The experience of a new MemoQ user

I have been testing MemoQ for about two years and working actively with it since the breakthrough version 3.5 release. Shortly after I purchased my license, Kilgray offered a great group buy opportunity through ProZ (for far less than I had paid), so we bought a second license for my partner, who had developed a certain fascination with MemoQ or at least the effect that working with it had on me. For weeks she heard such strange squeals of delight from my adjacent office that she began to suspect that my mistress was hiding under the desk. Much to her disappointment, I was simply enjoying the clean design and innovative features of the software.

Although I installed the software on her laptop, it wasn't until many months (and quite a few updates) later that she got around to using it. There's simply too much going on in this office on many days with a heavy work schedule and three hunting dogs who demand their share of attention. Then about two weeks ago, we had a high volume rush project that pushed our capacity to a scary limit and demanded great efficiency in collaboration. Since we don't currently have a good TM server running, I decided to set up the master project on my machine and export bilingual exchange files for parts of the files we worked on. In addition to that, regular exports of TMs and terminologies were exchanged. We also reviewed each other's work by exchanging views in "MemoQ bilingual" format (as this also permitted the exchange of written comments). In the course of several very hard days of work I answered a number of beginner's questions and was occasionally greeting with a "Wow!" or a "This is soooooo much better than...", so I thought that perhaps a little "in-house interview" on Monique's new software experience might be in order.

Translation Tribulations: Ms. Simmer, could you give us some background on your previous experience with translation environment tools?

Monique Simmer: You mean CAT tools? I started using Trados in the 1990s and continue to process files with it [editor's note: Trados Classic] today. I've been using Déjà Vu since 2000. I tried SDLX at some point but didn't like it. And now MemoQ.

TT: What did you like about Trados [Classic]?

MS: Nothing.

TT: What's not to like?

MS: I'm not a sheep and don't fall for sleazy marketing tactics. It doesn't handle numbers and dates. It's full of bugs. Often the target files won't save from TagEditor or there are cleaning problems. Do you really want the whole list? Its creators ought to be tarred and feathered!

TT: How would you compare Déjà Vu with MemoQ?

MS: I don't have enough experience with MemoQ to make a comprehensive comparison. The filters seem to be better. I find that the labeling of menus on the MemoQ screens is not very intuitive sometimes. I got confused between importing and exporting the bilingual exchange files and "ordinary" files. 
On the positive side, it's an easy program to use overall. It's übersichtlich as we say in German. I like the fact that the keyboard shortcuts could be customized so the ergonomics are basically the same as when I use Déjà Vu. And the QA window was very, very useful for checking my work at the end. It caught a few places where I had mistyped numbers.
I also like the fact that I can use more than the two databases, which is the limit for my Déjà Vu Pro license. We've been talking about spending over 1000 euros to upgrade my DV license so I can do this, and now I can do it - and generate uncleaned Trados Word files for some of our customers - without spending all that money on DVX Workgroup.
Oh, yes... one thing that drives me up the wall about the MemoQ editor is that I can't reposition words by dragging and dropping, and the leftmost character is often dropped in selections.

TT: I'm told that version 4 of MemoQ, scheduled to be released next month, will feature a new editor without those problems.

MS: Let's hope so! So far I understand why you like the program. And the kind of support that Kilgray provides is really important.