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Here we go again. Although memoQ is the undisputed leader for compatibility and interoperability among translation environment tools, users still encounter problems exchanging files, particularly XLIFF of some sort, with users of other tools. This is not because of any actual difficulty producing compatible XLIFF files, but rather a matter of deficient tool training and the failure to date by memoQ product designers to make the ease of interoperability a little more obvious. Some other tools, like recent versions of SDL Trados Studio, come pre-configured on installation to recognize the proprietary file extensions for memoQ's flavor of XLIFF ("MQXLIFF") and renamed ZIP packages (MQXLZ) containing XLIFF files, but others (or versions of SDL Trados Studio from many years ago) need to be configured to recognize those extensions, or someone simply has to change the MQXLIFF file extension to an extension that will be recognized by any tool: *.xliff or *.xlf are the choices.
The two-step solution is shown here:
On the Documents ribbon in memoQ, click on the tiny arrow under the Export icon and choose the option to export a bilingual file. There is some blue text which, if clicked, will allow a compatible XLIFF file to be exported, albeit with the MQXLIFF extension that some other programs might not recognize.
When the Export button in the dialog (marked 1, above) is clicked, the Save As dialog (marked 2, above) appears, simply change the file extension (the part after the period) to "xlf", for example. Then any program that reads XLIFF files can work with the file you export from memoQ. Despite the change of extension, memoQ will still recognize the file it produced, so it is possible to re-import it, for example if another person has made corrections to the XLIFF file that you want to use to update your translation or reference resources.
In some much older versions of memoQ, it does not work to change the extension in the export dialog; this has to be done directly to the exported file in whatever folder you save it in.
Of course, all of this will be rather difficult if you are one of those users who has not fixed the awful Microsoft Windows default to hide the extensions of known file types. Fixing that particular stupidity requires slightly different measures in different versions of Windows, but in Windows 10 you can do that on the View ribbon of Windows Explorer by marking the choice to show file name extensions:
The generally good impression made by Wordfast Anywhere in my recent tests inspired me to take a new look at the premium environment for freelance translators: Wordfast Pro 5. A lot has changed with Wordfast Pro since its early days, and much of what I found troublesome with early versions has been corrected. A new look has also been on my agenda for a while since I realized that two new formats were introduced (TXLF, an XLIFF format, and GLP, a zipped project package format for Wordfast), which can be handled by my usual translation environment but (currently) with a few extra steps required compared to the old TXML format.
The installation took about a minute and started off with a good impression from the warning about cloud drive synchronization:
I've seen a number of people come to grief with other tools when their projects, translation memories or other resources are stored in Dropbox or similar configurations so they can be shared by installations on different computers, and I appreciate Wordfast's attempt to warn people off from this dodgy practice. If you want to share resources, play it safe and stick them in Wordfast Anywhere.
At first, the program is in demo mode, which limits translation memories to 500 translation units (TUs) and does not allow access to remote resources such as Wordfast Anywhere. Fortunately, there is a fully functional 30-day trial available, and it took all of about two minutes to fill out the simple request form, receive the mail with the trial license key and activate it in Wordfast Pro 5.
I was really enthusiastic about the clean, uncluttered feel of the interface. There's a lot more functionality in SDL Trados Studio or memoQ, but all the myriad features of those environments can be intimidating to some, and even for experienced users navigation can be confusing at times to locate some obscure setting or feature. Not in Wordfast Pro 5: the features mostly aren't there, and what is there can be found without much ado. Given the limited scope of mastery and inclination to learn on the part of many hamsters running on the freelance translation wheel, this can be a definite advantage.
On the Help ribbon I saw a Feedback icon. I don't know why, but this inspired a weird enthusiasm in me, so I clicked it, and when the dialog appeared, I wrote a quick note to the development team to say what a great impression the new user interface was making before I had even started to do anything useful with it. I noticed that the feedback dialog also had options to include files and projects in case of a problem, which I also thought was really cool. Something like that in other tools would be very helpful to their users and probably encourage more suggestions and interaction.
It was really easy to navigate through the ribbon menus and explore the configuration options. I was pleased to see that different sets of keyboard shortcuts were available to make the ergonomics easier for users of some other tools.
But SDLX? Huh? That's kind of Jurassic. No memoQ shortcuts, but no problem. I can customize, right? Yes... but I soon discovered that I apparently had no way to save my customized shortcuts as "memoQ style" or whatever else I might want to call them. And then I noticed that I probably can't save the configuration to move it onto a second computer where the terms of the license agreement allow private individuals to install another copy. And, hmmmm, no option to print a cheat sheet I can refer to as I learn the keyboard shortcuts. memoQ users are kind of spoiled on both counts, I guess.
One thing I was very eager to try was the connection to my translation memories and glossaries in my Wordfast Anywhere account. That proved to be quite straightforward: it worked exactly as the clear instructions of the Wordfast Pro Help described the process.
So I was ready to try out some translation, maybe a little dictation with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I imported a little text file to get started:
WTF??? Now I know what the problem is here, but importing the same file to Wordfast Anywhere gives this result:
And in memoQ:
The import with the simple text filter of Wordfast Pro 5 (version 5.7) does not map the characters correctly. I had to change the source text file from ANSI to UTF-8: not a big deal for me, but a lot of translators I know will be over their heads right there.
The choice of import filters available is fairly good as one might expect from most professional translation environments these days, but two important things were missing for me. There seems to be no option to cascade filters, useful for example if you have a Microsoft Excel file containing HTML text to translate, and there is also no facility for configuring custom regex-based text filters or tagging text content which needs protection (such as placeholder text). This won't be an issue for a lot of translators, but for those who deal with challenging, often unexpected formatting issues in customers' files it could be a real pain in the neck.
On to dictation... Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) seemed to perform well. I had to turn off the DNS dictation box by unmarking thew checkbox in its dialog. Text was then transcribed well into the target field, and my spoken keyboard shortcut to confirm a segment and go on to the next one worked perfectly. Then I misspoke and used a spoken editing command to correct my error. Nothing happened. I tried several different spoken selection and editing commands that I use every day in memoQ. Nothing worked. Shit. What we have here is a failure of compatibility. The full potential of Dragon NaturallySpeaking cannot be used in Wordfast Pro 5.
I explored the settings further... quality assurance. That looked pretty good; the options were easy to understand and I could set them as I wanted to check my work. But the QA settings I need vary in many projects, and sometimes I want to do a QA check on just one aspect like tags or maybe terminology. Wordfast Pro 5 offered no facility to save a QA configuration or profile and load it as one might do in SDL Trados Studio or memoQ. This too would be a deal-breaker for me, alas. I depend on a full hand of memoQ quality assurance profiles for selective checking of important quality parameters in my jobs. Toggling settings back and forth in Wordfast would drive me nuts. Still, this wouldn't disturb many CAT tool users who can barely be bothered to run a spelling check on their work, much less run a check or missing or mismatched tags.
In contrast to my conclusions years ago, I can now say that Wordfast Pro is "ready for prime time". It has a nice, clean, easy to navigate interface, and the Help descriptions are clear, if somewhat idiosyncratic in their spelling at times. The options are limited compared to other professional tools I use which have comparable costs of use, but that may be perceived as an advantage by many... until they need what's not there, which is probably inevitable if they work at translation in a full-time freelance capacity. Over the years I have heard many good things about Wordfast support, so I expect that users will at least find help and advice when they need it.
The integration with the online Wordfast Anywhere resources is also simple and good. That's a major point in favor of this tool and should be very helpful for collaboration.
Overall, I think that users who invest in a Wordfast Pro license will get their money's worth. A three-year license costs €400, with three-year renewals costing half the list price after that. If you aren't willing to pay after the three years, your license will stop working (unlike SDL Trados or memoQ, where the current license models allow you to keep working with the software long after your claim to support and upgrades has lapsed - basically "forever" if nothing strange happens with newer operating systems).
The possibilities for collaboration between Wordfast users and those who work with other environments are much better than they used to be, and in just a short time I was able to see how I can prepare projects for a colleague using Wordfast Pro 5. (SDL Trados packages can apparently be handled, though that's not the case for memoQ project packages prepared with the PM Edition - I would have to make MQXLIFF files and export TM and term base resources.) And I hope that this situation will only get better, with more environments offering various kinds of Wordfast resource integration and Wordfast acquiring new capacities to work with other formats and resources.
The Wordfast suite of applications has a long history, and through much of it I've had my eye on the tools but up to now never really found them up to the demands of my work. Wordfast Classic (back when it was the only Wordfast app) was brought to my attention by an enthusiastic manager of a German bank's translation team more than 15 years ago; he found that the "blacklist" feature for terminology (since adopted by others - for example in memoQ's "forbidden" terms) was extremely helpful to his translators in avoiding terms which might provoke branding controversies or which were simply inappropriate in a particular specialist context.
When Wordfast Pro came along, I was disappointed in the interoperability of its early versions and it being late to the party for supporting XLIFF formats (as were some other popular tools). That issue is solved in the meantime, so I suspect I might not be quite so unhappy were I to revisit the application.
But really, Wordfast doesn't come onto my radar very often, and when it does, it's not so much the application suite itself as it is the Wordfast creator - Yves Champollion, who follows in a way the family tradition of the famous French Egyptologist, Jean-François Champollion, translator of the Rosetta Stone, and who has earned his own fair share of praise for his many years of support for individual translators and their professional organizations. It would not surprise me if much of the loyalty I find among users of Wordfast is inspired by the personal qualities of Yves as much as by any technical features of his tools.
The least among these tools was, in my consideration, the web-based Wordfast Anywhere (WFA). I looked at it briefly in the early days and was unimpressed: too limited, I thought. And the idea of translating in a browser seemed dubious to me, and it remains so in many scenarios that are relevant to my work. WFA was a bit ahead of its time, before the scamming Gold Rush that targeted corporate clients for web-based solutions designed to wrest data and control away from translators. WFA wasn't welcome in that party: its focus on empowering individual translators is anathema to most of the web CAT solutions ones sees today.
My interest in Wordfast generally was revived recently when I saw that memoQ has integration plug-ins for Wordfast term bases and translation memories on servers. This inspired the thought that perhaps Wordfast Anywhere might function as a collaboration server here, sort of like some had hoped for the Language Terminal resources, but one that actually works perhaps. Alas no, or not yet at least; the memoQ plug-in cannot "see" the WFA server and an individual account. Oh, but if it could....
Collaboration and interoperability between translation environments have been topics of great interest for me since I began to use specialist tools for organizing translation resources some 19 years ago. And on those occasions when I want to share resources with someone who does not have a professional suite of desktop translation resources, I'm always a little uncomfortable with my default recommendations, because they are just a little too nerdy to work well with everyone. So I wondered... how well might WFA work with resources I prepare in SDL Trados Studio or memoQ and pass on to a colleague unequipped with those tools or other desktop solutions. I thought I remembered limits that would restrict such an effort, but either my memory is wrong or these limits changed.
WFA can accept files to translate which are up to 20 MB in size. I receive files that are sometimes larger than this, but not routinely, so this is not much of a restriction. But then I thought the limit on translation memory size would be the stumbling block, and indeed, when I tried to upload a 390 MB TM with about 330,000 translation units, I got an error message telling me that 300 MB (or rather 300000000 with no indication of units!) was the limit. Looking in the online documentation I found that 100,000 TUs is the limit for an individual translation memory in WFA. But you can attach multiple TMs and term bases (which can be much larger as I saw from the 800,000+ entry IATE termbase supplied by the environment). And most TMs that I see for mid-size companies are well under that size limit.
So I spent some time kicking the virtual tires again. Uploaded some damned big EU directives in various formats, including bilingual alignments in an XLIFF. No problem. Loaded a big memoQ XLIFF file: the *.mqxliff extension wasn't recognized, but I fixed that the usual way by changing it to *.xlf and it worked well, roundtripping perfectly back to memoQ and confirming that interoperability would work well enough for collaboration.
Indeed, the range of original file formats handled by this free online translation environment is impressive.
As I browsed through the options and customizing features of the WFA environment, my respect for its capabilities increased further. The thought occurred to me at one point that this might even be suited as an environment for a small company with limited translation needs to manage its language resources and make them available for in-house or external translators. With the several exchange formats available, translators and reviewers could easily perform their work with other translation environment tools or even word processors, and the results could be merged with the master records in the WFA account. This is probably the least expensive, secure way for a company to take its first steps toward central management of its translations and terminology resources. No big server investments needed, and later all resources can be migrated easily to more sophisticated environments, such as a memoQ Server, if necessary.
Some years ago, I opposed the use of Wordfast Anywhere in a local university program, arguing instead that more established professional tools like SDL Trados Studio and/or memoQ should be used instead, especially as the cost of doing so is negligible in teaching curricula. I take that back now. And my impression is that WFA is better suited to a teaching program than other, perhaps slicker web-based tools, because of the underlying philosophy of its design, which leaves translators and their partners in control of the data, not some third-party provider inclined to carry out dubious data mining and use the results to sell more dodgy commercial solutions.
Wordfast users also know that their desktop software can access translation memories and term bases on a WFA account as remote resources. My last look at Wordfast Pro showed me that the tool had come a long, long way since I last dealt with it to clean up some messes a French translator inflicted on an agency client of mine. It's been on my list to look at further for some time; I know it will likely not meet my criteria for the broad range of translation, quality assurance and consulting tasks I do, but it does do a good job of covering the real, practical needs of many colleagues, and it is important to me to understand other translation environments to facilitate collaboration with people who use them.
And for these cases of working together with a mix of environments, it seems to me that Wordfast Anywhere can be a productive bridge to bring partners together. To create a free account and start testing Wordfast Anywhere, click here.
It appears that you flat out ignored (or disabled) the warning message that pops up every time you try to open a Publisher file (attached). There is no problem with Fluency with regards to Publisher. The issue lies in the fact that the Publisher interop is unstable. This (and the fact that professionals don’t use Publisher) are the reasons that CAT tools don’t support Publisher. Are you hoping to ridicule us to encourage us to fix Publisher support? We’d just as soon remove support for it altogether, but we do have a few users who are grateful for it and understand that they might have to restart their computer a few times or kill the Publisher process that is frozen in the background. Another option that works, sometimes, is to try and save multiple times, which you discovered, but incorrectly attributed to resizing the view of the text (which doesn’t affect the output). So we let you know before you start that Publisher is unstable and you’ve just spent a bunch of time documenting how it is unstable. To what end? As for our XLIFF files, yeah they aren’t great, but extremely rarely is someone exporting something from Fluency to another CAT tool. Regards, Richard Tregaskis Western Standard Support Em: support@westernstandard.com Ph: 801-224-7404
I'm not sure about the part that "professionals don't use Publisher". Certainly graphics professionals don't; when I earned my bread that way I usually used software like PageMaker, Quark Xpress or FrameMaker, nowadays Adobe InDesign seems to be the tool of choice. But I wouldn't think of some engineer in a technical department who uses Microsoft Publisher to write a manual as being unprofessional. Just foolish maybe, but no more so than the ones who use CorelDraw or even MS PowerPoint (!!!) in the same crazy way. People make the choices they do in the circumstances they work in, and professionals try to meet them at least halfway where possible to accomplish the necessary objectives. Fluency does that in the case of Microsoft Publisher, but one would do a service to the customer to suggest that another publishing platform might suit their needs better in the same way that responsible translation consultants often suggest that PDF is perhaps not the ideal format to provide for translation, and that the original format (if it isn't a Microsoft Publisher file or paper) might work better for everyone.
What concerns me about the response of Fluency's technical support, however, is the apparent lack of concern for the compatibility of their XLIFF files. If these cannot be exchanged readily with other platforms, one must ask what actual purpose they serve. Indeed, what would that be? And, perhaps, whether Fluency is really to be taken seriously as a professional platform for translation work.
Some years ago in a period where it looked a bit dark for my platform of choice, I thought that Fluency showed promise as a working platform, and I made a serious effort to investigate its suitability for my routine work as a translator of legal and scientific material. I was charmed by the generally functional approach to transcription, but the translation side of things was less encouraging, riddled with bugs at nearly every stage. After a few days I ran screaming back to more stable, well supported work platforms. The handling of SDLPPX (SDL Trados Studio package files) in particular was the sort of disaster one doesn't easily forget; even with products whose developers care about functionality and compatibility there are issues time and again as the SDL Trados platform evolves. I can only imagine what would happen with Fluency Now if I tried out one of those test files that a friend at SDL likes to play tricks on me with.
XLIFF is serious business. These days it is often the basis not only of interoperable processes with CAT tools but for all manner of bilingual exchange processes. And thus, until the technical support and/or development department of a tool takes this format seriously and makes a reasonable effort to ensure at least basic interoperability, that tool cannot be taken seriously for professional work.
I looked at Fluency some years ago, and while I found some interesting things there, such as its transcription module, on the whole the application never seemed ready for prime time with its sloppy programming of details. I spent some time trying to persuade its underfunded team to correct some of the problems I saw, but after a while it became clear that the company and its product were not able to cope with the demanding technical challenges routinely faced by language service providers today.
The discussion which followed the posted question suggested a number of approaches, but if the colleague's client expected to receive a translated PUB file instead of some other format, the only realistic option for this possibly one-off job would be to use Fluency in some way. I assumed (and suggested) that a workflow involving
might do the trick (with the exchange format probably being XLIFF, but otherwise the bilingual RTF format that I remembered from my tests of Fluency long ago.)
And so it proved to be. But the Devil is in the details.
The first sign of trouble came from a colleague - a professor at a local university who is known for his technical curiosity and flexibility in translation courses - who told me that Fluency does indeed offer an XLIFF export but that memoQ experienced problems importing it. His description of the error message sounded a lot to me like the typical mistakes that CAT tool programmers who are XLIFF newbies make when implementing a spec that they are probably too lazy to read and test. (I found the same error myself and submitted it to memoQ Support for comment a few hours ago.) He said that he had then tried the RTF export, but it wasn't clear to me what the result was and he was under time pressure, so I didn't press the matter but resolved to have a look myself.
I assume that "terminology" download is some silly, unhelpful public domain dictionary I would never use.
The Fluency user interface offered a sort of WYSIWYG representation for the text, which makes it appear not bad for work, though appearances are deceiving. In fact, this proved to be a source of some trouble later.
As mentioned, the XLIFF export could not be used in memoQ, and although I am capable enough of analyzing structure problems in a tagged file, I wasn't in the mood to clean up someone else's mess, so I exported a "Fluency Work File" as my next attempt. That is app jargon for a bilingual RTF file similar to that found in other applications.
The difference with Fluency RTFs is that they include the WYSIWYG text representation. Nice, really, and this makes the work in another environment a little easier. I copied the source text column and pasted it into a new file (DOCX), then imported that to memoQ for translation:
Afterward, the translation exported from memoQ was pasted into the target column of the Fluency Work File (bilingual RTF exchange file). I imported that bilingual file back into Fluency and then exported a translated PUB file using the File / Save As command. I got a strange error message saying that there had been some trouble with the export and that some manual adjustment might be needed in Microsoft publisher.
At first glance I thought, "Looks OK" and then... WTF??? Everything was OK except the title. Not only was the text cut off, it was not even the text I had translated in German. When I copied the text out of the field and pasted it into Notepad, this is what I saw:
Tag der Tag der kulturellen Vielfalt kulturellen Vielfalt Vielfalt kulturellen Vielfalt kulturellen Vielfalt Vielfalt kulturellen Vielfalt kulturellen Vielfalt Vielfalt
No joke. Fluency somehow went berserk exporting the text of the title field, and sliced, diced and multiplied the whole mess in a truly bizarre way.
In my nearly 5 decades of casual and occasionally professional programming I have seen almost every stupidity imaginable, so in this case I imagined that somehow the problem lay in sloppy programming associated with text that is longer than the space provided in the field. Interestingly, Fluency enabled me to change the size of the target text in the translation window, so I reduced it by about half and tried to export a new target PUB file.
That worked in fact. So Fluency can indeed be used as a sort of filter for Microsoft Publisher files to be translated in other tools such as memoQ, but the process is not without trouble on the Fluency side, at least when text overruns the field size available, as one might expect to happen with some frequency.
Western Standard offers a 15-day trial of Fluency Now, their desktop tool for freelance translators, and the application can be paid on a monthly subscription of only 15 US dollars. So perhaps for the occasional project or client that requires work with PUB files that is an option. Microsoft Publisher is not taken seriously as a layout and publishing tool by graphics professionals and CAT tool providers, but because it is part of the Microsoft Office suite, one will find it in use from time to time, and this imperfect solution may be the best option for helping such clients.
Click this graphic for more information and registration....
Didier Briel, current project manager of the Open Source OmegaT CAT tool, will discuss what makes this language service community resource unique, how it can enable you to work together comfortably in teams with others who use different tools (interoperability) and other interesting matters.
Have a look and see if this is the versatile, multi-platform tool you've been looking for!
One reason to keep translation environment tool licenses up to date is that new formats continue to appear. New formats for translatable files as well as new file formats for the tools that help to process files for translation. Very often I have heard some "professional" say "I'm a translator, not a [fill in the blank]. If the client wants this translated, I'll have to get it in a Microsoft Word file." Or something like that.
Let's get real for a moment.
That attitude is simply lazy and disrespectful toward translation consumers who would like to make use of one's services and
a lot of money is being left on the table here in many cases. I built a huge clientele at the start of the last decade, because my use of translation environment tools like Trados, Déja Vu, STAR Transit and Wordfast enabled me as an individual to tackle translation challenges that many agencies at the time had no concept of how to cope with.
As translation agencies have acquired more technical tools, most of them still remain unfortunately unaware of how to use them properly or plan more than the simplest workflows well, but that's a subject for another day. Also...
... by using tools and techniques that are compatible with what your clients require for a final format, you can save your client a lot of time and money for further layout work - and probably avoid the introduction of errors in your translation work in its final format as well.
And in my experience, showing technical and process competence to benefit clients usually leads to greater trust and better work together.
So what has all this got to do with Wordfast?
Well... I didn't like the Wordfast brand for a very long time. Its various incarnations were perhaps the weakest of the popular tools in a technical sense, and inevitably when agency friends called me, desperate to fix some massive translator screw-up (usually by somebody in France), Wordfast "Pro" was often involved in the disaster.
I looked at the "newer" Wordfast versions a number of times over the years, and honestly they always seemed like lobotomized wannabe tools. This was about the time that many other toolmakers were trying to decide if they should support XLIFF.
Well, a lot has changed since then. I became aware of the changes the other day when somebody posted a question in a social media forum for memoQ asking how to handle Wordfast Pro 5 GLP packages. I had never heard of these, so of course I was curious and decided to take a look. This finally led me to download a 30-day trial of the latest Wordfast Pro software to evaluate its potential for interoperable work with other translation environments. I see a lot of changes since my last look, and so far I think they are all positive, and along the way I had good cause to look at Wordfast Anywhere, the free web-based CAT tool that I talked some university colleagues into not wasting their time with a while ago. Well, my recommendation in that regard might change, but that and commentary on the latest incarnation of WF Pro will have to wait for another day.
About those GLP packages....
Yes, those. This was the question:
Someone pointed out that GLP files - like every other translation "package" one finds from all the tool providers - are merely ZIP files with particular structure inside and the extension re-named.
Gotta love Facebook. You'll always get an answer in some group, usually a wrong one. That's why I keep a blog. Good information gets buried in social media noise too often, and good luck finding it in any kind of search. In this case... we don' have no steenkeen TXML files as I learned... that's the old Wordfast Pro....
A colleague in Germany kindly provided me with a little GLP package to examine, which I promptly unzipped. I noticed that at least one tool (7-Zip) sees through the renamed extension nonsense and saved me the usual trouble of renaming it before unpacking.
So far, so good... inside the folder for the unpacked GLP file I found the following:
The test package was an English to Portuguese project. But source? Hello? Let's have a look there!
Very interesting. The original source files (English) came along for the ride. This is good, because I often like to translate source files in memoQ - taking advantage of the preview there for many file types - and then use the translation memory to translate the file that is created by other other tool (usually SDL Trados SDLXLIFF files in my work). Now let's have a look inside the pt target folder. There's actually another folder named txlf inside that one. And there I found:
No TXML files! TXLF is a new instance of the rather ubiquitous XLIFF files one finds in the translation world, some of which have some rather bothersome "extensions" that may require special handling in the translation process. In the simple test I performed, none of that was apparent; an ordinary XLIFF filter seemed to work well. Future tests will show me if there are any quirks I hope, but so far, so good.
So one strategy, with pretty much any CAT tool, would be to unpack the GLP file, get at those TXLF files and then bring them into another working environment using an XLIFF filter. Maybe also use my approach with the source files too, which will ensure that you can deliver a good target file even if quirky tags in the XLIFF lead you to produce less than an optimal result there.
The current version of memoQ (8.4) does not recognize the TXLF extension, so as in all such cases, the All files option must be used and the correct filter applied in a later dialog. Unlike with some other tools, memoQ cannot be "trained" by the user to recognize new extensions as far as I know.
But what about importing the GLP files directly to memoQ? Wouldn't that be nice? And I thought it might be possible using the ZIP file filter recently introduced (and the same All files trick to get the GLP file and apply the ZIP filter later). Well...
It looked promising.
So much so that I even optimistically named and saved a custom configuration for the ZIP filter. All I need to do now is cascade an XLIFF filter!
Ack. Sooooo close. I've been here before. There are more things in heaven and down-to-earth cascading formats, Kilgray, than are dreamt of in your philosophy! Please, please expand the list of possible cascaded formats sensibly to make better use of this lovely new ZIP filter!
So for now, that's a no-go, but soon? Who knows? If you bother support@kilgray.com and tell the memoQ team how helpful it would be, maybe this and similar problems can be solved with relative ease.
In any case, for now it seems that the unpack-and-do-the-XLIFF approach will work for most anyone with a modern CAT tool. And that's good news, because in today's fast-changing technology environment for translation, interoperability of CAT tools is increasingly important. It is a foolish waste of time to translate in a large number of CAT tools and probably a bad idea to do so in two or three according to my old research. I've usually found that such JOATs are, professionally, often stupid goats who lack the depth in a single major environment or two, which could allow them to get the most out of their tools and serve their clients in the best way with their linguistic skills and subject matter knowledge.
So is the latest Wordfast a tool worth checking out? I don't know yet. But it may be used by colleagues and clients with whom I like to work, and understanding how to share projects and project resources in painless ways will benefit all of us, no matter what our tool preferences may be. Wordfast seems to be developing very much in that spirit, so I will revisit it for more collaboration scenarios in the future.
This post has been updated. The good two-template solution has been improved to make a one-template solution. This is user engagement at its best in the world of memoQ.
Marek Pawelec (aka @wasaty), one of my favorite technical solution finders in translation, has published an effective improvement for those who prefer to do memSource projects in memoQ. I have done a good bit of this in the past, as I greatly dislike the limitations of the memSource local editor and dislike browser environments (from any firm) even more for translation, but the funky interpretation of XLIFF used by that tool requires some custom filter configuration to enable work to proceed without the risk to unrecognized tags. Even so, the inability to transfer match percentage information and locked status for segments gave me more than a few headaches with these projects.
Someone at Kilgray mentioned a while ago that a proper memSource filter had been considered, but that resources were, alas, focused on other priorities, like 8.x "fixes" to features that weren't broken so that life would become more interesting for legal and financial translators whose work was becoming too easy with memoQ 7.8. No matter: once again, Marek has come through with an excellent professional solution for doing memSource better in memoQ.
Some highlights of the template provided:
memSource match rates are visible in memoQ
locked segments stay locked!
"translated" status will be kept
machine pseudo-translated garbage is marked with "MT" status in memoQ
memSource tags can be converted to memoQ tags
populated segments can be given "edited" status
Currently, this template is the best technical solution for working more efficiently and accurately with memSource MXLIFF files in memoQ and will probably remain so until Kilgray does get around to creating a properly integrated filter with configurable options. So if you have valued customers who use memSource but you want to leverage all your memoQ resources to do the work better, Marek's template is for you. Check out the detailed description and instructions on his blog!
It has been interesting to see the behavior of my codornizes since I moved them from the confines of a rabbit hutch in a stall at my old quinta to the fenced, outdoor enclosures in the shade of a Quercus suber grove. In the hutch, they were fearful creatures,panicking each time I opened their prison to give water and food or to collect eggs. Their diet was also rather miserable; the German hunters who first introduced me to these birds for training very authoritatively told me that they ate "only wheat", and I felt bold to offer them anything different like cracked corn or rice. In the concentration camp-like conditions in which they lived, they also developed a serious case of mites and lost a lot of feathers. I thought about slaughtering and eating them as an act of mercy.
Then last spring I moved to a new place with a friend, who built a large enclosure for my goats and chickens. She didn't know about the quail. I brought them one day and hastily improvised an enclosure for them with a large circle of wire fence around a tree, because I was afraid the goats might trample them. There was far more space in this area than they had before, and real, dry dirt for taking dust baths. Soon the mite infestations improved (even before regular dunks in pyrethrin solution began), and the behavior of the birds began to change. They became less nervous, though sometimes when someone approached the enclosure they flew straight up in panic as quail sometimes do and bloodied themselves on the wire.
A few months later I built a much larger enclosure for a mother hen and her chicks to keep them out from under trampling feet or from wandering through the chain link fence of the enclosure into the hungry mouths of six dogs who watched the birds most of the day like Trump fans with a case of beer and an NFL game on the TV. The quail were moved in with the chickens as an afterthought. With nine square meters of sheltered space, the three little birds underwent further transformations, becoming much calmer, never flying in panic and allowing themselves to be approached and picked up with relative ease. They also exhibited a taste for quite a variety of foods, including fresh fruit and weeds such as purslane. Most astonishing of all, they began to lay eggs regularly in an overturned flower pot with a bit of dried grass. Nowhere else. All the reading I've done on quail on the Internet tells me that quail are stupid birds who drop their eggs anywhere, do not maintain nests and seem to have no maternal instincts whatsoever. I am beginning to doubt all that.
At various times in my life I have heard many statements made about the cultural proclivities of various ethnic minorities, but these assertions usually fail to take into account historical background and circumstances of poverty and prejudice, choosing instead to blame victims. In cases where I have seen people of this background offered the same opportunities I take for granted or far less than my cultural privilege has afforded me, I cannot see any result which would offer itself for objective negative commentary.
There are a lot of ignorant assumptions and assertions made about the class of digital sharecroppers known as translators. Some of the most offensive ones are heard from the linguistic equivalents of plantation owners, some of whom have long years of caring for these hapless, technophobic, unreliable "autistics" who simply could not survive without the patriarchal hand of their agencies.
Fortunately, technology continues to evolve in ways which make it ever easier to take up the White Man's Burden and extract value from these finicky, "artistic" human translation resources. The best of breed in this sense could make old King Leopold II envious with the civilization they have brought to us savage translators.
On many occasions, I have advocated the use of various server-based or shared online solutions for coordinating translation work with others. And I will continue to do so wherever that makes sense to me. However, I have observed a number of persistent, dangerous assumptions and practices which reduce or even eliminate the value to be obtained from this approach. It's not a matter of the platform per se, usually, unless it is Across to bear, but too often over the past decade, I have seen how the acquisition of a translation memory management server such as memoQ or memSource or a project management tool such as Plunet, OTM or home-rolled solutions has led to a serious deterioration in the business practices of an enterprise as they put their faith more in technology and less in the people who remain as cogs in their business engines.
As the emphasis has shifted more and more to technologies remote to the sharecroppers actually working the fields of words, a naive belief has established itself as the firm faith of many otherwise rational persons. This is expressed in many ways – sometimes as a pronouncement that browser-based tools are truly the future of translation, often in the dubious, self-serving utterances of bottom-feeding brokers and tool vendors who proclaim the primacy of machine pseudo-translation while hiding behind the fig leaf argument that we need such things to master the mass of data now being generated. It is fortunate for them perhaps that this leaf is opaque enough to hide their true linguistic and intellectual potency from public view.
A related error which I see too often is the failure to distinguish between the convenience of process and project managers and the optimum environment for translating professionals. I don't think this mistake is malicious or deliberately ignores the real factors for optimal work as a wordworker; it's simply damned hard much of the time to understand the needs of someone in a different role. I could say the same for translators not understanding the needs of project managers or even translation consumers, and in fact I often do.
So indeed, the best tool for a project manager or a corporate process coordinator might not be the best tool for the results these people desire from their translators. Fortunately, this is usually a situation where, with a little understanding and testing, both sides can win and work with what works best for them. The mechanism to achieve this is often referred to by the nerdy term "interoperability".
Riccardo Schiaffino, an Italian translator and team leader based in the US, recently published a few articles (trouble and memoQ interoperability) about memSource, a cloud-based tool whose popularity among translation agencies and corporate or public entities with large translation needs continues to grow. High-octane translators like Riccardo and others have trouble sometimes understanding why these parties would choose a tool with such great technical limitations compared to some market leaders like SDL or memoQ, but the simplicity of getting started and the convenience of infrastructure managed elsewhere on secure, high-performance servers with sufficient capacity available for peak use is an understandably powerful draw.
And the support team of memSource and the tools developers are noted for their competence and responsiveness, which is equal in weight to a fat basket full of sexy technical options.
So I will not argue against the use of memSource by agencies and organizational users whose technical needs are not particularly complex and who do not have concerns about a tool almost entirely dependent on reliable, high bandwidth internet connectivity at all times to fulfill its key promises. In fact, it's a good and easy place to start for many, perhaps more so than the rival memoQ Cloud at present, which suffers sometimes from limited capacities (at the same data center used by memSource and others!) during peak use. Unlike the barbed-wire, unstable and unfriendly solution Across, which has achieved some popularity in its native Germany and elsewhere through sales tactics relying on fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding illusionary or delusional data security, memSource works, works well, and the data are portable elsewhere if a company or individual makes another choice some day.
But damn... it's just not very efficient for professional work, especially not for those of us who have amassed considerable personal work resources and become habituated to other tools like SDL Trados Studio, Déja Vu or memoQ like a carpenter is to his time- and work-tested favorite tools. Trading one of these for the memSource desktop editor or, God forbid, the browser-based translation interface feels worse than being forced to do carpentry with cheap Chinese tools cast from dodgy pot metal. Riccardo mentions a few of the disadvantages, and I could fill pages with a catalog of others. But compared to some other primitive tools, it's not so bad, and for those with little or no good experience with leading translation environment tools, it may seem perfectly OK. You don't miss a myriad of filtering options to edit text or sophisticated QA features if you are still amazed that a "translation memory" can spit out a sentence you translated once-upon-a-time if something similar shows up six months later.
And as mentioned, memSource - or some other tool - may indeed be the best solution on the project management side. So what's a professional translator to do if an interesting project is on offer but that platform is unavoidable? Riccardo's tips on how to process the MXLIFF files from memSource in memoQ offer part of a possible good solution which would work almost equally well in most other leading tools as well these days. One additional bit is needed in the memoQ Regex Tagger filter to handle the other tag type (dual curly brackets) in memSource, but otherwise the advice given will allow safe translation of the memSource files in other environments. I can even change the segmentation in memoQ if, as usual, the project manager has failed to create appropriate segmentation rules in memSource to accountfor some of the odd stuff one often sees in legal or financial texts, and this does not damage or change the segmentation seen later when the working file is returned to memSource.
Even concerns about the "lack" of access to shared online resources in memSource if an MXLIFF is translated elsewhere are easily addressed. A few useful things for this include:
pretranslation of the memSource files to put matches into the target before transferring to other environments,
leaving the browser-based or desktop editor for memSource open in the background for online term base or TM look-ups, and
occasionally exporting and synchronizing the MXLIFF in memSource to make the data available to team members working in parallel on a large project - this takes just a minute or two and allows one as much time as needed for polishing text in the other environment.
The last tip is particularly helpful to calm the nerves of project managers who are like mother hens on a nest of eggs which they fear might in fact be hand grenades and who panic if they don't see "progress" on their project servers days before anything is due. One can show them "progress" every twenty minutes or so without much ado if so inclined.
I am past the point where I recommend any translation memory management server in particular for agency and corporate processes. There are advantages to each (except Across, where these are actually hallucinations) and disadvantages, and where I see real problems, it is seldom due to the choice of platform but rather the lack of training and process knowledge by those responsible for the processes. The bright and shining prospects of a translation server are easily sold with a slick tongue, but without an honest analysis and recommendation of needs for initial and ongoing staff training these too often end up being bright and shining lies. I think very often of a favorite German customer who invested heavily in such a system four or five year ago and has not managed one single successful project with the system in all that time. This makes me sick to think of the waste of resources and possibilities.
So on the project management and process ownership side, memSource may be a great choice. Certainly some of my clients think so, and the improvements in their business often back this belief up. And for those who work with gangs of indigent, migrant or sharecropping translators whose marginal existences make the investment in professional resources like SDL Trados Studio or memoQ seem difficult or undesirable, it may be all that is needed by anyone.
The good news for those who depend on the efficiency of a favored tool, however, is that with a few simple steps, we need not compromise and can get full value from our better desktop tools while supporting interesting projects based in memSource. So each side of the translation project can work with what works best for them, without loss, compromise, risk or recriminations.
And the translating quail who start out in a dark box with a stunting lack of possibilities can look forward to the real possibilities of work liberation in a larger environment richer in healthy possibilities and rewards.
Last night from 6:00 to 9:30 I enjoyed a "memoQ&A Evening" at the Porto Bagel Café as a reward for surviving the long bus ride to Porto/Gaia from Évora to attend the JABA Partner Summit. About 25 local colleagues attended to hear my not-as-short-as-promised presentation and discuss approaches to memoQ and other translation technologies as our working tools. The evening was part of the Translators in Residence initiative and a good start to my second visit to the area after my whirlwind tour last month to investigate venues for teaching events. Many thanks to the sponsors. the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters and Chip7 of Évora for providing the funding and tools (an excellent LCD projector - thank you, Carlos!) to do this.
I very much appreciate IAPTI's commitment to the professional education and continuing development of my good colleagues in Portugal, particularly in difficult economic times when many findit difficult to attend translators' events in faraway places. The evening was free for all attendees, who only had to pay for whatever they drank (great coffee - I had my usual galão) and ate (the best bagels in Portugal!).
After an initial hour of snacks, coffee and chat, the evening began with a discussion of the game-changing implications of speech recognition technologies for our working lives. Not only is it now possible for colleagues to use high-quality speech recognition on desktop computer and laptops in languages such as Hungarian and Portuguese, which are not currently supported by Dragon NaturallySpeaking (using, for example, the integrated recognition tools in the Mac Yosemite OS, as demonstrated with SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in Lisbon the day that SDL conquered Portuguese translation), smartphones are part of the game now too. Since picking up an older iPhone model (4S) for a few hundred euros about a month ago, I have had excellent results testing it with English, German, Russian and Portuguese and e-mailing texts to myself with just a few taps on the phone's screen. Once transferred as an e-mail, the text is then aligned in a CAT tool such as memoQ and subjected to tagging, QA and other procedures of the usual virtual translation working environments.
The use of memoQ and other CAT tools for single-language original authoring and text revision was also discussed. This flexible workflow extends the relevance of translation environment tools well beyond the usual limits within which translators and translation companies live and operate and offers interesting prospects for collaboration and re-use of creative resources. This topic willalso be covered next week in a lecture and workshop at Universidade de Évora and in an eCPD webinar on June 2, 2015.
Interoperability is another important topic for translators; I discussed different ways in which I use SDL Trados Studio and other tools to prepare projects to work in memoQ and vice versa as well as mz highly profitable use of SDL Multiterm to enhance customer loyalty and my professional image with this terminology management ssystem's excellent output management features.
Other tips and tricks in the memoQ&A included the untapped potential of LiveDocs, tracked changes and row histories in memoQ, dealing with embedded objects, graphics and transcription, PDF 3-ways and new tricks for nasty and/or illegible image PDFs, versioning and a concept for transforming translation memory concordancing into something much, much more useful and less prone to errors in editing and translation.
Copies of the slides from the evening's presentation are available here. It is, however, merely a palimpsest of the evening.
Many thanks also to colleague and translation tools teacher Felix do Carmo for kindly chauffeuring me around town and for the interesting tour of the training and production facilities at his company, TIPS.
For those planning to attend the upcoming university event for SDL technology in Lisbon, be aware that the imams and imamas of the bulk market bog have issued a fatwa against it for the dangerous agitation expected among wordworkers in attendance, who may discover better ways to master a leading translation environment tool and free themselves from the local piecework slavelancing conditions. In particular, revelations that one can collaborate with users and abusers of other translation tools and challenge the divine infrastructure of Linguistic Sausage Producers in orgies of interoperability caused considerable controversy in meetings of Board Members Without Boundaries and Transwordling, who have worked hard to spread the needed money and manure in the field to ensure rich corporate yields for years to come. His Hendzelness the First and Only, pope of the Premium Church of Translation, decried this and other heresies, such as calls for professional translators associations freed of the commercial guidance of their betters at the production of linguistic sausage, in his New Year's sermon to an admiring crowd of underage Czech and Bulgarian colleagues. Those who hope to have a real future should boycott events such as the one planned at Universidade Nova de Lisboa on January 22nd and instead do some real good for the world and volunteer free translation of materials to inform the world that Robert Mugabe is the greatest defender of African dignity against colonialist aggression.
It's been two years and two days since my first arrival at The End of the Earth, prodigal Portugal, immersed in the agony of grief over its lost colonies, where the people still stubbornly refuse to understand how worthless an Agrarland is and that the world needs the machines made in small German villages to run at the tempo dictated by the Bundesbank, Siemens et alia, and flawed human hearts still beat in defiance of the better-engineered alternatives implanted in Merkel and her cronies. Since my transplantation to this Unworthy Place of sun, sangria and sex, I have conspired with other unworthies to continue producing the propaganda of futile resistance to the Borg juggernaut of machine pseudo-translation and the undeniable value it offers as evidenced by the breathless exclamation of leading translation technologits that some translators are actually using it.
In the spirit of that tradition, in 2015 Translation Tribulations hopes to expand its range of heresies to include cartoons honoring the Prophet Mohammed, thepigturd, Mantis/Orbe, Lyingbridge and other Great Leaders who show us how life can be if only we would submit. To that end, the office at Quinta Branca is working to acquire two young goats to provide the necessary therapy for those who dispute the power of the pen as opposed to Le Pen.
Comfort for a frustrated artist forbidden to draw people, about to embark on a new career as a wannabe terrorist
The Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon is pleased to invite you to a day of talks on SDL Trados, with special guest speaker Paul Filkin, Director of Client Communities for SDL Language Solutions.
Event schedule (subject to updates)
10:00 Welcome
10:15 – 11:30 “SDL Open Exchange” with Paul Filkin
11:30 – 13:00 “Voice Recognition (Portuguese and English) and CAT Tools for translation and PEMT” with David Hardisty, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. This session will show how to use voice recognition to post-edit machine translation, how voice recognition is available in Portuguese, and how it can be used to cope with physical disability (such as cerebral palsy).
LUNCH !!!
14:00 – 15:40 “SDL Trados Clinic” with Paul Filkin. In this session Paul will invite the audience to raise common issues they have with Trados, and cover other common issues and solutions.
16:00 – 17:00 “SDL Trados and Interoperability with other CAT Tools” with Kevin Lossner. This session will present various ways to use SDL Trados to work successfully with those who have other translation environment tools such as memoQ, OmegaT, etc.
Presenters
Paul Filkin has worked for SDL Language Solutions since 2006. His main focus is evangelizing and helping users of SDL technology get the most out of their investment and is often found on social media providing advice wherever needed. His blog “Multifarious” describes some of the practical challenges for translators and translation companies and how to resolve these with SDL technology in the mix.
Kevin Lossner has a healthy skepticism of translation technologies where it is not clear if they serve their users or the other way around. His blog “Translation Tribulations” discusses SDL Trados Studio, memoQ and more and is the ultimate authority on chocolate chip cookies in Évora, Portugal.
David Hardisty has taught Translation Tools at FCSH/UNL to undergraduate and postgraduate students since the inception of the Translation Programmes at FCSH. He has also worked with Technology in the teaching of ELT and in the last 25 years has co-authored five books published by Oxford University Press.
Isabel Rocha is a Spanish to Portuguese translator with thirty years of experience. She has completed the curriculum component of the Masters in Translation at Lisbon University and preparing to write her thesis.
Joana Bernardo is a Masters Student at FCSH/UNL. She has also studied Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the same university. She became interested in Translation after a summer internship at a subtitling company.
All professionals and students with an interest in modern translation technologies and working methods are welcome to attend this free event. For more information, please contact: David Hardisty [david1610.dh (at) gmail.com] – or just surprise us with your smiling face at the door. Where the heck is this?
Click this graphic to see the location using Google Maps!
Just kidding, actually. Facebook groups are, of course a buzz with tales of bugs and crashes the day after Kilgray's milestone release, and in my own office I heard a flurry of curses behind me as my Portuguese translator discovered the "can't quit" bug that someone had written about. This was just a short time before I delivered the last files for one of the busiest weeks of translation I've been hit with in months, weeks where I decided to live dangerously and do all the work with the bleeding-edge beta for yesterday's release. For me it was actually a rather bloodless experience.
Sure, I saw bugs. Screen refresh weirdness in the first few beta builds and my favorite (non-lethal) quirk: multiple instances of memoQ web search. I guess the developers figured we can't get too much of a good thing!
Triple play, anyone?
I didn't write as much about this release as I intended to originally, partly because I was too busy, but also because I took a very different approach this time, using the beta opportunity to do a little informal psychological research to support some upcoming tutorials I'm working on to help people make a smooth transition to the new interface and cope better with the costly challenges of flipping between versions if required to by some projects (for example with conservatives who still use old memoQ servers.
Those who are not absolute newbies on the technology scene are well aware that the months after any release from any provider of translation technology are always a risky time for those eager to get started with a new version. The prudent advice to anyone is don't hurry. There's no use slamming Kilgray or SDL or anyone other firm for the inevitable bugs after any release, at least not until two or three months have passed and the version has put through the real-life wringer in a way no testing program can do. After that, fair game as far as I'm concerned. Those first months are usually a critical time in which many improvements not even anticipated by the designers occur. So regardless of the official line, people, for the next three months any of you using memoQ 2014 R2 are beta testers. And that's a good thing, a chance to participate in a good development process. SDL Trados Studio users, DVXn fans and everyone else are on more or less the same curve each time a big upgrade hits.
In my beta test over the past month I made few attempts to explore new features. Instead, I focused on my usual workflows to see how they felt in the new environment. As I indicated in my first blog post on this release I was not entirely comfortable after a week of work just with thew new version. And I'm still not. I am less productive than I want to be, because changing the translation environment interface is always a costly process associated with reduced productivity. This is why I am such a strong advocate of interoperability and tell people to go deep with their environment of choice and learn how to work with information prepared in other environments with just your favorite tool for maximum efficiency and better earnings if you work at full capacity.
What I have learned so far is that this learning curve will be longer and steeper for me than I anticipated. However, the Kilgray ribbon designs for the new memoQ are well-designed for the most time, and I can reason my way through them and find anything. It just takes time right now. So make the transition when you aren't going to be under the gun for a while. Kick the tires soon (you can install versions in parallel at no risk) but take it slow and easy. The trip may be long, but it is clearly worth it in the end for a design that will benefit most in the long run.
And focus on keyboard shortcuts. The more you depend on those, the easier your work will be in the months ahead. Stay tuned.
