool filters of which I am aware, so to import only the text designated for editing it is necessary to go inside the DOCX file (which is just a ZIP archive with the extension changed) and use the XML file which contains the document text with all its format markers.

This approach is generally valid for all formats applied to Microsoft Office files since Office 2007, such as DOCX from Word or PPTX from PowerPoint. I have prepared a video to show how the process of extracting the content and importing it for translation can work:

 After translation, the relevant XML file is exported and the original XML is replaced with the translated file inside the archive. If the DOCX or PPTX file was unpacked to get at the XML, the folder structure can then be re-zipped and the extension changed to its original form to create the deliverable translated file.

What I do not show in the video is that the content can also be extracted by other means, such as convenient memoQ project templates using filters with masks to extract directly using various ZIP filter options. But the lower tech approach shown in the video is one that should be accessible to any professional with access to modern translation environment tools which permit filter customization with regular expressions.

Once a filter has been created for a particular format such as red text, adapting it to extract only green highlighted text or text in italics or some other format takes less than a minute in an editor. Different filters are necessary for the same formats in DOCX and PPTX, because unfortunately Microsoft's markup for yellow highlighting, for example, differs between Word and PowerPoint in the versions I tested.

Although this is a bit of a nerdy hack, it's probably easier for most people than various macro solutions to hide and unhide text. And it takes far less time and is more accurate than copying text to another file.

In cases where it is important to see the original context of the text being translated, this can be done, for example, using memoQ's PDF Preview Tool, a viewer available in recent versions which will track the imported text in a PDF made from the original file. This can be done using the PDF Save options available in Microsoft applications.

Troubleshooting memoQ light resource import problems

The other day I sent a friend some updated auto-translation rules for currency expressions; a short time later I received a message that they would not import into memoQ. The error message displayed was the following:

Now the problem here might seem obvious, but the name of the file I sent was nothing like any rule she already had installed,

In the example shown below, the source of the trouble is more obvious, but if there are a lot of resources in the list shown in the Resource Console or elsewhere, the redundancy of the name in the import dialog and an existing resource name in the list might not stand out so clearly....

In the MQRES file (for the memoQ light resource), the "trouble  spot" is in the XML header at the top of the file. This can be seen by opening it in any text editor (in this case I used Notepad++ to show line numbering);

In this case, the fifth line contains the name that will be applied to the resource after it is imported. The <Name> tags are found in all kinds of memoQ light resources, and the same problem will occur if a redundancy is found during import. Here is an example from a memoQ ignore list (used to exclude certain words from error indications by spellchecking functions):

There are a couple of ways to avoid or correct these problems:

• First of all, when a ruleset is edited, the text enclosed by the Name tags should be altered. It's probably a good idea to update the Description as well. The FileName  is actually ignored and need not be updated; a difference with the real name of the MQRES file will not cause any trouble with an import.
  
• When importing a light resource, you can always change the information read from the Name and Description tags of the MQRES file. This avoids the conflict.
  
            
    
• The name and description of an existing light resource can be edited via the Properties of the resource in the Resource Console or Project Home > Settings, Accessing the resource via memoQ Options will currently (as of version 8.1) not show the Properties.
  
             

memoQ's "light resources" - the portable configurations and information lists to assist various translation tasks - are one of the environment's greatest strengths, but the generally bad state of the associated editing tools and unhelpful error handling continue to cause a lot of unnecessary confusion among users. Key people at Kilgray are not unaware of this problem, and for years there has been a debate regarding new features versus actual usability of the features already present. When you encounter difficulties like the one described above - or other troubles using this generally excellent, leading translation assistance tool - it is important to communicate your concerns to Kilgray Support (support@kilgray.com). 

Without appropriate feedback from the wordface, there is often really no way for the designers and product engineers to understand and prioritize the challenges of usability. I can understand the reluctance of those who have used other tools for many years, where it was clear that their requests for bug fixes or other improvements were largely ignored, to take such action, but it really does make a difference, though not always on a time scale of hours or days. Weeks, months, sometimes years may pass before important changes are made, but usually this is because the urgency of the matter has not been communicated with sufficient clarity, or there are in fact, more pressing matters which require attention. But in fact no serious matters are seldom ignored by those responsible, as nine years as a satisfied user have shown me.

Doing the deed with the DGT

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

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

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

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

Include only TMX files in the LiveDocs corpus import:

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

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

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

Cleaning up a crappy OCR job for translation

It's a sad fact in the professional work of translators that a lack of understanding on how to deal effectively with various PDF formats causes enormous loss of productivity and results which are not really fit for purpose. The aggressive insistence of many colleagues possessed of a dangerous Halbwissen on using half-baked methods and inappropriate tools contributes to the problem, but, bowing to the wisdom about arguing with fools, I now mostly sit back with a bemused and amused smile and watch the tribulations of those who believe in salvation by PDF import filters and cheap or free OCR. "TANSTAAFL" is a true as it ever was.

Just before the weekend I got an inquiry from an agency client I rather like. Nice people, good attitude, but struggling sometimes trying to find their way with technology despite some in-country "expert" training. This inquiry looked a bit like ripe fish at first glance. The smell got stronger after I was told that because the corporate end client had converted the PDF for their annual report and begun to edit the mess (and comment it heavily too) in the OCR file that this would be all there was to work with. It was a thoroughly appetizing sight when imported into a translation environment:

There are so many issues in that tossed salad of translation terror that I don't even know where to start describing them.

The screenshot above was in memoQ. How does it look in SDL Trados Studio? Often just as messy. In this case, this was the result in an older version of Studio:

 

SDL Trados Studio choked and refused to import the file!

I do have the latest version of SDL Trados Studio 2014, but unfortunately it's on a system that does not yet Microsoft Office, because I refuse to bow to Microsoft's insistence that I must buy a Portuguese version of that software. No MS Office, no file import in this case with SDL Trados Studio. memoQ fortunately has not needed MS Office to import its old file formats since the release of memoQ 6.0.

Ugly OCR trash like this file is all too common at this time of year, and as I am busy compiling the syllabus for the workshop I want to do on better living with well-used technology for legal and financial translators, I felt obliged to take this one on as a teaching example. It's actually not as bad as it looks. On the other hand, the best approach may not always be obvious, and the best solution for one document may not apply as well or at all to another.

My first approach was to use Dave Turner's CodeZapper macros. This isn't as straightforward as it used to be since I downgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to later versions; for some reason the toolbar refuses to stay loaded between work sessions, and there's no way I can keep track of all the abbreviations for macros on it.

I can't deal with anything more complicated than clicking the "CZL" option for "Code Zapper lite", which did a rather decent job on the heavy mess above:

But all was not quite as well as it seemed:

Text in the header and footer remained trashed, and the heavy use of comments and tabbed lists meant that there were plenty of legitimate tags to deal with which were just too confusing with the DVX-like mess of memoQ's default import and display for an RTF file.

So I went for a kinder, gentler approach. I changed my import filter settings in memoQ:

There is actually seldom any good reason to import an RTF or DOC file into memoQ using the default filter settings. And marking those two little checkboxes at the bottom often accomplishes much of what CodeZapper does. Sometimes less. A bit more in this case.

The header and footer texts were absolutely clean. Don't let the extra tags in this sample fool you: overall, there were fewer than in the code-zapped file. Now there are still a number of issues to be seen in the screenshot above, including paragraph breaks in the middle of a sentence and awful manual hyphenation (many instances of that in the whole text) and joys like badly placed comments and links which mess up the text and prevent term identification by the software:

 

Source editing features of memoQ (F2) enable issues like the two above to be dealt with easily:

After a bit of repair like this in the memoQ environment (where it is really much, much easier to fix the problems of bad comment and link placement), I copied the entire source text to the target to enable me to export a cleaner source text file. I then opened this file in Microsoft Word and used various search and replace operations to fix the bad hyphenation and other problems like excess spaces. Replacing the hyphens had to be done occurrence-by-occurrence, because the style of writing in German meant that there were many legitimate instances of hyphens followed by spaces.

After all was done, the "before and after" looked like this:

BEFORE

AFTER

The remaining tags were all legitimate formatting tags for comments, hyperlinks, tabs after section numbering, etc. These do, of course, require attention and add complexity to the work still, so they must be included in the charges for the job. memoQ makes this calculation particularly simple by allowing weighting factors to be specified in the analysis. These are the settings I typically use for a German source text:

I find this usually represents a fair minimum for the additional effort in translation and quality assurance that tags require. In this case, of course, time charges for the cleanup apply, but as you can probably guess from comparing the two analysis tables above, the customer is actually saving a lot of money by paying me to clean up the mess, and the results will be a lot more usable. My cleaned-up version of the source text will also be returned in case the authors intend to make more revisions in the source - this will save more time and money by avoiding redundant cleanup in that case.

Proofreading LiveDocs bilinguals, recycling versions in memoQ

(These tests were performed with memoQ 2013 R2 but should, in principle, work the same in any version of memoQ 6.0 or later.)

I really like memoQ's versioning features, and I use the X-Translate function fairly often when a document I'm translating has been updated or a new version comes sometime later. However, I don't keep documents in my projects forever. I use "container projects" for particular clients or subject domains so that I don't have to keep reattaching the same translation memories, terminologies and LiveDocs corpora and various light resources (non-translatables, autocorrect lists, segmentation rules, etc.) all the time. These can get rather full, so I send my old translations off to a LiveDocs corpus after a while. And then if a new version of a document shows up, well... I'm sort of out of luck if I want to use the X-Translate function with the previous version.

Or so I thought. And then a friend rang me and asked how she can export a LiveDocs alignment she did to an RTF bilingual file to make it more convenient to proofread in Microsoft Word and pass on to one of her partners with tracked changes. With that the answer to both problems was clear.

Select the corpus and the file in it to export:

Click Export and choose a location in which to save the MQXLZ file:

In the Translations window of any memoQ project with the correct source and target language settings, select Import and choose your MQXLZ file:

After the file exported from LiveDocs has been imported as a translation file, it can serve as "version 1" for a new file version to be translated using the Reimport document and X-translate features. It does not matter that the file types are different. A bilingual RTF file can also be exported for external correction and commentary.

Here is an example of an exported bilingual RTF file with changes tracked. The changes do not have to be accepted before the bilingual file is re-imported to update the translation using the Import command.

Here is the updated translation:

Changed are marked with blue arrows. Only text changes were implemented in this case, no format changes such as italic text, because the XLIFF file does not support WYSIWYG text formatting. (MQXLZ is a Kilgray-renamed ZIP-package with XLIFF and a chocolate surprise inside.)

Now I've got a new version of my text to translate in a DOCX file. I use the Reimport document function, answer No to the dialog so I can select the new version at a different location:

I'm curious what the differences from the original text are, so I use the History/reports command in the Translations window to find that out:

Then using Operations > X-Translate in the working window, followed by pretranslation to get the changed "exact matches" (like "Aussehen und Gewicht" above) and the fuzzy matches, I end up with this:

If you make it a point to store your important versions in a LiveDocs corpus, this procedure will allow you to recover your archived texts and re-use them for more controlled, reference-based translation. It would be nice, of course, if some day Kilgray would enable specific LiveDocs files to be used as the basis of a reference translation, perhaps even scanning a corpus or a set of corpora to identify the best-matching document or documents. It would also be nice if bilinguals stored in LiveDocs could be exported to other formats and perhaps even be updated with something like an exported bilingual RTF. However, those bilinguals can simply be imported directly to a LiveDocs corpus as new documents, and any corrections made to a document in the Translations list can be sent back to LiveDocs using the relevant command in the Translations window.

The Next Big CAT Feature To Copy?

Thanks to the persistent disbelief of some users, particularly cranky financial and legal translators who don't understand the challenges of programming, that it really is "impossible" to enable a project or TM update based on an edited monolingual target text, Kilgray has decided to just do it and make this feature available to the masses with the next release, memoQ 2013 R2. It's not a perfect solution, but a great start, and when the rest of the specification is implemented later, it will be really, really good.

Here's an example of the first step reimporting a short text in which every sentence except the first was rewritten and rearranged (click the pic to see it full-sized):

This monolingual alignment and the matches it assigned was totally automated - no adjustments by me. When applied to the translation document in memoQ, it doesn't change the order of the translation, but it does make updating the translation memory much easier. I can also use the tracked changes feature for versioning to look at the edits in more detail, and the view can be filtered to show the changes in a large document more clearly to ensure that nothing was missed.

What good is this? Well, so far Kilgray is rather fixated on the idea that one might receive edited documents from a proofreader or a client at some later date and import the changes to the project to update the TM. Maybe, but in many cases, this won't really happen in my workflow. If I finish I project, now I very often send the documents to a LiveDocs corpus, where they make a marvelous pseudo-TM (if a bit slow or slower sometimes) and an excellent context reference for concordance searches. I then delete the documents from the project, because I use projects as "containers" for repeated business, so unless some day the monolingual updates are made available for a document in LiveDocs, I may often not be able to take advantage of it. One could, of course, apply the same principle of monolingual alignment to a translation memory or even a TMX file, and I am sure somebody will do that before long if it doesn't already exist in some flaky academic freeware for supernerds somewhere.

So why am I so excited about this feature? Because I already use it every day. It saves me time and puts a big smile on my face. When I get ready to deliver  translation, the last step for me is to look at it in the source application - Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc. There I make last-minute adjustments, change words, combine sentences, split sentences, delete things, etc. A lot of these changes never make it back to the TM, because that maintenance can be a major pain in the backside, especially when there's a lot happening on my desk and in my e-mail inbox. This feature is a big step toward reducing that stress.

Kilgray isn't done with this by any means. Plans for source text merges to allow combined sentences in an edit to be handled easily have not been implemented yet, but I'm told that will follow no later than the next version. I hope so. The current beta version is also a bit dodgy with many formats I've tested so far beside DOCX and TXT, and changes of target text file type have been forbidden in the current version, as have any edits except segmentation adjustment and linking during the monolingual alignment.I plan a lot more testing to understand the limits of the current implementation, and I expect there will be many improvements in this area. But this is an excellent start.

When the specification was developed, Kilgray was unaware that something like this was already available from SDL in one of that company's pricy "regulatory" licenses (I wonder if the idea came from watching the video of the public argument about this option at memoQfest two years ago - I know that remarks about the SDL OpenExchange were followed closely). However, SDL has taken no great advantage of this to offer such a feature to a wider user base yet, so I have no idea how well it looks. But mark my words - in a few years, this innovation will be one of those things that users of any good CAT tool should take for granted!

SDL Trados Studio vs. memoQ: Translating Text Columns in Excel

Paul Filkin of SDL recently showed a few "little known gems" of SDL Trados Studio 2011 in one of his recent blog posts, which is quite useful for learning how to approach some not-so-rare project challenges with Trados Studio. Here I would like to share his video tutorial about one of those gems - how to translate multiple columns of text in an Excel file. (HINT: these embedded videos are easier to watch if you do that in full screen mode by toggling the icon at the lower right of the play window.)



memoQ can also translate Excel files with a similar structure, and here's how to do that, with a little bit of Dragon Naturally Speaking thrown in just for fun:

The Sodrat Suite: delimited text to MultiTerm

The growing library of tools in the Sodrat Suite for Translation Productivity now includes a handy drag & drop script sample for converting simple tab-delimited terminology lists into data which can be imported directly into the generations of (SDL) Trados MultiTerm with which we've been blessed for more than half a decade.

Many people rightly fear and loathe the MultiTerm Convert program from SDL and despite many well-written tutorials for its use, intelligent, competent adult translators have become all too frequent callers on the suicide hotline in Maidenhead, UK.

Thus I've cast my lot with members of an Open Source rescue team dedicated to squeezing a little gain for the victims of all this pain and prescribing appropriate remedies for what ails so many of us by developing the Sodrat Software Suite. The solutions here are quick, but they aren't half as dirty as what some pay good money for.

The script below is deliberately unoptimized. It represents less work than drinking a cup of strong, hot coffee on a cold and clammy autumn morning. Anyone who feels like improving on this thing and making it more robust and useful is encouraged to do so. It was written quickly to cover what I believe is the most common case for this type of data conversion. An 80 or 90% solution is 100% satisfactory in most cases. Copy the script from below, put it in a text file and change the extension to VBS, or get the tool, a readme file and a bit of test data by clicking the icon link above.

To run the conversion, just put your tab delimited text file in the folder with the VBS script and then drag it onto the script's icon. The MultiTerm XML import file will be created in the same folder and use the name of the original file with terms as the basis of its name.

Drag & Drop Script for Converting Tab-delimited
Bilingual Data to MultiTerm XML

ForReading = 1
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
inFile = objArgs(0) ' name of the file dropped on the script

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(inFile, ForReading)

' read first line for language field names
strLine = objFile.ReadLine
arrFields = Split(strLine, chr(9))

outText = "          "UTF-16" & chr(34) & "?>" & chr(13) & "" & chr(13)   
   
Do Until objFile.AtEndOfStream
 strLine = objFile.ReadLine
 if StrLine <> "" then
  arrTerms = Split(strLine, vbTab)
   
  outText = outText & "" & chr(13)
      for i = 0 to (UBound(arrTerms) )
        outText = outText & chr(9) & "" & chr(13) & chr(9) & chr (9) _
                   & "" & chr(13)
        ' write the term
        outText = outText & chr(9) & chr (9) & chr (9) & "" & _
               arrTerms(i) & "" & chr(13) & chr(9) & "" & chr(13)
      next
  outText = outText & "" & chr(13)
 end if
Loop

outText = outText & ""
objFile.Close
outFile = inFile & "-MultiTerm.xml"

' second param is overwrite, third is unicode
Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(outFile,1,1)
objFile.Write outText
objFile.Close

Fun with the memoQ 6 Client API!

The release of Build 55 of memoQ version 6 included a client application programming interface (API) for the first time. It is currently available only in the project manager edition of memoQ, which is really a shame, but I look at this as a good start nonetheless. I have wanted this API for years, and a mere 6 months before it was released Kilgray's chief developer swore that it would never happen, because the work involved was monumental and the effort had no perceived payoff. Well, events unanticipated on that cold February night in Budapest changed that perception, and this is an excellent start for a great tool that was never supposed to happen. The current scope is pretty much limited to project preparation, analysis and TM manipulation, but even there much can be found to simplify the lives of some translators and corporate users with automation.

A simple snippet of script code for exporting a TM to TMX has been circulating for a while now as a VBA macro to run from Microsoft Word, for example. Personally, I object to running something in MS Word that has nothing to do with that program, so I recoded it as an executable script and added a few extra tweaks:

tmFolder = InputBox("Which TM should be exported?")
if tmFolder <> "" then

' The path where all my memoQ TMs are stored
standardTMpath = "C:\ProgramData\MemoQ\Translation Memories\"

'build absolute paths
outputTMXfile =  ".\" & tmFolder & "_" & date() & ".tmx"
tmFolder = standardTMpath & tmFolder

Set fact = CreateObject("MemoQ.ClientService.ServiceFactoryScripting")
Set tmService = fact.CreateTMService
Set createTMRes = tmService.ExportToTMX(tmFolder, outputTMXfile)
if createTMRes.Success = False then
   MsgBox createTMRes.ShortErrorMessage
else
   MsgBox "The TM was exported."
end if

end if

Just copy that script into a text file, rename the extension to *.vbs and you have a double-clickable script to export a TM without opening memoQ. The TMX export is placed in the same folder where the script is executed and tagged with the date of the export.

Encouraged by this little test, I went on to tackle one of my pet peeves: the lack of muliti-file import capabilities in memoQ TMs. Trados Studio has no problem importing a folder full of TMX files to a TM in one go, but with memoQ one must import each TMX file - painfully - one at a time. The pain is felt quite severely if, for example, you are a former OmegaT user with a legacy of 300+ TMX files from your old projects.

So I wrote another little script which allows me to drag and drop any number of TMX files onto its icon and have them all import to the specified TM. This is a rather crude example for just one set of had-coded sublanguages (DE-DE and EN-US). The API currently does not allow sublanguages to be ignored for the import. Adapt this to use your relevant sublanguages if you like:

'
' memoQ TMX import macro
' drag & drop TMX files onto the script icon
'
tmFolder = InputBox("To which TM should the TMX file(s) be imported?")
If tmFolder <> "" Then

' The path where all my memoQ TMs are stored
standardTMpath = "E:\Working databases\MemoQ\TMs\"

'build absolute path
tmFolder = standardTMpath & tmFolder

' Create the ServiceFactoryScripting object and TM service
Set objSFS = CreateObject("MemoQ.ClientService.ServiceFactoryScripting")
Set svcTM = objSFS.CreateTMService

' Set import options parameters
Set objImportOptions = CreateObject("MemoQ.ClientService.TMImportOptionsScripting")
objImportOptions.TMXSourceLanguageCode = "ger-de" 
objImportOptions.TMXTargetLanguageCode = "eng-us"  
objImportOptions.TradosImportOptimization = False
objImportOptions.DefaultValues = Null
objImportOptions.DefaultsOverrideInput = False

  Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
  For I = 0 To objArgs.Count - 1
    tmxfile = objArgs(I)
    logFileName = tmFolder & "_" & date() & "_" & "importlog." & I & ".txt"

    Set returnvalue = svcTM.ImportFromTMX(tmFolder, tmxfile, objImportOptions, logFileName)
    If returnvalue.Success = False Then
        MsgBox returnvalue.ShortErrorMessage
    Else
        MsgBox "No errors in the import of " & tmxfile & ". See the log file at: " & logFileName
    End If
  Next

end if

Since I once wasted a full day importing a big load of TMX files to memoQ (before I got the bright idea to use The Other Tool as an intermediate step), I was so delighted to get this script working that I just kept making new test TMs and running it long past the point where there was anything left to prove. It's just a thrill to know that consolidating my TMs is now much, much simpler!

These are just a few of the myriad simplifications that are possible for one's processes with the new API. I expect most of its applications will be in "real" programs with real programmers using "real" languages and not wimpy, half-baked scripts like I've thrown together and shown here. This API has potential benefits to a great number of ordinary memoQ users, I think - especially if little productivity tips like these here are shared. So I do hope that, at some point, access to the client API is expanded to include the memoQ Translator Pro edition!

Dissecting SDL Trados Studio project files (SDLPPX) for translation with other tools

When a translation request with an SDLPPX (SDL Trados Studio project file) shows up in my inbox, it's always a bit irritating. The current version 5 of memoQ can't do a thing with these project files, unlike those from Star Transit, where a nicely automated wizard sets up a memoQ project with everything I need except terminology. To translate the content (SDLXLIFF files) of an SDL project file, you have to take the thing apart.

Of course, if you own an SDL Trados Studio license, it's usually a simple matter to open the package with Trados and export the resources you need. But today that didn't work. An error message informed me that the PPT source file for one of the SDLXLIFF resources was missing. Indeed. It was sitting on an FTP server to which the PM had failed to give me the access data before the weekend. Looked like I was SOOL.

In the past, when I took these SDLPPX file apart manually to get at the components I wanted, my luck was mixed. These are just ZIP files, so if you take a project file named MyWonderfulSubcontractedJob.sdlppx and rename it MyWonderfulSubcontractedJob.zip you can unpack it with WinZip or other utilities. Inside the ZIP file, the structure will look something like this:

Inside an SDL Trados Studio project package with Source language German (DE) and target language English (UK)

Both the source and target language folders contain an SDLXLIFF file with the source content. But there's a catch. You must take the SDLXLIFF file from the target folder.

Here's an example of a translation segment from the SDLXLIFF in the source fiile:

<trans-unit id="4e4fc380-8fac-4570-942b-a4bf6c4a4c7f"><source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</source><seg-source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</seg-source></trans-unit>

Notice anything missing? There is no tag set for target content. This is essentially a monolingual file. When imported into memoQ it will show zero segments! A look at the same translation unit in the SDLXLIFF file out of the target language folders shows the difference (a bit more than just the target tags highlighted):

<trans-unit id="4e4fc380-8fac-4570-942b-a4bf6c4a4c7f"><source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</source><seg-source><mrk mtype="seg" mid="560">Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</mrk></seg-source><target><mrk mtype="seg" mid="560" /></target><sdl:seg-defs><sdl:seg id="560" /></sdl:seg-defs></trans-unit>

This second SDLXLIFF file will import fine into other tools like memoQ using the XLIFF filter and allow you to translate without difficulty. I had not noticed this before, because in the past, if the SDLXLIFF file I imported had no segments, I just opened it in SDL Trados Studio, copied source to target and resaved it, and the resultant file imported without trouble and showed all segments. It took a missing original file that Studio demanded to save changes for me to look at matters a bit more closely.

I really do hope that a future version of memoQ will include a project import routine for these SDL projects similar to that for Star Transit projects. I am encountering SDLPPX files with increasing frequency due to the general lack of understanding interoperable workflows by those living in the Trados ghetto, and this added functionality in my primary tool would be a great help.

What should an SDL Trados Studio user do to ensure a less troublesome collaboration with those who use other tools? Don't send a damned project file. Send SDLXLIFF files and export the relevant TMs to TMX. If you are part of the 1% of Trados users who have a clue what to do with terminology, export the MultiTerm data, if you have any, to a delimited format of some kind. Most tools can take it from there, and you'll get back your finished SDLXLIFF files to review.