Resources for learning European Portuguese (A1-B2)

When I first moved to Portugal eleven years ago, I resolved to avoid the difficulties I had experienced as an exchange student in Germany many years before, where my northern German accent and academic style of speaking caused bartenders and salespeople in the Saarland to refuse service shortly after my arrival. So in Évora, I decided to learn the language "of the street" from neighbors, shopkeepers and daily tasks. It was a slow process to be sure, but I soon learned that other options were hardly available in the interior; even the local university offered essentially nothing except an A1-level course for Erasmus students, which was poorly attended (and often canceled) due to the lack of coordination among the faculty. In that city and in the border town I moved to a few years later, there were also neither language schools nor established, reliable tutors available. The few who could be found had issues with low business volumes and soon ceased their registered commercial activities.

In the heavily populated coastal regions with a large number of immigrants or tourists with money, there are a number of good programs at universities or private institutions, but the time commitments for these (typically weeks or months of full-time attendance) were not really compatible with my lifestyle and work schedule, and the most highly recommended programs cost thousands of euros that I needed for other things.

When it came time to take the CIPLE exam to certify A2-level competence for my permanent residence (which is also required for citizenship for those not married to a Portuguese citizen), I enrolled in online courses offered by the Camões Institute in Lisbon. These had three options: an entirely self-guided program, and two programs with some level of interaction with an assigned tutor for 30 minute sessions each or every other week. I opted for the latter, and the excellent tutors (who in my case were usually native Portuguese enrolled in some graduate program in Spain) were probably the main reason I was able to pass the exam and get my título da residência permanente. The actual exercises in the online courses weren't very good (except for the writing assignments), and I found a lot of functional errors in some of them. Plain sloppy programming, which is really shameful in a country that hosts the Web Summit every year.

My early explorations of apps available for language learning a decade ago were not very satisfying. Flashcard programs like Anki or Memrise are really too limited for achieving any kind of functional competence, and at the time I found nothing with any kind of systematic structure for acquiring basic grammar and conversational skills. I could open and read an entirely Portuguese grammar book and understand the content without difficulty because the concepts were largely familiar to me from other language study, but without some systematic practice or more social opportunities in the country, the grammar books were of little real use.

One hears that "immersion is critical", and when I moved to Portugal, I assumed that my learning curve would be even faster than it was years before for German, Russian and Japanese, but there's immersion in the shallow end of a language, with simple, comprehensible input to build a foundation of basics, and then there is immersion in the fast river of daily adult life with bills to pay and neighbors and authorities of all kinds to deal with, where in the comfortable slumber of a language novice, it is more likely that "human voices wake us, and we drown".

For a long time, the only "comprehensible input" (in Krashen's sense) that I could find to help improve my Portuguese was the podcast "Portuguese with Leo", which is intermediate level, about right for me by the time I discovered it, but still lacking the content I needed to patch up gaps in my competence.

Duolingo, allegedly the world's most popular language learning app, while helpful for basic Spanish, simply sucks whale dork when it comes to learning Portuguese for Europe or Africa. People have no idea how bad and useless its teaching of Brazilian Portuguese is for a visit to Portugal until they get here and realize that what they hear sounds nothing like what they learned. There's nothing wrong with Brazilian, and if I were planning to visit Brazil or spend a lot of time with people from there, I would certainly spend time mastering the quirks of pronunciation and the great differences in vocabulary and grammar in informal speech particularly, but for Portugal all that is simply unhelpful in the extreme. The differences are far greater than between ordinary speech in the UK and the US, for example, and on my first visit to London in 1977, I understood almost nothing of the directions people gave me on the street. In what was supposed to be my native language. So don't expect to get far with Brazilian in Portugal. Even if you are a native speaker from Brazil, the pace and manner of speech here may make you feel like a victim of a traffic accident.

But meanwhile, there are a few good apps and sites that focus on European Portuguese and may help you prepare for holidays or life in Portugal. The best of these I've found are described below.

I didn't realize until someone in a Facebook language learner's group mentioned the Practice Portuguese app that I had actually discovered and subscribed to their YouTube channel some time ago. But I didn't pay enough attention to the YouTube content to realize that there was something more on offer and that this something was, to a large extent, something useful for me, even after eleven years of living in Portugal and a competence level that allows me to conduct daily business and socialize in my hunting club without a lot of difficulty.

I'm currently working my way through the A1 level of the Practice Portuguese iOS app and website, though I also skip ahead and enjoy a lot of the B1/B2-level content in lessons, videos, podcasts, etc. After a few days of looking at the free content, I decided to subscribe (the best deal here is via the web site, not the online app stores for phones and tablets), and I am finding a lot of useful material to fill basic knowledge gaps even at the simplest level. I'm also impressed by the well-considered and somewhat original options for review, including the recently introduced "audio review" option.

One of the things that distinguishes the content of Practice Portuguese from Duolingo, for example, is that the voices used in the app are real ones (sometimes with shitty audio and a lot of background noise, but there is always a button to click and hear the same expression in a clear, noise-free native speaker's voice). The use of a large number of different speakers is helpful, I think, to recognize some of the different pronunciation one might encounter, and this is often dealt with explicitly in the lessons. Not differences between Brazil and Portugal but rather how one might here something in Lisbon as opposed to Beja or Braga.

Another resource I found recently is "Conversa Portuguese". It uses the Learnworlds platform (similar to Teachable, which I use sometimes to offer online CAT tool instruction for memoQ) and has what looks like a well-structured program for those needing Portuguese competence for countries other than Brazil. The platform also offers quite a number of useful, free resources for practice. I've looked at these resources, and I like them, but I haven't tried the commercial instruction program (yet) for lack of time. I hope to do so later this year and offer an in-depth report on what I find.

***

Some may wonder how it is that I can still find useful learning opportunities for European Portuguese with programs like Practice Portuguese or Conversa Portuguese, given that I've lived in the country for so long, I have a Portuguese partner with whom I share a farm and a life, and I've had a lifelong reputation of being "gifted" with languages (said reputation being largely unearned and taken seriously mostly by monolinguals). Well, I ask myself that too sometimes, but it is what it is, and "fluency" is really context-dependent, and depending on one's needs and commitments may differ greatly between individuals. It all really comes down to comprehensible input, I think, and that depends a lot on interests and background. Within a few weeks of coming to Portugal, I could grab an organic chemistry textbook in the library and read it, understanding everything in Portuguese (even though I could pronounce none of it). But it was probably a year before I could reliably order a pizza or tell the butcher just what I wanted.

For my friends and colleagues and others who plan to visit Portugal for a holiday or a professional conference or who may consider living here at some point, the options I have described in this article should give you a good foundation for coping with the variety of Portuguese you'll encounter here and perhaps make the culture of the country a bit more accessible. Portugal is not the Paradise some claim it to be, but of all the places I've lived in my life, I find it the least problematic for the things that matter most to me. Your mileage may differ, but equipped with some basic language skills, you'll be more fit for the journey.

Fail early and often

A guest post by Kevin Hendzel 

Why playing it safe by trying to avoid mistakes is exactly the wrong instinct in translation

We’re all afraid of failure – it’s deeply hard-wired into our genetic code. If our forebears had not succeeded in avoiding all the predators on the primordial savannah by listening to those trembling fears, none of us would even be here today. 

And then there’s the shame of being told we are wrong. We avoid this at all costs because the downsides are so painful -- loss of approval and respect, and a feeling of personal regret.  We’ve all been there.

Novice translators often instinctively avoid these risks by playing it safe, or engaging in what’s called “risk aversion” – clinging to dictionary definitions they can point to later in self-defense, providing literal renderings of the source text and other approval-seeking behavior. 

This is exactly the wrong thing to do.

I learned this lesson as a young rock climber in the arid mountain climate of Arizona.  At high altitudes, novice climbers instinctively cling to the rock face, pulling their face and upper bodies flush to the rock with their arms.  This is totally understandable.  Fear will do that to you when you’re 400 feet up in the air and there’s nothing below you but more rock.

Unfortunately, this is the wrong instinct.  

While your face and upper body feel safer as they cling to the rock, that position pushes the toes of your feet – on which all your weight rests – ever so slightly outward.  It dramatically increases the likelihood that you will slip and fall.

Experienced climbers hold their upper bodies slightly away from the rock face – this pushes their toes and feet into the rock, and gives them greater stability and mobility.  

Experienced translators do this, too.  A lifetime of climbing all over texts has taught them to cling less desperately to that rock face.

Since novice translators lack this experience, another strategy they use is to defend a translation based on their “feeling” for the text, or their “intuition” on how a text should be rendered.  

This is certainly seductive, because we have all experienced how successful this strategy can be in personal interactions with spoken language in social situations where two people are working together to find common ground.  But those conversations are usually in limited domains, rely heavily on visual cues and body language, and are forgiving of errors.

This strategy utterly fails in written translation when it’s just you and the source text staring you in the face.

That’s because it falls victim to a human cognitive flaw. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls it the “WYSIATI Fallacy” (“What You See is All There Is.”)  As Kahneman notes, “It leads a mind to experience high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know.”

Let’s see if I can explain that one a bit better.

Skill in the translation field is a form of wisdom that relies on extended life experience in which we make repeated errors that are then corrected, sculpted and eventually perfected over a period of many years to form the building blocks that we use to convey master-level texts.

This is because translation is not one single skill, but a whole complex chain of specific, precise and in many ways unrelated skills.  These include, among others:

a) The ability to think and navigate in two or more languages simultaneously; 

b) A talent for conveying ideas over complex and often incompatible terrains; 

c) A profound sensitivity to the power and subtleties of different languages; 

d) An artistic flair and ear for composition in your target language;

e) The mastery of exceedingly complex technical, legal, scientific and cultural subjects.

As you can see, “intuition” is a feeble weapon against such a fearsome task.

So try this: Take risks.  Ease away from the rock. Explore different routes and paths. 

In practical terms, when you are first starting out, this means you will fail early and often. But the path to success in translation is paved with an endless cornucopia of errors. We learn and retain more knowledge from the errors we’ve made and learned from than the questions we got right the first time on the test. 

Translation at its best is an essentially collaborative enterprise.  It requires endless learning from each other – mentors, instructors, colleagues and partners – every single day. So take the risk right now of being revised and re-written and corrected.

It’s a lot more fun when we’re all climbing this mountain together.

The Kindness of Strangers and Friends

This day was one of tired celebration. I'm in Lisbon, exhausted and relieved at getting my Portuguese visa renewed after months of over-the-top stress about the difficulties of scheduling a renewal interview in a system badly cracked under strains from international politics of recent years. I used to walk in to an office of Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF) and there would be almost nobody there, and business was settled quickly. Now, even when I tried to book an appointment (walking in is no longer allowed) six weeks in advance, I was given a date for a renewal interview that was three and a half months after my visa would expire. Only by great good luck did I get an earlier date when somebody canceled and my lady called the immigration offices at just the right moment.

I went out to a local restaurant near our Benfica apartment to celebrate alone; the dinner of monkfish and shrimp rice was perfect with a vinho verde tinto.

As I ate, I read various articles on my ever-present iPhone; one - "Helping Others Become Bilingual" in Psychology Today - spoke in particular to my present experience of life and things that have moved me so often in the past six years as I learned a new language and sometimes struggled more than a little to find my way in a new culture I may never understand entirely. The article is basically about kindness.

Kindness is what brought me to Portugal. It is, of course, not a patented property of the country and culture, though I have encountered more of it here than anywhere else, and I believe that there are some cultural factors which cultivate it more than in some other places. The kindness I have experienced in nearly every country, sometimes momentary, sometimes sustained over decades, is the mortar which holds together the foundation of most of what has been good in my life, and some significant part of that has been linguistic kindness in a large part. When I was an exchange student in the Saarland many years ago, I was welcomed into homes of people who spoke a dialect I found baffling, and they kindly tolerated my lack of understanding, never ostracized nor criticized me and patiently translated bits like "Hoscht gess?" into more familiar forms like "Hast du gegessen?". As a consequence, the many dialects of the Saarland and Rhine-Palatinate region of Germany will always have a special place in my heart.

Poland taught me that the language of kindness need not be verbal. I was buying bread one morning while attending a professional conference, and I had tied my young wire-haired vizsla Jambor to a metal chair outside the bakery. The air brakes of a bus frightened him, and he took off running across a busy street. I screamed No!!! and ran after him into the street, falling full length in front of a car which stopped just in time not to kill me. I ran after my dog and he raced down the sidewalk opposite; after several hundred meters some pedestrians managed to stop him before he ran out into a busy intersection, where he might very well have been killed. I held my young dog, shaking and crying, wondering how it was that we were still alive. The voices around me were comforting, but I understood nothing; I just shook until an old man quietly put his arm over my shoulder, and I could breathe again. I returned to the bakery with the bent and broken chair, expecting to be screamed at for the destruction, but the owner of the shop invited me and my dogs (Ajax, my Drahthaar, was also with me and also managed not to get killed as he followed me on the run) inside and gave me tea, telling me not to worry.

The Dutch are known for being brusque and rude, but in that crudest of cultures I have experienced kindnesses I can never describe without tears and memories of clients who have become friends who will never be forgotten wherever they go.

Such stories are everywhere, and I suspect nearly everyone, anywhere, has at least a few. Bilinguals surely have some, more like a lot, of kindnesses shown when they stumbled and fell over new or rusty tongues. Today again I had my share, in the SEF interview where I proudly mangled the Portuguese language with a patient immigration clerk, at dinner tonight as the waiter kindly confirmed my dessert order while teaching me the correct way to pronounce the fruit I wanted and many times in between.

My six years have, I think, given me some insight into what it might be like for some of the many refugees and immigrants in this world as they struggle to come to terms with new languages and cultures, often without the financial and other material resources I have and with backgrounds and skin colors that might inspire less sympathy than mine usually do. When I think life in my wonderful country of choice can be hard at times I feel shame when I remember how much harder some things are for so many others.

I spent time living in a very poor neighborhood of Évora, because I wanted to get away from all the educated Portuguese who would immediately switch to English with me. The Psychology Today article brought back many memories of that time and the extraordinary kindness of the people who, upon being told that I was not returning to the country of my birth, but instead intended to make theirs my home, welcomed me and patiently taught me new words and lavished me with kindnesses of every degree on my many walk with the dogs through their streets. The local grocery workers even took extra time to show me local foods and teach me to pronounce all the things I pointed to buy.

My goodnight graphic

I am not always kind in return, not even with those who are kindest to me, and that is simply wrong. My beautiful doutora spoke the most miserable English when we met, and I was grateful for her patient communication and complete acceptance of my complex and usually difficult self, but now that she has achieved an English fluency that would make her a good international lecturer I unkindly nitpick her word choices and burst with impatience and yet another fucked-up participle that anyone would understand anyway with no trouble. And I fail to give credit most of the time when I steal her original perversions of English and pass them off as my own linguistic creativity with the applause of my professional peers. Yes, I am a plagiarist of sorts, probably, and an ingrate in any case.

Of course, I have professional justifications for being a linguistic asshole; I feel - probably rightly so - that my strict separation of languages I use is necessary to keep my edge as a writer and translator and not fall into the incompetent muck that is the medium of the bulk market translation service bog. I cringe when I see the actual incompetence of some language professionals who are not quite Dunning-Kruger cases but are at least not in the fraction of the top percent that so many of my friends inhabit. But I'm getting that all wrong in most respects. As some others do too.

Michael Moore made the point well in his autobiography when he wrote of his time with writer Kurt Vonnegut in that great man's last year. Kurt said that his son Mark had figured out the meaning of life for him, with all its senselessness and pain. "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." That's about right.

"Unprofessional translation" and CAT tools

Those who came to this post expecting more ammunition for the war against the deprofessionalization of translation by the exploitative practices of the bulk market bog inhabited by the worst of (dis)service companies like Lionbridge, TransPerfect, thebigword and others will be disappointed. Nor will they find anything useful to combat the many technophobic misunderstandings and actual abuses of professional tools by sometimes less than bilingual wannabes whom some hope to keep away from translation by building some sort of virtual wall.

Tools are as useful as what we do with them. Hammers are good to drive nails or posts, depending on their design, weight and other factors, or they can be used to commit grisly murder, as one reads occasionally in the papers. But they can also make nice doorstops or play a part in exercise and sports. Computer-aided translation (CAT) tools or (as they are better known) translation environment tools (TEnTs) are versatile and often useful to solve problems and processes for which they were not originally conceived. The E-Learning, Translation and Ideas Bakery website and blog (included for years now in the blog roll here on the left of the page) by a Romanian colleague who teaches at university in the UK shares a number of concepts that can be described thus, and the Unprofessional Translation blog (also in the list here) which I also follow shares many stories of situations where the usual working tools of my present profession can be applied well to situations beyond the usual commercial or literary borders that most of us set for our work.

I continue to be excited by the possibilities of using TEnTs as an aid in language learning. The fact that these are so seldom used in that way is, for me, evidence of great opportunities missed by teachers and students around the world and perhaps also by the providers of commercial tools, though for the broad market of teachers and learners everywhere I would encourage the use of several excellent free and open source tools like OmegaT and the Heartsome Suite, even the web-based tool of that axis of evil, the Google Translator Toolkit.

I have documented some of my own efforts to use my main professional tool, memoQ, to support my own progress of learning Portuguese since I moved to Portugal six years ago. This was essential for getting a grip on the terminology and expressions needed to pass my weapons license exam in Portuguese when I could barely speak well enough to order breakfast, and I continue to use it as a means to track vocabulary and expressions I encounter in the newspaper, magazines and public notices such as the warning about deadly Asian wasps here (in the graphic at the top of this post). many years ago when learning German, Russian and Sumerian I kept a thick deck of flashcards for reference and practice, and at various times I have used online sites like Duolingo, Livemocha or Memrise to get farther with Portuguese or Spanish vocabulary, but none of these have proven as effective for focused study of a written language than the tools I have on my desktop computer, which enable me to compile corpora and glossaries which are adapted best to my personal situation and needs for language acquisition in a new country and culture.

One welcome difference of using TEnTs for personal projects as opposed to professional work is that one can focus on the parts most needed and need not worry about completing an "assignment". Thus I will maintain corpora with only partial translations or perhaps only simple comments to explain grammatical aspects of particularly challenging sentences. And if there is some useful external quiz engine I want to use for virtual flashcards (or I want to make printed cardstock ones or a cheat sheet to help with discussions at the tax office or sporting goods store) that is easy enough to do with the many data exchange options in memoQ, SDL Trados Studio, OmegaT or whatever.

In the same way that understanding the use of word processing software does not make you a writer, students of language who use translation environment tools are unlikely to become viable translators en masse, even if they may have that as an objective for some reason. As a professional translator, I see the attempts of bulk market providers to engage even competent bilinguals as translators and note with depressing frequency that a fool with a tool remains a fool and that language mastery will go nowhere professionally without mastery of concepts and subject matter details as well. But most people can, I think, get on farther and faster with the many challenges posed by a new language in areas of interest and necessity with the "unprofessional" aid of professional translation tools.

CAT tools for weapons license study

More than a decade ago I found a very useful book on practical corpus linguistics, which has had perhaps the greatest impact of any single thing on the way I approach terminology. Among other things, it discusses how to create special text collections for particular subjects and then mine these for frequently used expressions in those domains. It has become a standard recommendation in my talks at professional conferences and universities as well as in private consultations for terminology.

Slide from my recent talk at the Buenos Aires University Facultad de Derecho

In the last two weeks I had an opportunity to test my recommendations in a little different way than the one in which I usually apply them. Typically I use subject-specific corpora in English (my native language) to study the "authentic" voice of the expert in a domain that may be related to my own technical specialties but which differs in its use of language in significant ways. This time I used it and other techniques to study subject matter I master reasonably well (the features, use and safety aspects of firearms for hunting) with the aim of acquiring vocabulary and an idea of what to expect for a weapons qualification test in Portugal, where I have lived for several years but have not yet achieved satisfactory competence in the language for my daily routine.

It all started two weeks ago when I attended an all-day course on Portugal's firearm and other weapon laws in Portalegre. Seven and a half solid hours of lecture left me utterly fatigued at the end of the day, but it was an interesting one in which I had a lot of aha! moments as I saw a lot of concepts presented in Portuguese which I knew well in German and English. Most of the time I looked up words I saw in the slides or in the course textbook prepared by the PSP and made pencil notes on vocabulary in my book.

Twelve days afterward I was scheduled to take a written text, and in the unlikely event that I passed it, I was supposed to be subject to a practical examination on the safe use of hunting firearms are related matters.

Years ago when I studied for a hunting license in Germany I had hundreds of hours of theoretical and practical instruction in a nine-month course concurrent with a one-year understudy with an experienced hunter. Participants in a German hunting course typically read dozens of supplemental books and study thousands of sample questions for the exam.

The pickings are a little slimmer in Portugal.

There are no study guides in Portuguese or any other language which help to prepare for the weapons tests that I am aware of except the slim book prepared by the police.

There are, however, a number of online forums where people talk about their experiences in the required courses and on the tests. Sometimes there are sample questions reproduced with varying degrees of accuracy, and there is a lot of talk about things which people found particularly challenging.

So I copied and pasted these discussions into text files and loaded them into a memoQ project for Portuguese to English translation. The corpus was not particularly large (about 4000 words altogether), so the number of candidates found in a statistical survey was limited, but still useful to someone with my limited vocabulary. I then proceeded to translate about half of the corpus into English, manually selecting less frequent but quite important terms and making notes on perplexing bits of grammar or tricks hidden in the question examples.

A glossary in progress as I study for my Portuguese weapons license

The glossary also contained some common vocabulary that one might legitimately argue does not belong in a specialist glossary, but since these were common words likely to occur in the exam and I did not know them, it was entirely appropriate to include them.

Other resources on the subject are scarce; I did find a World War II vintage military dictionary for Portuguese and English which can easily be made into a searchable PDF using ABBYY Finereader or other tools but not much else.

Any CAT tool would have worked equally well for my learning objectives - the free tools AntConc and OmegaT are in no way inferior to what memoQ offered me.

On the day of the test, I was allowed to bring a Portuguese-to-English dictionary and a printout of my personal glossary. However, the translation work that I did in the course of building the glossary had imprinted the relevant vocabulary rather well on my mind, so I hardly consulted either. I was tired (having hardly slept the night before) and nervous (so that I mixed up the renewal intervals for driver's licenses and hunting licenses), and I just didn't have the stamina to pick apart some particularly long, obtuse sentences), but in the end I passed with a score of 90% correct. That wouldn't win me any kudos with a translation customer, but it allowed me to go on to the next phase.

Practical shooting test at the police firing range

In the day of lectures, I dared to ask only one question, and I garbled it so badly that the instructor really didn't understand, so I was not looking forward to the oral part of the exam. But much to my surprise, I understood all the instructions on exam day, and I was even able to joke with the policeman conducting the shooting test. In the oral examination in which I had to identify various weapons and ammunition types and explain their use and legal status, and in the final part where I went on a "hunt" with a police commissioner to demonstrate that I could handle a shotgun correctly under field conditions and respond appropriately to a police check, I had no difficulties at all except remembering the Portuguese word for "trigger lock". All the terms I had drilled for passive identification in the written exam had unexpectedly become active vocabulary, and I was able to hold my own in all the spoken interactions - not a usual experience in my daily routine.

The use of the same professional tools and techniques that I rely on for my daily work proved far better than expected as learning aids for my examination and in a much greater scope than I expected. I am confident that a similar application could be helpful in other areas where I am not very competent in my understanding and active use of Portuguese.

If it works for me, it is reasonable to assume that others who must cope with challenges of a test or interactions of some kind in a foreign language might also benefit from learning with a translator's working tools.

memoQ 2014 Release 2: beware of Hungarians bearing updates!

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.