Get a Q about translation!

Once again, my friends at memoQ Ltd., the software artists formerly known as Kilgray, are offering a great deal:

30% discount

on new licenses for the Translator Pro edition of memoQ, the most versatile professional platform for organizing and performing translation work. The relevant sales page can be found HERE.

Many people who use memoQ these days are only familiar with the limited WebTrans versions linked to a server for slavelancing; with your own desktop edition of memoQ Translator Pro, you need no licenses allocated by server operators and have far more control over the resources used in projects based on remote servers. And, of course, total control over all the projects on your local computer, without dependence on sometimes unreliable online connections.

A memoQ license often makes a lot of sense for translators and reviewers who prefer to work with other tools as well. Each platform for computer-aided translation has its own unique set of characteristics, such as the file formats it can process (a major, major point) and the kinds of operations it can perform to translate, edit, review and quality check texts. This is why, for example, I keep a license of Trados Studio on hand, because certain types of files can be prepared better with that tool, but the actual translation after preparation works better for me in memoQ. Conversely, if you are a user of another tool, such as Trados Studio or Wordfast, file formats which cannot be handled easily in those tools can often be prepared in memoQ as an intermediate stage and then translated in your preferred tool. And powerful features like memoQ's Regex Text Filter, which is basically a build-you-own-filter toolkit for any sort of crazy client-cooked text-based data format, enable memoQ to "serve" a wide variety of other platforms. Just a week ago, for example, I used that feature to build an import filter for the *.ctm format used in Community Trade Mark information in the EU so that XLIFF files could be prepared for memoQ, Trados Studio, etc. and translators and reviewers would no longer have to suffer nightmare's from the EU's badly programmed translation software.

This special price on new licenses is also relevant for current users of memoQ who have not had a support and maintenance agreement (SMA) for some years. The annual SMA cost of memoQ Translator Pro is 20% of the list price of the software (€620) or €124 per year (or the equivalent in other currencies). This entitles the user to deeper-level support and access to all upgrades released during the term of the SMA, even if these are not installed by the time an SMA lapses. Some think there is no "value" in that, because they ask all their questions on a listserve or a Facebook user group, but I've had too much personal experience with corrupted customer files rescued by my Hungarian Heroes to give much credit to that opinion. The memoQ Support team is honestly the best in its class. I have five decades now of experience with software support teams on which I base that opinion. On more platforms than most people can or should imagine.

There is some confusion and occasional resentment about memoQ's policy of cumulating costs for the SMA if someone wants to renew in order to access features in a new version. If you "skip" two years, the cost of those "missing" years is added to the cost of your renewal, and at some point it's just cheaper to buy a new license. What's that point? Let's do the math. There is usually at least some opportunity to get a 30% discount deal at least once a year, and some professional organizations have continuous access to that rate, which would currently be €434 (or about US$ 515 according to xe.com, but if you are in the US or somewhere else and plan to pay in US currency, please check the sales page for the actual price). So...

(434 new license cost)/(124 SMA per year) = 3.5 years

In other words, if you feel you don't need support from the dedicated experts who make the software and need to eat and pay their water and electricity bills just like you, then upgrade (pay the SMA) only every five years (one free year of SMA comes with each new license) and you'll save a little bit of money. This approach actually works best for people who are only occasional users or who rely on other tools for their routine work. The memoQ license continues to work indefinitely with or without the SMA under any Windows operating system with which it is compatible. Unlike a Wordfast or Memsource license, for example, it isn't a subscription which lapses after some period. I still run into memoQ users with ten year old software, and it works just fine for them, and they don't do the SMA. I've heard discussions of possible memoQ subscription (SaaS) models, and there is a cloud-based server that uses that model, but that's not what this special Translator Pro deal is about.

memoQ has a lot to offer, and the user community is full of really great people who offer mutual support for a lot of really tough challenges, as one also finds for many other leading commercial and Open Source tools. As a consultant for translation technology with over 5 decades of IT experience now, I try to make fair comparisons of usability and value and invest what personal time I can afford (or someone pays me to afford) to see what works best for a given individual or organization. And more often or not, the answer UI find is "memoQ". Even when my friends in the company piss me off with some awful bug in a new or old release or disappoint me with some policy with which I vehemently disagree, and in a fury I think, "Damnit, I am going to switch to X!", I never find that X > Q.

So for all of us in translation, even those without a clue, maybe it's time to get a Q. It also matters to me that the people behind it all actually do care about what we do.

Free TM source file data information utility

Just yesterday I was chatting with an Egyptian colleague about an interesting conference to be held in Cairo next April, and he told me how his wife sometimes gets annoyed with him because he gives away so much information. (I am a big beneficiary of his generosity, and some of the best improvements in recent presentations I've given are techniques I have taken directly from him.)

I've been criticized the same way for most of my life, but I've usually found that information shared freely in the right spirit can often feed more people than a bit of bread and some fish, and the occasional dividends that come back are often delightful surprises.

So it was today. I received a nice e-mail from a reader of this blog, who wanted to share a custom tool for which he had commissioned the development to solve a particular troublesome challenge. His letter is posted below along with a download link for this tool and an explanation of what it does. I hope that some will derive unexpected benefits from this.

*******

Hi Kevin,

I've been using memoQ for a year, and some of your posts on Translation Tribulations have helped me do things and solve problems with memoQ that I wouldn't have been able to solve otherwise. So I want to give back to you and all your readers.

I commissioned from the great Stanislav Ohkvat, the author of TransTools, a program to automatically extract the names of all documents contained in a TM. Add ".exe" to the end of the link below to download.

http://stasokhvat.s3.amazonaws.com/MemoqTmxUtilities

My particular use case is that my colleague reviews my work and sends it back to me for adding to the Master TM, while also adding it to his own Master TM. He also sends me all documents he translates himself, and I review them, adding them to my own TM. However, I recently noticed our Master TMs differed by around 7k segments, meaning we forgot to share a few documents between us.

Rather than tediously sifting through tens of thousands of segments and manually copying the document names, the script does it for us.

I give you full permission to post it on your blog as you see fit.

Cheers,

Érico Carvalho
Pharmacist and translator-subtitler for BNN Medical Translations
Working languages: Brazilian Portuguese to English & vice-versa, Spanish to English, Spanish to Brazilian Portuguese
Specializes in: Clinical Protocols, Informed Consent Forms, Investigator's Brochures, Video Subtitling

Documenting auto-translation rule development for memoQ

In an recent article, I described my simple method of recording examples of structured information like dates, financial expressions or legal references to help developers plan auto-translation rules (or other features using regular expressions, such as Regex Tagger rules) in memoQ and other applications. These are a sort of simplified performance specification - a table of examples showing how the rules should "perform", what they should do: what patterned source language expressions are to be transformed into particular structured expressions in the target language.

The need for proper documentation of such efforts does not end there, however. It is very important, especially for more complex sets of rules, that there be clear documentation of the purpose and logic of the rules developed, and that this documentation be present

• in the rules themselves (as comments) and
• in external documents to be used as references for troubleshooting, maintenance and further development.

Auto-translation rules and other resources using regular expressions should not be scripted and maintained for the long run in memoQ itself or in any other environment which does not allow thorough commenting of the regular expressions used. Without comments, it is simply too easy to destroy functioning rules by forgetting why they were written a certain way once-upon-a-time, and an environment able to use comments also allows old rules to be "commented out" (disabled, but still available for reference or later re-use) while new versions are tested. That is basically impossible with memoQ's internal resource editors at the present time. And to make matters worse, if auto-translation rules are edited inside memoQ, their order changes, sometimes with dire consequences if functionality depends on the rule order. Try sorting out problems like that in a set of 70 or so rules.

Excerpt from a large set of currency format rules with extensive comments. These comments are stripped when
the rules are imported into memoQ, so all maintenance should be done externally in a tool like Notepad++.

As I began to revise and improve old rules that I created years ago for dates and currency expressions, I found that it was helpful to create a record of what changes I had made - and why I made them - and keep this information in a tabular form for easy reference and re-use.

Click to access a PDF sample of my rule development record (2 pages)

The graphic above is one example of how I maintain my personal records of some work developing regular expressions. I usually include

• descriptions of all information recorded
• a specific example on which I will base the general rule
• a simple ("fragile") version of the rule part (source input and target output) with only the most essential elements; this is not error-tolerant, but it is the easiest to understand and the first place to look if something isn't working as I would like it to
• more robust variations which take into account differences in spacing, punctuation, etc. or include things like non-breaking spaces that might be desired in the output (this can get cluttered and hard to read)
• color-marking for easier identification of some elements
• comments about why things are written as they are or about possible improvements or problems

This record is a template of sorts from which rules can be assembled very quickly or rules can be re-purposed for other languages or formats in a way that is easy to follow and catch mistakes. Such records are also helpful if the rules are to be shared with other developers or maintained by someone else.

My example is certainly not the final word in project documentation for such efforts; it is simply part of a set of personal tools to help me work more efficiently with the limited time I have. Professional development and consulting organizations often have far more extensive and detailed systems of project documentation; when I was part of one such shop nearly 20 years ago, my (downloadable) 2-page example might easily have filled twenty pages of very important-looking professional technobabble. Life's too short for shit like that anymore.

But if you value your time as a developer or your investment as one who hires others to develop such useful rules, it pays big dividends in most cases to demand some sort of clear, systematic and accurate record of how your special rules, filters, etc. were developed so that they can be maintained and improved in the future.

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.