Proofreading LiveDocs bilinguals, recycling versions in memoQ

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

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

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

Select the corpus and the file in it to export:

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

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

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

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

Here is the updated translation:

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

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

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

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

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

Kilgray offers 101% Support & a free book in February!

During the month of February, Kilgray has been running a special promotion featuring 101% support (i.e. the usual above and beyond the call of duty assistance), which this time also includes a free copy of my memoQ 6 in Quick Steps guide.

If you already own a copy, you can share that special promotional gift with a friend in need as many others have done already with full-priced copies.

I would like to thank Kilgray and my readers for all the kind support of my methods research  and efforts to find better ways for all of us to work together with the often complex software intended to support our efforts. It has been a pleasure and an honor to assist so many of you in recent years.

This special promotion ends on Thursday; if you have recently renewed your support contract it will merely add another 12 months to your remaining term of free support and upgrades.

Clich HERE to extend your Kilgray memoQ Support and Upgrade contract and receive your free code to get the memoQ 6 in Quick Steps book at no cost.

The truth about memoQ 6.x and XLIFF

Lately there has been a lot of disinformation and misinformation being spread by people presumed to be memoQ or other CAT tool 'experts'. What is an 'expert' anyway? A good working definition, I think, is that an expert is someone who is clueless at a higher level. Read whatever you like into that; many days the worst interpretations apply very well to me.

It is often assumed and sometimes explicitly stated that, with the introduction of memoQ version 6 and the new MQXLIFF and MQXLZ (a ZIP file with XLIFF and other resources) formats, memoQ has taken a step backward in compatibility and can no longer produce ordinary XLIFF (or *.xlf) files. This is simply not true!

Kilgray doesn't exactly help the situation by talking about renaming MQXLIFF extensions to XLF; in fact, I have roasted the chief developer of Kilgray slowly over hot coals for this and other silliness and told him how I think this all ought to be handled. (And knowing Gábor, when he does fix it, he'll exceed my best imagination in the quality of his concept.)

But as is often the case, those geeks at Kilgray actually solved the 'problem'; they just forgot their own solution or forgot how to explain it coherently.

First of all, it's important to get the settings right. In memoQ, XLIFF files are saved from the Documents or Views tab of Project home > Translations, by choosing Export bilingual, and the correct settings for the bilingual (XLIFF) file to be shared with other environments or older memoQ versions are:

 

I have boxed the relevant area red for better clarity.

When saving the file, simply change the file extension in the name of the file as you save it as shown here:

When the exported bilingual file is saved to a folder in the file system, a quick check confirms that renaming the file extension in the Save dialog works. (I do this all the time in other software like Notepad).

Now the file can be recognized without further ado and imported into most other environments for translation. The only real "troublemaker" here is, of course Trados. As I reported in September 2011, there is a bug in SDL Trados Studio which screws up the import of XLIFF files in many cases if the sublanguages are not specified or the default major languages do not match. SDL has many priorities, but often it seems that compatibility and standards compliance are not among them; to this day AFAIK the bug remains unresolved!

For users of other tools, this means that to exchange data with Trados users for any purpose, you should get in the habit of specifying sublanguages. This means DE-DE, DE-CH or DE-AT instead of DE for German, EN-US, EN-UK, and so on instead of EN for English. Ain't it great? Brought to you by SDL development. Maybe they'll do a better job once the move to Cluj, Romania is complete ;-)

Update 2013-07-24: Here is a short video illustrating the process of exporting XLF files from memoQ and opening them in SDL Trados Studio:

Fun with the memoQ 6 Client API!

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

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

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

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

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

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

end if

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

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

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

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

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

'build absolute path
tmFolder = standardTMpath & tmFolder

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

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

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

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

end if

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

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

memoQ 6.0.55: The Great Leap Forward with a Client API

Yesterday in the Yahoogroups forum, Kilgray's COO quietly announced the release of a new build of memoQ, which contains some very significant additions and improvements.

Important: memoQ 6.0.55 released 
Mon Sep 3, 2012 12:12 pm (PDT). Posted by: "Istvan Lengyel" 

Hi All, 

Sorry for the long silence since the previous memoQ build - we had something in the making. memoQ 6.0.55 was uploaded to our website today, you can download and install it. This build now supports 64-bit installation, however, we have an issue with AutoUpdate which we may or may not be able to solve (it's third-party software), so for the time being you have to install 6.0.55 yourself from the website, and it may remain so in the future if we can't fix this. Therefore AutoUpdate is not available for an indefinite amount of time. Besides numerous bugfixes, there is new functionality added: 

• - the long-awaited SDLXLIFF filter, 
• - a client-side API - only for users of the project manager edition (hello Paul :)), 
• - on the server side, the possibility to use FirstAccept from content-connected projects. 

We did not release this as a new version as the number of features does not qualify for a full new upgrade. I hope it will meet your expectations. 

István 

There were actually many other improvements; a great number of fixes to bugs in the concordance and LiveDocs, which were driving me nuts. Also, the performance for importing very large XLIFF files (think EU DGT scale!) was improved by an order of magnitude, though to see the full benefit one needs a 64-bit operating system and lots of RAM.

The SDLXLIFF filter should be helpful to the many memoQ users who translate files created in SDL Trados Studio. It has been possible to read this format since it first appeared using thestandard XLIFF filter, but this new filter offers better results.

I am particularly excited by possibilities offered by the new client application programming interface (API). This will enable certain functions of memoQ to be run from other applications, even when memoQ is not active. Available features include analysis and TM functions; I've seen three simple lines of macro code in Microsoft word that will export a memoQ TM to TMX, for example. I think this will lead to many interesting extensions of memoQ functionality and automation. Note that the API is only available in the Project Manager edition, but the additional cost of that version is less than I paid for my Déjà Vu X Workgroup upgrade years ago, and for those who work with multiple target languages or who need additional features for outsourcing and collaboration, an upgrade to memoQ Project Manager makes sense anyway.

And who knows? With rumors of SaaS resources for memoQ on the horizon, I can imagine more reasons to upgrade from memoQ Translator Pro.

Addendum: The documentation for the Client API is found at C:\ProgramData\MemoQ\SDK

Polish colleague Marek Pawelec also commented in the Yahoogroups list:

I'm happy to report that in version 6.0.55 you can import .sdlxliff files with mapping segment states without any hassle (see SDLXLIFF tab in filter settings) and if appropriate option is selected (States tab, Map memoQ states to XLIFF states on export, select SDLXLIFF in Source drop-down), memoQ states are properly mapped back to Studio states.

memoQ 6 desktop: working with other memoQ users

The best methods for memoQ desktop editions to work with other memoQ users are influenced by the versions of the software you and others use. If these versions are compatible, project information can be shared fully, including previews and status settings for the translation. Otherwise, many of the compromises of working with other translation environments apply.

Bilingual exchange files

Bilingual exchange files are generated via Project home > Translations > Export bilingual. If the other person also uses memoQ 6, the best and "friendliest" option is to create a memoQ XLIFF and include the skeleton and preview. The "skeleton" allows target files to be created. For earlier versions of memoQ, a simple XLIFF with the extension changed to XLF or one of the other bilingual formats will do. In memoQ 6, bilinguals are imported using the Import command (and are recognized automatically); in earlier versions, the Import/update bilingual command is used. The tags will always be respected.

If the bilingual DOC format is used for exchange, the finished work must be exported via Export bilingual. Other export commands produce monolingual target documents. The least complicated format to use for users of memo 4.2 to 5.0 is the two-column RTF.

Version 6 TMs and termbases are fully compatible with Version 5 of memoQ, and data can be exchanged with all versions via TMX and delimited formats.

Project backups

A fully configured project with all settings, translation files, TMs, termbases and corpora can be sent by creating a backup. On the memoQ Dashboard, select the project and click Backup selected. Warning: backup files can be very large, so you might want to detach very big TMs first, for example. And of course this requires the same version of memoQ to be used.

Handoff packages (PM version only)

If translations have been assigned by name in Project home > Translations, handoff packages for translators and reviewers, including necessary resources, can be created after running a check on Project home > Overview > General > Handoff checks.This, too, requires the same version of memoQ.

Another point to consider: memoQ versions 5 and 6 can co-exist on the same desktop computer, so if you need to continue working with clients who have the version 5 server, for example, there is little to stand in the way of upgrading to version 6. The only real difficulty might arise if you want to attach corpora you have migrated; this may require restoring the LiveDocs corpora from the backup of the old version or creating a new one.

memoQuickie: "compatible" XLIFF in memoQ 6, 6.2 and 2013

The recent builds of memoQ 6 have caused some confusion with Kilgray following the SDL practice of creating its own extension for XLIFF files, so these may not be recognized by other applications and would need the extensions changed to XLF or something else generally recognizable as XLIFF.

This can actually be done directly in the export dialog for the bilingual XLIFF file. Just change the file extension in the File name field. Despite a renamed extension, the file will be recognized as a memoQ bilingual when re-imported, and the translation of the original file will be updated.

If you encounter a compressed memoQ XLIFF export (MQXLZ), be aware that this is just a ZIP file. Rename the extension to ZIP and unpack it to get the real XLIFF (MQXLIFF) file. That file has a generic name (document.mqxliff) and should probably be renamed before it is shared.

Update 2013-07-23: Here is a short video I posted on YouTube to show how to export an XLF file and open it in SDL Trados Studio: