The Dark Secret of memoQ interface switch-hitters

The memoQ world looks very different in the typical view of a translator versus that of a project manager.

Chaos Central: the memoQ Translator Pro dashboard

Ready to work: the project manager interface of memoQ

These differences sometimes lead to difficulties in training or documenting procedures for others. It can be quite annoying, for example, for the students in a university translation technology course to watch their professor demonstrate a technique in the project manager version as they stare at their local copies of memoQ Translator Pro in the computer lab and try to repeat the steps in that different environment.

Project managers who never or seldom use the Translator Pro version often sow unintended confusion when they explain to a translator who isn't a memoQ power user how to performcertain tasks; it really would help if both were looking at the same setup.

I used to spend a lot of annoying time changing the license in my copy of memoQ when I needed to change from one edition to another for purposes of teaching or writing help instructions for the blogor elsewhere. No longer.

A few years ago, memoQ developers and testers got tired of the same problem, so Kilgray made it possible to switch easily back and forth between the edition views. The only catch, as far as I know, is that you must be using a PM license, such as the one that is included with the memoQ cloud service account.

Switch-hitting with memoQ is very simple, just a few little steps. These are:

1. Create an XML file named ClientDevConfig.xml with the following content: 
2. Copy this file into the path: C:\ProgramData\MemoQ. Note that ProgramData is generally a hidden folder, so you'll have to deal with that. If I have to tell you how, you probably shouldn't be doing this :-)
3. Restart memoQ. There will be a new menu group at the far right of the ribbon menu. Perhaps you noticed that already in the screenshots above. This addition may appear in two different forms:

That's it. So if you are a memoQ trainer or a project manager who needs to explain something to a frustrated translator in a visual context they can relate to, you have another tool to help you with that. This has been a great boon to me for the past few years, and I am very glad to have it in my tattered bag of tricks.

CAT tools re-imagined - an approach to authoring and editing

I am often asked about the monolingual editing workflows I have used for some 15 years now to improve texts which were written originally in English, not created by translation from another language. And I have discussed various corpus linguistics approaches, such as to learn the language of a new specialty or the NIFTY method often presented by colleague Juliette Scott.

However, on a recent blitz tour of northern Portugal to test the fuel performance of the diesel wheels which may take me to the BP15 and memoQfest conferences in Zagreb and Budapest respectively later this year, I stopped off in Vila Real to meet a couple of veterinarians, one of whom is also a translator. During a lunch chat with typically excellent Portuguese cuisine, the subject of corpus research as an aid for authoring a review paper came up. I began to explain my (not so unusual) methods of editing and existing document when I was asked how the tools of translation technology might be applied to authoring original content.

The other translator at the table said, "It's a shame that I cannot use my translation memories to look things up while I write", and I replied that of course he could do this, for example with the memoQ TM Search Tool or similar solutions from other providers. And then he said, "And what about my term bases and LiveDocs corpora?", and I said I would sleep on it and get back to him. In the days that followed, other friends (coincidentally also veterinarians) asked my advice about editing the English of the Ph.D. theses and other works they will author in English as non-native speakers of that language. One of them noted that it would be "nice" if she could refer to corrections made by various persons and compare them more easily. I said I would sleep on that one too.

A few days after that the pain in my hands and feet from repetitive strain injuries and arthritis was unbearable, aggravated by a rope burn accident while stopping an attack on sheep by my over-eager hunting dog and by driving over 1000 km in a day. I doubled down on the pain meds, made a big jug of toxically potent sangria and otherwise ensured that I was comfortably numb and could enjoy a night of solid sleep.

It was not meant to be. Two hours later I woke up, stone sober, with a song in my head and the solution to the problem of my Portuguese friends writing in English and Tiago wanting to author his work in memoQ for the convenience of using its filters to review content. Since then the concept has continued to evolve and improve as others suggest ways of accommodating their writing or language learning needs.


After about a week of testing I scheduled one of my "huddle" presentation classes, an intimate TeamViewer training session to discuss the approach and elicit new ideas for adapting it better to the needs of monolingual authors. The recording of that session is available for download by clicking on the image of the title slide at the top of this post. (The free TeamViewer software is needed to watch the TVS file downloaded; double-click it, and the 67-minute lecture and Q&A will play.)

I'm currently building Moodle courses which provide more details and templates for this approach to authoring and editing, and it will be incorporated in parts of the many talks and workshops planned this year.

I am aware that SDL killed their authoring product, the Author Assistant, and that Acrolinx offers interesting tools in this area, as do others. But I'm usually hesitant to recommend commercial tools in an academic environment, because their often rapid pace of development (such as we see with memoQ) can play serious havoc with teaching plans and threaten the stability of an instructional program, which is usually best focused on concepts and not on fast-changing details. So I actually started out my work and testing of this idea using the Open Source tool OmegaT, the features of which are more limited but also more stable in most cases than the commercial solutions from SDL, Kilgray and others. But as I worked, I noticed that my greater familiarity with memoQ's features made it an advantageous platform for developing an approach, which in principle works with almost every translation environment tool.

Part of my motivation in creating this presentation was to encourage improvements in the transcription features available in some translation environments. But the more I work with this idea, the more possibilities I see for extending the reach of translation technology into source text authoring and making all the resources needed for help available in better ways. I hope that you may see some possibilities for your own work or learning needs and can contribute these to the discussion.

memoQ&A: How can I have multiple target languages in a project?

Every translation environment tool has its own approach to project management and languages. Recently, a colleague asked for advice on outsourcing options for a client project which may involve a number of target languages translated from an English source text. I think her usual tool is some flavor of SDL Trados Freelance, but the five-language restriction on freelance software versions from SDL means that Studio is not an option in this case without an expensive upgrade to SDL Trados Studio Professional. This might be a worthwhile option, though it's difficult to judge in this case, because I don't know if this sort of project will be part of the future routine.

As I recall from my days as a Déjà Vu user, projects could have multiple target languages, but without the Workgroup version, collaboration was made difficult by restrictions on the bilingual files ("external views"). I don't know if this is still an issue in DVX3, because the uncertain future of Atril makes me reluctant to invest much study time in that tool.

memoQ does not restrict the languages one uses, but creating a project with multiple target languages requires the Project Manager edition. Kilgray doesn't talk much about this edition of memoQ and usually tries to link it to a server license sale (or a memoQ cloud subscription); if you look on the Kilgray web site, you will find very little information. I think the license typically costs about €1500, with €300 (20%) annually for maintenance upgrades and support. Quite a bargain, actually, and with the PM version one also gets access to another well-kept secret: the memoQ client API, which can be used to automate or simplify a number of project management processes. And of course with the PM edition one can create convenient "handoff packages", which provide convenient resource bundles for collaboration with other memoQ users with compatible versions of the translation environment tool.

But the memoQ PM edition is total overkill for someone who typically needs only individual language pairs for work and is faced only rarely with the need to manage multiple target languages from a source language. If there are just a few languages involved, it's probably not a big deal for someone with the memoQ Translator Pro edition to create several projects (one for each target language needed). There is, however, another option worth considering in some cases: using the Translator Pro edition to manage a multilingual project created with the PM edition.

If a multilingual project is created with the memoQ Project Manager edition, the individual target languages are available in the memoQ Translator Pro edition. A text imported with the target set to "All languages" is automatically put in every target language in the project; suitable bilinguals (XLIFF, RTF bilingual tables or TWB-/Wordfast-compatible unclean DOC) can be generated from each individual target language.

A downloadable example of a memoQ project backup to test for memoQ 2013R2 is here.

Using a project with multiple target languages in the Translator Pro edition requires, of course, that the original project be created by someone with the Project Manager edition. And the sophisticated functions for reporting, package creation, etc. are not available when the project is open in the Translator Pro edition. But translation memories, termbases, LiveDocs and other resources can in fact be managed for multiple target languages in the project. The work can be reviewed or prepared for external proofreading, target files can be created in all the languages, and a number of other simple management tasks can be performed. In many cases this may be enough.