Getting around language variant issues in memoQ LiveDocs

I was told by some other users that a fundamental change had been made in the way language data are accessed in LiveDocs. It was said that until a few versions ago it had been possible to use documents for reference in LiveDocs regardless of their sublanguage settings. So I was told. The truth is more complicated than that.

According to my tests, memoQ 2015 is the first version of memoQ to have a logically consistent treatment of language variants for both bilingual and monolingual documents in corpora. All the other versions tested (memoQ 2013R2, 2014, 2014R2) are equally screwed up and show the same results.

The "visibility" of a monolingual or bilingual document when viewed in a corpus attached to a project running under memoQ 2015 follows these rules:

• the sublanguage (language variant) settings for source and target (of the document or the project) must match the project
• or the language setting (of the document or the project) must be generic. 

Two rules. Pretty simple. It doesn't matter what version of memoQ the project or corpus was created in, only which version is actively running.

I created a test corpus with the following document mix:

The corpus contained 11 documents, both bilingual and monolingual with a mix of generic language settings and settings with language variants specified (such as German for Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein and English for Zimbabwe, the US and UK). 

In a project running under memoQ 2015 with the languages set to generic German and generic English, all 11 documents in the corpus were accessible. 

So if you want access to all LiveDocs corpus data for the major languages of your project, it is necessary to use generic language settings, either when you load the data into LiveDocs (difficult unless you always use the resource console, since adding documents to a corpus from within a project automatically applies the project's language settings!) or in the languages specified for the project itself. And this will only work with memoQ 2015. If you want to apply penalties to particular language variants this can be done using keyword markers (as seen in the screenshot above) and configuring the More penalties tab of the LiveDocs settings file applied to that corpus.

If the same corpus is attached to a project running under memoQ 2015 with language settings for Swiss German and generic English, the documents available from the corpus are these:

For a Swiss German and UK English project under memoQ 2015, this is the picture:

And for a Germany's German and US English:

 All the screenshots above can be predicted based on the two rules stated. Work it out.

"But what happens with earlier versions of memoQ?" you might wonder. It's messy. Here is a look at a Swiss German and UK English project under memoQ 2013 R2, 2014 and 2014 R2: 

And here's a project with generic German and Generic English under memoQ 2013 R2, 2014 and 2014 R2:

In each case the five bilingual documents are visible no matter what the project's language settings are. However, there is strict adherence to language variants and the generic language setting for monolingual documents! In my opinion, that's for the birds. I see no good reason to follow a different rule for data availability in bilingual versus monolingual documents. So in a sense, Kilgray has cleaned up this inconsistency in the latest version of memoQ.

Some have expressed a desire for a "switch" setting to allow language variant settings to be ignored. And perhaps Kilgray will provide such a feature in the future. But the best way to get there now is simply to make your project's language settings generic.

Changing the language settings for bilingual data in an existing LiveDocs corpus 

If you have a corpus with a mix of language settings and you want to convert these to generic settings or a particular variant, this can be done as follows currently only for bilingual documents:

1. Select the bilingual documents to export from the corpus and export them to a folder. (If you choose to zip them all together, unpack the *.zip file later to make a folder of the exported *.mqxlz files.
2. Re-import the *.mqxlz files to the LiveDocs corpus via the Resource Console so you are able to specify the exact language settings you want. In the import dialog, you'll have to change the filter setting manually from "binary" to "XLIFF". These *.mqxlz files are not the same as bilingual files from a translation document in a project and are not recognized automatically.

Unfortunately, there is no way to change the language settings of a monolingual document except to re-import it in the Resource Console in its original form and set the language variant (or generic value) there.

So really, for now, the best way to go seems to be to use memoQ 2015 with generic project language settings.

Colors in memoQ lookup results - which termbase?

A subject that comes up time and again with experienced colleagues is the desire to distinguish more easily where matches come from in memoQ. Of course, clicking on a match in the Translation Results pane of memoQ's working grid provides additional information for each type of resource (the example of the LiveDocs match has different information than one would expect to see from  TM hit, a termbase match, a non-translatable or other kind of entry). But many want more obvious information in the working display and bilingual RTF exports to indicate the source of matches.

In the graphic at the left, segment matches from two different translation memories and two different LiveDocs corpora are shown. There is no visual clue to indicate the differences between these corpora and TMs. One would have to click on a particular entry and look at the meta-information at the bottom right to see which data collection the hit came from, the name of the document translated, when the translation unit was created, who wrote it, etc.

With termbases, however, the situation is now different. For those with excellent eyesight (I don't really qualify), there are subtle gradations of color to reflect termbase priority, the higher priority termbases showing darker colors for their hits. This is clever and useful, and unfortunately not able to be customized in a meaningful way at this time as far as I can tell. I might like to set a special match color for a termbase I want to take particular note of but which has a lower (and hard to distinguish) priority. Can you tell how many termbases are showing hits in the screenshot here? Look carefully.

I find the color cues used for matches in the memoQ working window quite helpful in most cases. Although these can be customized under Tools > Options > Appearance > Lookup results, I refuse to do so, because I use these color cues to explain things to other users sometimes, and I cause enough chaos telling them to use my personal customized keyboard shortcuts based on an old version of Déjà Vu, having long forgotten what the default keyboard shortcuts are. I also don't see an easy way to reset the default colors if I mess things up.

I'm grateful for the little bit of help that color differentiation in termbase results provides in recent versions of memoQ, and I hope that Kilgray takes this concept further. Similar gradations of color for TMs and LiveDocs would be helpful, and it would be very nice if custom colors could be assigned temporarily to particular resources of any type where some collections of data require special consideration. And then we need a simple way to reset those temporary color assignments.

If you agree with this or have other ideas for improving the accessibility of match result information, please write to support@kilgray.com and express your thoughts. Too often users remain passive with their frustrations and thoughts about changes or additional features needed. Kilgray tends to be a very responsive solution provider, but if the user community does not express its needs clearly and consistently, it's not reasonable to expect that what we need will happen and it's even less reasonable to be annoyed when it doesn't. In the five years I have used memoQ, things have often taken time to implement, but in that time the developers and product designers have usually given careful thought to matters and mostly exceed my expectations when they do provide the solution.

Online workshop plans: memoQ for legal & financial translators

As readers of this blog know, I've spent a good part of the last year or more investigating some instructional practices for translators' continuing education and forming my own opinions about what works, what does not, and what might be improved. I've looked at different approaches to blogging, developed e-mail based tutorials for one company, acquired some familiarity with remote coaching options via Skype and TeamViewer, begun the production of short training videos on a YouTube channel, learned to use Moodle and other online courseware platforms, released a PDF e-book with short tutorial modules, supported the localization of some of the preceding things into Portuguese and... probably a few other things I don't remember at the moment. Somewhere in all of that I moved countries and translated a bit to pay bills and buy dog food.

Now I am considering working with a specialist translator to plan a flexible course on the use of memoQ in an optimal way - together with other technologies as required - to achieve better results in processes involved with legal and financial translation. The intent is in no way to teach anything about legal/financial translation as a subject, but rather how to organize the software and work processes to overcome frequent problems, satisfy particular customer requirements or achieve specific improvements in quality management for the translation work.

I have specific topics in mind based on my own work and questions directed to me from specialist colleagues in these areas, but I would like to have suggestions from others, particularly those who might be interested in involvement in such a course in some way. These suggestions can take any form and can be as simple as an observation regarding a difficulty you find in this area which you suspect might have a solution involving technology or working methods.

The delivery media planned are a combination of e-mail, "live" sessions for about an hour each week for small groups or individuals using Skype or TeamViewer, with these recorded and made available for viewing and/or download in a private Moodle course forum on my server. As it makes sense to do so, supplemental material will be provided as web pages, video clips, practice files for testing, memoQ light resources (such as stopword lists or auto-translation rules), PDF "handouts" from my new book edition and other sources.

I've set up an (experimental) mailing list - "Translate Solutions" to discuss this, other topics related to continuing education for translation technology and education/training resources. You are welcome to join the discussion there with a subscription request to translate_solutions-subscribe (at) lossner.net.

The scheduling and detailed subject matter of the course will be announced as specific content requests are received and assessed.

So let the fun begin.

On a role with memoQ!

This morning I finished off a job I shared with another colleague, sent him the target document and a memoQ MQXLZ file for any edits he might want to make before dumping it in his TM or LiveDocs archive. I went on to other things and didn't see his message until about six hours later. He could not edit my bilingual file! What was wrong?!

I was "on a role" you might say. But not on a roll. Not today. I had not stopped to think that although the method I had used to review my work is popular with some freelance translators using memoQ, most of us do not use roles in our own projects, and few understand what they actually do. But roles can be an effective addition to our workflows and enable us to keep a better overview of a translation's status.

When working in a local memoQ project, you can assume one of three roles at a time: translator, first reviewer or second reviewer. The default role is always "translator".

Each role applies a different status when segments in the translation grid are confirmed:

• Translator = Confirmed
• Reviewer 1 = Reviewer 1 confirmed
• Reviewer 2 = Proofread

The confirmation settings you choose under Project home > Settings determine which of these three roles you work in. You can also set your role in recent versions of memoQ using the dropdown menu in the far right section of the translation window's toolbar. The icon for the dropdown menu reflects your current role:

When segments are confirmed in different roles, the status icon will be different:

The screenshot above shows four segments confirmed with three different roles. Someone in the Translator role or Reviewer 1 role cannot change segments which have been confirmed by someone working in the Reviewer 2 role. These "proofread" segments are protected and can only be modified in the Reviewer 2 role. However, the Translator role can change unwanted edits made in the Reviewer 1 role.

What use is that to a translator working alone? For a long time, my instinct was to say "none at all" and think of this as a feature of interest only to team processes. Too often I'm a team of one these days.

But on a number of jobs lately, I've found myself scribbling Post-It notes about which parts of a long job I had already checked, and it occurred to me that these roles might help. I've also grown fond of the X-Translate feature for new source text versions, where I usually protect content which has been carefully reviewed before if it has not changed. So the idea of doing a "final review" of some sections and protecting them by confirming in the Reviewer 2 role was appealing.

So, like some others, I have begun to switch roles in memoQ when I am carrying out different tasks. And the different confirmation icons - the check, check+ and double-check - give me a simple visual clue as to where I have worked with what purpose.

Another nice feature I use a lot is the Row History in the context menu. It shows me the translation of that segment for each minor version. If I am making a lot of edits and want to remember a particular translation, I use Operations > Create Snapshot... to make a new minor version for later reference. Minor versions are also created automatically with various operations such as target text export and exporting bilinguals. The row history shows all versions of the translation for the current source text (major version):

Text of previous translations can be copied to restore using Ctrl+C. Unfortunately, despite  requests, Kilgray has not yet seen fit to do the obvious and add a button for conveniently inserting other versions of a translation in the row history.

So what about my frustrated colleague who couldn't update the text in my "proofread" bilingual? How can he, a mere Translator, override my work in a superior role? By giving himself a "promotion" and choosing the Reviewer 2 role from the toolbar or his confirmation status in the project settings to Proofread.

For a discussion of how roles can affect what is written to a TM, see this old article on memoQ TM settings. The defaults have now been changed so that roles are no longer automatically stored in the TM, so if you are working with the default TM settings for memoQ 2013 R2 Build 53 or later, you don't have to worry about changing the defaults as I discuss in the old article.

memoQ cloud: a team server "on tap"

This afternoon, Kilgray CEO István Lengyel held one of the best webinars I've seen him do yet to describe the convenient new hosted server facilities known as memoQ cloud, which I reviewed recently.

In the webinar, he explained the company's evolution of thought for online computing and how concerns about security were finally resolved to create a more sustainable offering than the more support-intensive "honeymoon" server solution.

He made it clear how existing desktop licenses for the Project Manager and Translator Pro editions can be used in combination with concurrent access licenses (CALs) for the server, as well as how cloud services can be suspended for periods in which they are not needed, saving considerable costs for those with only occasional needs to work in a coordinated online team.

Backing up the server configuration can be done quickly and easily from a Language Terminal account, so if cloud service is dormant for more than three months (after which data are deleted from the server), everything can be restored quickly when needed.

The webinar also included a demonstration of the integrated translation in web browsers, memoQ WebTrans. This is one way of providing access to the server for others who do not have installed copies of memoQ or working on your server when using other computers. Of course this interface also works in web browsers under other operating systems, such as MacOS or Linux. (Click on the graphic below to get a full-sized view of the web translation interface.)

Access to Kilgray's premium terminology server qTerm and memoQ server APIs is also available for an additional subscription fee. Subscribed services can be changed at any time as your needs evolve.

In the webinar, István showed how in about the same time it takes to enjoy a cup of coffee, one can get a free Kilgray Language Terminal account and register with a credit card for a month's trial of the memoQ cloud server (with any services available) for just €1/$1. If you are trying out services which you will not want beyond the trial period (like the API, qTerm or extra licenses), these can be set to cancel at the end of the trial period to avoid unwanted charges.

The embedded video below is a 20-minute tour of how simple it is to set up and manage projects in memoQ cloud. Use the icon at the lower right of the video frame to watch this on your full screen.


This is a good overview of the process, although the licenses aren't explained very well, and the project type recommendation is bad advice in many cases, as I pointed out in my post on server projects on segmentation and projects with desktop documents. Everything else in the video is good, but it's often very important to allow segmentation to be changed or corrected, particularly if the segmentation rules used in the project do not cover abbreviations which may split sentences in very unfortunate ways. If you need to have instantaneous access to work from other team members by using online documents, the the segmentation will need to be checked very carefully and corrected before the project begins to avoid difficulties.

Those testing the memoQ cloud server or using desktop editions of memoQ may also want to check out various free configuration resources on Language Terminal. These include special QA profiles, AutoCorrect files, import filters that are not part of the shipping product and auto-translation rules for easier translation of number and date formats, etc. Language Terminal offers other facilities which may be of interest even to those who do not use memoQ, such as the free InDesign server, which can create PDF previews of InDesign documents (very useful for reviews before delivery) or convert InDesign files of any type to XLIFF for translation in many different environments.

UPDATE:
The memoQ cloud webinar is now available to watch on Kilgray's page for recorded webinars; it can be accessed directly here or viewed in the embedded video below.

A ferramenta de pesquisa, Memória de Tradução, do memoQ

Esta funcionalidade permite usar as TM do memoQ para procurar texto numa outra janela, por exemplo, num documento do Microsoft Word ou de uma outra ferramenta de Tradução. Também é possível utilizar esta funcionalidade em ambientes de tradução que não tenham memórias de tradução, ou cujo acesso a estas esteja restrito.

À medida que copia o texto da sua janela de trabalho, o conteúdo que está na sua área de transferência é automaticamente transferido para a janela de pesquisa e as combinações aparecem.

Ctrl+Shift+Q	Inicia a ferramenta de pesquisa da memoria de tradução do memoQ, que vai, imediatamente, procurar por qualquer texto na área de transferência do Windows.
Ctrl+C	Copia o novo texto para a janela de pesquisa da memória de tradução, e executa uma procura.
Ctrl+Alt+C	Copia, o texto de destino de uma correspondência selecionada, para a área de transferência.
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copia, o texto de origem de uma correspondência selecionada, para a área de transferência.
Ctrl+V	Cola o texto da área de transferência noutra aplicação.

Na ferramenta de pesquisa da TM pode selecionar qualquer uma das suas memórias de tradução para usar noutras aplicações. No menu Configurações de Pesquisa, desta janela, também é possível definir outros parâmetros, tais como, a percentagem mínima para que existam correspondências, as penalidades para com os alinhamentos ou o rigor a ter para com as tags existentes.

Uma memória de tradução selecionada na ferramenta de pesquisa da TM não pode ser usada nem aberta no memoQ, enquanto a ferramenta de pesquisa estiver ativa, nem a ferramenta de pesquisa consegue aceder à TM que está associada a um projecto em aberto no memoQ. Um raio laranja é exibido na lista das memórias de tradução para indicar esta condição. Depois da ferramenta de pesquisa estar fechada, a memória de tradução ficará disponível novamente para ser usada no memoQ. E, quando fechar o projeto, a ou as TM correspondentes ficarão outra vez acessíveis para a ferramenta de pesquisa.

A ferramenta de pesquisa também pode ser útil como uma segunda concordância no memoQ, para procurar um conjunto em particular de memórias de tradução, que não estejam associadas ao projeto em aberto.

*****

Excerpt from memoQ em Pequenos Passos, the Portuguese version of the second edition of my memoQ tips book. Translated by Cátea Caleço Murta.

Locking out other languages in memoQ source texts

One of the interesting and useful results of Kilgray introducing document language recognition features in memoQ 2013 R2 is the ability to identify and exclude segments in other languages. I see this sort of thing from time to time in German patent dispute documents which quote English patent texts extensively or in texts to translate where new source language material may have been added to an existing translation. In the past, I prepared such texts for translation by hiding the text which is already in the target language or is in a language I cannot translate (such as French) or I locked it manually, which can be time-consuming to do in a long text. Now the task of preparing such tasks for translation is a little easier.

The screenshot above shows a patchwork document with German and English. The hundreds of segments in this job were a wild mix of the two languages with unfortunately few coherent blocks of the source language (German). To save time in preparation, I selected the option in the Operations menu to lock the segments:

The result of the locking procedure looked like this:

Most of the English segments were copied source to target and locked. The differentiation of languages is performed using statistics and is rather good but not perfect. In slightly under 400 segments, there were 5 or 6 that were not correctly identified and locked. Several of these were in the bibliography and consisted of  long string of names and one or two short English words or abbreviations. I saw no false positives (source language misidentified and locked), though I did hear a report of some from another translator working from Dutch to English with a very large mixed document. Discussions with Kilgray Support revealed that a "failure rate" of about 1-2% may be experienced for this feature.

So what good is it? A lot, really. It enabled me to do a quick estimate of effort and separate the two languages so I could make a reasonable assessment of the separate efforts for proofreading the English and translating the German. Obviously, if I were a project manager preparing  file for somebody else to translate, I would need to do manual checking of the segments to correct any errors of identification. But this feature would still often save me a great deal of time in preparing the file, an manual checking is important to do anyway to ensure that there are no segmentation problems which may cause difficulties in translation.

Do you work with mixed language documents where this feature might be relevant? If you do, have you tried this yet? What has your experience been with your language pair(s)?

memoQ AutoCorrect update & MS Word export macro

Last summer I wrote about autocorrection of text in memoQ and offered an indexed embedding of a video I created to give an overview of the AutoCorrect functions in memoQ 2013. There have been a few enhancements since then in memoQ 2013 R2; where only "smart quote" toggling was possible before there are now various options for correcting accidental miscapitalization.

I've also been looking to optimize the procedure for migrating the Microsoft Word autocorrection lists to memoQ. There are a number of problems with using the table-generating macro that Kilgray suggests in the knowledgebase article on using MS Word 2003 autocorrect data; when I created a 17,000 entry list from a large AutoCorrect file for one language, it was nearly impossible to do anything with it because of memory problems. The following macro, which could be put into the Normal template in MS Word, should be a little easier to work with:

Sub BuildAutoCorrectList()
  Dim ACE As AutoCorrectEntry
  ' Create new document.
  Documents.Add
  ' Iterate through AutoCorrect entries.
  For Each ACE In Application.AutoCorrect.Entries
    ' Insert each entry name and its value on a new line.
    Selection.TypeText ACE.Name & vbTab & ACE.Value & vbCr
  Next
End Sub

Invoke the macros dialog in MS Word with Alt+F8. Select the Normal.dot or Normal.dotm file (depending on your version of MS Office) from the dropdown list, enter the name of the new macro and click the Create button. Then paste in the code above. When the macro is run, it will create a new document with the autocorrection list in tab-delimited text. To bring the list into memoQ, you'll have to

1. Paste in the XML header needed by the "light resource" for AutoCorrect lists in memoQ. You can see what this looks like for the language setting you want by creating a dummy resource, exporting it and opening the file with a text editor. European Spanish might look like this, for example:
   <MemoQResource ResourceType="AutoCorrect" Version="1.0">
     <Resource>
       <Guid>6d61e3bc-da00-4cb8-a4f3-93c980543bba</Guid>
       <FileName>spa-ES#EU Spanish AutoCorrect.mqres</FileName>
       <Name>European Spanish</Name>
       <Description />
       <Language>spa-ES</Language>
     </Resource>
   </MemoQResource>
    
2. Save the file as plain text with UTF-8 encoding.
3. Change the file extension to "*.mqres"
4. Import the resource to memoQ.

AutoCorrect lists which are language-neutral (for example, lists of company names) use "all#" in the name and "Neutral" between the tags.

Other sources for autocorrection data
With a bit of searching, one can find other sources of data to add to AutoCorrect resources for various language. Wikipedia, for example, offers lists of commonly misspelled words, such as this one in English, which includes links to Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish lists. The structure of the data lends itself easily to reformatting with the search and replace features of a text editor:

alamanya->almanya
aferim->aferin
agrasif->agresif
ağostos->ağustos
ahret->ahiret
ayle->aile
alarım->alarm
atmış->altmış

Copy the data from the Wikipedia page to a text file. Then use search and replace to substitute tabs for the "->" structures, add an appropriate XML header for the memoQ resource and save the file as UTF-8 with an MQRES extension and you have an AutoCorrect list ready for import to memoQ. An example of the Turkish list converted and ready for use in memoQ is available for download here.

For German, there is a list of common spelling errors on Wikipedia which can be adapted with very little effort to make this resource.

The English list on the Oxford Dictionaries page can also be adapted without much ado. And there are many others to be found on the Internet.

Merging memoQ AutoCorrect resources
Entries from multiple AutoCorrect lists can be combined in a single tab-delimited file, and duplicates can be removed using Microsoft Excel, for example.

The screenshot above shows a merged German AutoCorrect list opened in Excel. When using the Remove Duplicates function on the Data ribbon, be sure that only Column A is selected in the dialog:

The reason Column B must not be selected is that it contains the desired text after correction, and there may be more than one error entry for a particular word.

After duplicates have been removed from the list, save the file as Unicode text, then import it to memoQ. A similar procedure with Excel may be followed to maintain other memoQ light resources; I do this rather frequently for segmentation exceptions to ensure that the lists for the different language variants I work with remain synchronized. (It would be nice, of course, if Kilgray would create a reasonable light resource manager with such capabilities. It gets tiring to do this so often with stopword lists and other resources.)

Multiple, separate concordances with memoQ

In the comments of my recent post on the memoQ TM search tool, I mentioned a possibility for using that feature to "de-junk" and simplify concordance searches.

In the example above, for example, I am searching the 2 million translation unit EU DGT TM using text selected in a memoQ 6.2 project. Working this way offers me the following advantages:

• I can separate the concordances for my project from a big reference dataset I only need for certain lookups.
• A simple copy command (Ctrl+C) automatically looks up text in either language in the TM search tool.
• If I want to avoid any possibility of unintended "leakage" of data from certain TMs in the project, selecting them for use in the memoQ TM search tool ensures that their content will never be "accidentally" inserted as an ordinary TM match as I work.

Note also that I am using a feature of memoQ 2013 R2 (6.8) to do searches while working in an older version of memoQ. I could do the same if I were working in a web translation interface for memoQ (which does not allow me to attach my own TMs) or any other translation environment.

I remember an argument with a translation agency owner about a year and  half ago. The man told me quite insistently about his intent to force even translators with memoQ to use the web translation interface so that he could restrict them to the use of the client-specific TMs he maintained. With the use of the TM search tool, a reasonable compromise is achieved for TM data at least. (LiveDocs and termbase access remains a bit more cumbersome, however, though by setting up a dummy project with termbases, corpora and particular TMs attached, one could actually use three separate concordance sets. That could be interesting.)

In any case, the possibility of a separate concordance for handling large data volumes separately from one's main TMs and the possibility of doing this even while using older versions of memoQ may be a reason why those who do not yet want to do their routine work in the latest version or cannot do so can still benefit from upgrading now and installing the latest version alongside the old version(s).

Cloud 9 for memoQ teams

After the Civil War in the US, there was a saying that Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal. A similar thought occurred to me regarding Kilgray when I began testing the new memoQ cloud service announced last month. This convenient, no-hassle "server on tap" really has the potential to level the field between teams of individual translators and agencies with servers.

Kilgray will hold a free webinar on January 22, 2014 for setting up and using the memoQ cloud service. I will also be creating some resources (blog posts, videos, additions to future editions of my memoQ user guide) to share my ideas for how to work effectively with this platform. At a cost of only €120/month for a project manager license, this is a very cost-effective way for teams to access server functions as needed without the heavy investment and risks of setting up and maintaining their own local server. It also promises to be a good alternative for small agencies or corporate departments with limited capital budgets or limited abilities to maintain infrastructure.

The memoQ cloud service currently requires the use of memoQ 2013 R2. Attempts to access the server for administration with an older version of memoQ will result in error messages or a notice of the version needed.

Both web-based translation (in a browser) and client/server translation are possible with this service and are determined by how a project is set up. There are some limitations in the number of licenses which can be subscribed, but this should not cause any real difficulties for a typical small team, particularly if the members have their own memoQ licenses. There is no access limit for memoQ license owners: in addition to any subscribed memoQ cloud licenses, currently any number of translators can connect if they have a valid memoQ license. (This will change at some point, but the access model is still under consideration.)


If you are curious about working with a memoQ server, you can try the service for a month with only $1/€1 charged to your credit card. There is a bit of a learning curve for setting up projects correctly for various purposes, and I expect some users may have difficulties putting together pieces of that puzzle from the various memoQ Server manuals from Kilgray, but I expect that before long there will be a number of useful guidelines for different audiences. Data on the memoQ cloud server are saved for up to three months of a "dormant" period, and if a subscription is to remain inactive for a longer period, a full backup (including all user data and projects) can be made and restored later.

Working with a server requires some different strategies than desktop-based work, and I think it will be important to emphasize some of these differences so that project mangers in the teams will understand what can be changed or added after a project is launched and what cannot as well as what alternative approaches are available. Adding a LiveDocs corpus on the server to a project is one such case.

A little different: the server project management window

Translators working with memoQ cloud or any other memoQ 2013 R2 server may also be a little disoriented by changes required in their revision workflows. If a bilingual file of some kind is exported for external review in a server project, it must be re-imported in the server project management window for the project by someone with corresponding rights. The new monolingual option for importing reviewed documents may provide a practical way to revise text externally in some cases and re-import the changes to the project, but this new feature is not trouble-free in all cases and thus should be used with great care.

On the whole, I am extremely encouraged that Kilgray has offered this new service. I have been asking for something very much like this for nearly five years, and what's on offer here greatly exceeds my expectations. I have a few questions about administrative details which I need to ask Kilgray, but from a technical standpoint I really see this as a best case for the company's software as a service.

The memoQ TM search tool

Release 2 of memoQ 2013 included a new utility which allows memoQ translation memories to be used for lookups, the TM search tool:

When working in other translation environment tools such as SDL Trados Studio or Wordfast, translating text in a word processor or reading PDF files and web pages, selected text can be looked up directly in chosen translation memories and text from the source or target of a translation match can be put in the Clipboard for pasting into the other application. Relevant keyboard shortcuts are:

Ctrl+Shift+Q	Starts the memoQ TM search tool, immediately searches for any text on the Windows Clipboard.
Ctrl+C	Copies new text to the TM search window and executes a search.
Ctrl+Alt+C	Copies the target text of a selected match to the Clipboard.
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copies the source text of a selected match to the Clipboard.
Ctrl+V	Pastes the Clipboard text into another application.

A translation memory selected in the TM search tool cannot be opened or used in memoQ while the search tool is active. An orange lightning bolt is displayed in the TM list of the Search settings to indicate this status. After the search tool is closed, the TM is available again for use in memoQ.

Although the initial version of this tool is quite useful, many users have realized that further refinements of its features would make its application more flexible and effective. Some suggestions so far include

• selecting/deselecting all TMs
• filtering TMs by metadata
• saving and loading profiles (collections of particular TMs and settings)
• indicating match sources (i.e. TM, preferably with metadata)

A number of other quirks, like the ability to launch multiple instances of the tool, also still need to be sorted out as of Build 52.

I hope that Kilgray will take the further development of this tool seriously and consider how to improve and expand it, perhaps to include remote translation memories as well. The current version of the TM search tool requires a memoQ license on the computer where it is used, but separate licensing could also be quite interesting. This could be useful, for example, in collaborative projects with partners who use different tools and working methods or for those who want to use memoQ translation memories as bilingual concordances. I see the potential for a value-added service here if I can provide such a concordance (for a fee) to an end client, perhaps with some sort of protective encapsulation for the memories provided. Inclusion of termbases and LiveDocs corpora in future versions of the tool could also prove interesting. memoQ could become a reference information packaging platform to create additional communication services for our clients. There are interesting possibilities for mobile applications here as well. But in the meantime I'll settle for the modest improvements in the bullet points above.

Further information on the memoQ search tool can be found in the Kilgray knowledgebase.

General settings for memoQ TMs

memoQ TM settings are found in the Resource Console, the Options and a project's Settings.
This is a very useful "light resource" which is well worth nearly every user's time.

To define the TM settings to be used in new projects, select a settings configuration under Tools > Options... >  Default resources > TM settings (in the row of icons) by marking its checkbox.

To define the default TM settings to be used in the project you have opened, go to Project home > Settings > TM settings (in the row of icons) and mark the checkbox for the desired project default.

Different settings for individual TMs in a project (for example to set higher or lower match criteria) may be applied by going to Project home > Translation memories, selecting the TM of interest, clicking the Settings command at the right of the window and choosing the settings to apply instead of the project's standard TM settings.

The General settings tab is the same for all currently supported versions of memoQ. Role options are included on another tab in memoQ 2013 R2, and the Project Manager editions of memoQ offer additional possibilities for filtering and/or applying penalties to content on a Filters tab.

Match thresholds
The first value here (minimum) controls the fuzzy percentage below which a match will not be displayed in the translation results pane at the upper right of the working translation window.

The "good match" threshold is relevant to pretranslation (though this is unfortunately not made obvious in the dialog). The default value of 95% is really too high and would only apply to matches with small differences in tags or numbers; since any small difference in words is penalized significantly in memoQ (something I find very helpful, as I can understand more quickly what differences to look for compared to working in Trados). I usually set my "good matches" to 80%.

Not a "good match" according to the memoQ TM default setting

Penalties
In my work, an alignment penalty, which is a deduction from the match rate of a translation unit created by feeding an alignment to a translation memory, does not make a lot of sense. This is because

• I almost never send alignments to a TM. Why bother? LiveDocs may be slower in pretranslation, but it provides context matching just like a TM, and you can actually read what you find in a concordance search in its original document context. TMs suck because you do not get the full context for your matching segment and are thus at greater risk for missing information which may be important for a translation. This is especially the case with short match segments.
• if I happen to be aligning a dodgy translation and want to send it to a TM, I'll put it in a "quarantine TM" which already has its own penalty.
• on those rare occasions when I might feed an alignment to a TM, it's because the content is going to a user of another CAT tool, and if that person uses Trados or another tool that can read XLIFF files or other available bilingual formats, I'll send the data as that instad, so it can be reviewed and modified more easily before feeding to a TM. This also gives the other person a bilingual reference with document context.
• alignment for TMs is soooooo 1990s!

User penalties: If you have the misfortune to share a TM with someone whose work you do not trust completely and you want to avoid letting that person's 100% and context match segments slip past you unnoticed, apply a suitable penalty for the level of "risk" that person represents. If you want to be sure that user's content never gets used in a pretranslation and never appears in the translation results pane, apply a whopping big penalty like 80%. Those segments not be shown or inserted but will still be there in a concordance search if you want them.

TM penalties: Sometimes a client provides you with a TM you do not trust completely, or you may have a "quarantine TM" with content of dubious quality. Or I might have a TM with good content in British English but need to deliver a translation in American English. Applying penalties to such TMs will reduce the priority of their matches and prevent 100% matches with inappropriate language from slipping past without more careful inspection. As in the case of user penalties, you can also apply a very large penalty to ensure that matches will never be displayed in the translation results pane or used in a pretranslation but still have the TM content available for concordance searches.

Adjustments
It seems to be a good idea generally to enable the adjustment of fuzzy hits and inline tags. In many (but not all) cases, this will correct small differences in numbers, punctuation, cases and inline tags.

The only significant effect I was able to determine in adjusting the inline tag strictness in my tests was that more permissive settings might count a match with different tags as a full match. While this might meet the requirements of some clients hoping to impose discount schemes, from a quality assurance perspective, this does not seem like a good idea, and I believe it is better to have a strict setting here to draw attention to differences and reduce the chance that errors might be overlooked.

memoQ TM settings: beware the Kilgray defaults!

memoQ 2013 R2 introduced a very significant change in the management of translation memory data which most users are likely not aware of. However, because the default behavior for information storage in translation memories was changed, it is important to be aware of this difference and what to do before your data are unacceptably compromised.

The screenshot above shows several different translations stored in my TM for the sentence in the second segment. In previous versions of memoQ, only one translation would be stored with the way this translation memory was configured. However, in memoQ 2013 R2, the role of the person editing the translation becomes an important part of the "context", and as a result, multiple translations can be stored for different roles. Personally, I find this a rather useless feature, because if I want to know previous translations for a segment, I consult the row history using the context menu. But I understand how in some processes, it may be desirable to maintain a record of translations entered by the translator and the first and second reviewer.

I have no use for these older translations, especially as these may contain errors (as seen in the example of the third entry in the screenshot). If I am proofreading my translation in a "reviewer" role and make changes, I want to overwrite the original entry in my TM and avoid the chance that its errors will be propagated in later work.

To avoid the problems that can result from this redundancy and preservation of errors in the translation memory, as of build 6.8.6 it is necessary for users to explicitly opt out of the current Kilgray TM settings defaults and create their own custom settings.

TM settings are "light resources" which can be managed in four places:

• The Resource Console,where settings can be created, edited, imported, exported, etc.
• The Options (Tools > Options... > Default resources > TM settings), where the default for new projects can also be set
• Project Settings (Project home > Settings > TM settings) in a specific project, where the default settings for the current project can be set
• Project home > Translation memories > (TM) > Settings where alternative TM settings can be specified for a particular translation memory selected in  project. This would be the case there you want to apply a special set of penalties to the content of that TM, for example.

The last tab of the default TM settings dialog looks like this:

To avoid the trouble of multiple, role-based entries being written to a TM, settings must be created in which the option to Store modifying user's role in the TM entries in not selected, and these custom settings must be applied to the primary translation memory in the project (by default or explicit selection).

Here's the "fast path" for staying out of trouble:

1. Go to Tools > Options > Default resources > TM settings and if you do not already have custom TM settings to edit, select and clone the default settings. Give them a suitable name like "My Own TM Settings".
2. Click the Roles tab and unmark the setting to store the user's role in TM entries.
3. Click OK.
4. Ensure that the checkbox next to these custom settings is marked so they will be applied to all new projects. Then click OK to exit the options.
5. In any currently open project to which the desired settings have not been applied, go to Project home > Settings > TM settings and select the desired settings as the default by marking the corresponding checkbox.

Multiple entries written to the TM when the roles are included will not be eliminated after the TM settings are corrected. They must be explicitly removed by editing the translation memory.

I hope that in the future Kilgray will reconsider these troublesome new default settings and make the new possibilities "opt-in" values in custom TM settings. But for now, users must actively change their settings and defaults if they want to avoid role-based additional TM entries. (The current version of the memoQ Help describes roles as being disabled here by default. Would that this were so!)

You can, of course, make other useful adjustments to your custom TM settings, such as defining what a "good" match is (for pre-translation) or adjusting the tag matching behavior or applying various kinds of penalties to reduce match values for content which might have quality problems. The memoQ Help offers guidance on these options.

Postscript:
Even after the settings are "fixed", "existing damage" in a TM caused by the storage of unwanted, role-based information is not repaired. Any messes will have to be cleaned up in the rather inadequate TM editor in memoQ or in an external TMX maintenance tool. At the present time, there is no "easy option" to clean up a large number of erroneous or redundant translations stored because of this role setting. This case unfortunately underscores the woefully inadequate maintenance facilities for translation memory resources in the current version of memoQ. Perhaps some of the sophisticated options developed for Kilgray's TM Repository will finally trickle down in some way in an integrated option with Language Terminal or some sophisticated filtering and editing options will be added directly to the desktop product so that users can finally maintain their TM data in a reasonable way. memoQ is, overall, the best option available to us for project work in most cases, and I recommend it to colleagues because I know they will be able to do most ordinary tasks with a minimum of grief and calls for help (or expressions of anger) directed to me. But in 2013 it is ridiculous that my ability to manage my TM in my tool of choice is inferior to what I could do when I started using Déjà Vu as my CAT tool 13 years ago. Please join me in encouraging Kilgray to raise their game - soon - with respect to translation memory maintenance by writing to support@kilgray.com and expressing your need for better data management! (And more sensible default TM settings, of course.)

Update:
It looks like this default problem may end with the 6.8.6 build. One of the key people involved with memoQ and its features has stated that "After the [next] update, the default TM settings resource will have 'Store modifying user’s name in TM' unticked." Excellent.

For cases where there may already be data problems from older, erroneous entries being retained, the following workaround was suggested:

• Export to TMX
• Start up 6.5 and import into an empty TM

In the process, memoQ 2013 (version 6.5) will ignore the role information in the TMX, and entries with the same source will not create duplicates; translations with a later timestamp will be preserved in the TM if there are duplicates in the TMX.

This still doesn't change the fact that we need better means of maintaining our data in memoQ, but it is good that once again, Kilgray has responded quickly to important concerns of its users and is on the way to solving the problem.

The state of the upgrade: memoQ 2013 R2

The memoQ 2013 release started off on the wrong foot with me in many ways. I was deeply disappointed by the features that were previewed in Budapest at the last memoQfest, and I was even less happy after I saw what a hash had been made of one of the features I use most: comments. In fact, I wrote a rather annoyed blog post about that not long after the release. There was a lot of talk about "game-changing innovation", but frankly I really could not see it. My translating colleagues asked me if it was worth it to upgrade, and aside from my usual warnings about the need to wait for at least 2 or 3 months after any release for it to mature and stabilize, I just could not find any compelling arguments for a freelance translator to move from the stable, excellent 6.2 version to the rather dodgy 6.5 version, or "memoQ 2013" as it was rechristened.

Almost on the usual schedule, however, two months later the bugs were largely sorted out, the initial mistakes in the comment feature redesign were well fixed, and I no longer saw the memoQ 2013 release in the same dim light, but could actually see some benefits for my freelance colleagues to upgrade to that version and no actual harm in doing so. And as I got to know the fuzzy term matching feature better and saw how it helped me deal with typo-laden source documents or the usual spelling chaos of German technical writers, I began to see some very compelling value in memoQ 2013 for translators.

Most of the "game changers" talked about in May actually arrived a month ago with Release 2 of memoQ 2013. I did my best to lower expectations for this release, not because I think it is crap, but because I think this is one of the best CAT tool version upgrades I have seen in 13 years, and I knew it would need the usual time to mature. I think by the end of the year this version will have so much to offer that I would rather not have people stressing over the small stuff that I am confident will be fixed well.

However, I decided to live dangerously, and I switched over all my production work to use this version even before the official release. The first few weeks were not fun with all the little quirks I discovered and duly reported, but I encountered nothing data-destroying or really shocking, mostly just housekeeping details like somebody forgetting to vacuum the rug after gutting the whole house and giving it a nice remodel.

One month after the official release, memoQ 2013 R2 is far more reliable than I remember any memoQ version being one month after release. There has been steady refinement in its features, and I continue to discover hidden gems that I sometimes suspect most of the Kilgray team aren't even aware of yet because so much was added and changed, but not in a way that disrupted older work processes. I have a long shopping list of refinements that I think should be made to new features like the TM search tool (which has only actually worked on my system since the release of the 6.8.5 build about a week ago) or that ground-breaking monolingual review feature which (will probably be the next big CAT feature to copy), but even the new features I consider rather immature are already looking pretty damned good. I can't guarantee that this release can be trusted for all your work right now (though it actually seems pretty good to me right now), but since it can be safely installed in parallel with older versions, I definitely recommend taking a look and joining the conversation on refinements still needed. I think Kilgray has been very responsive to user feedback in this round, and I can't say I am anything but encouraged by what I have seen in the last month.

One very exciting change for me in the current build (6.8.6) is that the rather risky non-optional export of target text comments with DOCX files has been sorted out very nicely. The solution seems a little strange to me right now, but it's a great step forward with some excellent possibilities.

When I saw those "severity levels" added to the commenting features in memoQ 2013 (6.5), I had very little good to say about them. I still don't think much about how they are named and wish I could choose my own labels, but now I can only applaud their usefulness. Why? Because the addition of the five checkboxes above has given me the control I want over comments to be included in an exported translation of a DOCX file. I can cleanly separate the comments which are notes to myself from those for my project partners and comments for my customers. This is very helpful.

I do think it is odd that this control was placed at Tools > Options > Miscellaneous > Translation when the comment exports (as far as I know) only affect DOCX files, but if there are plans to extend this feature to other exported formats, then this makes sense. I would like to see similar filtering controls for the ordinary view filters (on that last tab where comment and tag filtering criteria can be specified) and for comment inclusion in a bilingual RTF export. Either of these would be an enormous help to my frequent work processes, because I use a lot of comments intended for different people, and sorting these out cleanly can be laborious.

In recent weeks I have been working on the new edition of my memoQ tips book and taking a very close look at "corners" of the software that I suspect very few have time or inclination to look in. And I've had days when it really felt like Christmas has come early. One discovery after another of nice little refinements, lots of incremental improvements, which added together give a total with what I feel is a lot of value. I'm writing way too many private thank-yous to some of the people at Kilgray for what I see as excellent new directions even if I am inclined to argue over some of the details.

Since the release of memoQ 6.2 and its follow-ups with the bilingual text/Excel filter, there has been such a steady flow of useful improvements to help individual translators work better that those who claim that all the effort of development has been spent catering to the corporate sausage-making interests of the low-paying cattle call crowd simply haven't been paying attention. Or they have been confused by Kilgray's occasionally appalling failure to organize their messages properly for different interest groups. If you're talking to a big group of freelance translators and start discussing "great server features to monitor your translators' productivity", don't expect blown kisses and showers of rose petals. Sometimes it's obvious that the makers of the tool don't always understand the importance of what they have created for our work. Well, why should they? We're the ones doing it. But I tell you, right now there is a lot more gold for individual translators in the memoQ mine than anyone realizes. That goes for me too. I am surprised by fat new nuggets I find almost every week.

Do I care that so much effort is spent on developing cutting edge project management features for memoQ translation servers, even ones that I think can be abused in some pretty awful ways by some companies whose business practices I detest? Well yes I do... I think it's great. Besides, I can actually come up with nice uses of those awful features. You can do a lot of things with a cutting-edge: chop up a tasty salad... or the local nursery school. Blame the fool, not the tool.

Kilgray has avoided the disastrous errors committed by Atril in the last decade as their market mis-focus and disastrous failure to get the maintenance revenue needed to fix and develop features steadily eroded the ability of its loyal users to cope with a changing market. There was nearly a complete failure to compete for the business of translation agencies and corporate and government translation departments. And the solutions that prevailed in those quarters were mostly rather awful. I watched whole departments of Siemens traumatized by the disastrous Trados Teamworks, which made a number of those in the translation team of the medical products division look forward to retirement.

Kilgray has steadily built its business in the markets ignored by Atril a decade ago and in doing so has secured its future far better and ensured the funding of a truly remarkable series of improvements in the four and a half years I have been using memoQ. And now... when I look at the features of the recent SDL Trados 2014 release I see good things that I have known from other tools for a long time for the most part, nice to have really, but as I stifle a yawn I wonder if it all really has to be so complex since I'm not depending on consulting or training for SDL to pay my bills. And then I get back to memoQ and keep getting rocked by the "wow factor" as I find useful new things while trying to concentrate and get a job done. memoQ 2013 R2 is one of the worst offenders I've seen in a long time for its very real threats to make my work a lot easier and more fun!