Bilingual Excel to LiveDocs corpora: video

A bit over three years ago, I published a blog post describing a simple way to move EUR-Lex data into a memoQ LiveDocs corpus so that the content can be used for matching and concordance work in translation and editing. The particular advantage of a LiveDocs corpus versus a translation memory is that the latter does not allow users to read the document context for concordance hits.

A key step in the import process is to bring the bilingual content in an Excel file into a memoQ project as a "translation document" and then send that content to LiveDocs from the translation files list. Direct import to a LiveDocs corpus of bilingual content using the multilingual delimited text import filter is still not possible despite years of asking the development team for memoQ to implement this.

This is irritating, though in the case of a EUR-Lex alignment which may be slightly out of sync and need fixing, it is perhaps all for the best. And in some other situations, where the content may be incomplete and require filtering (in a View) before sending it to the corpus, it also makes sense to bring the file in as a translation document first to use the many tools available for selecting and modifying content. However, in many situations, it's simply a nuisance that the files cannot be sent directly to a LiveDocs corpus.

In any case, I've now done a short (silent) video to make the steps involved in this import process a little clearer:

Words in music: what vocabulary and languages tell us about leading musicians

Corpus linguistics has been a passion of mine since an article published by three colleagues about a decade ago showed me the possibilities of "mining" collections of text in a subject area to determine its critical vocabulary, what sorts of words belong together in specialist language, etc. The public webinar offered tomorrow by the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) is a new take on this familiar subject, exploring the use of vocabulary by popular musicians and relating these to things like mastery of multiple languages or commercial success. A familiar subject, sort of, but nonetheless something completely different.

It is this kind of reimagination of things we "already" know which can open our minds to knew possibilities of many kinds which are available now, but which nobody expects and therefore nobody sees. So I will enjoy hearing what Mr. Jewalikar has to say at 3 pm UTC tomorrow, October 10th and look forward to the new ideas this may stir up in my head. And if you would like to join us in the presentation, you can register by sending a short e-mail request to info.request@iapti.org; there is no charge to participate.

This event is the sort of professional information with fresh perspectives and a clear focus on the needs and interests of individual professionals - not the linguistic sausagemakers and exploiters - that I have come to expect from this organization. While others sell out to the commercial interests of the bulk market bog to turn language professionals and aspiring professionals into "input" for their post-edited machine sausage of words, IAPTI and a very few other groups keep the focus on stimulating content of real professional worth.

A quick trip to LiveDocs for EUR-Lex bilingual texts

Quite a number of friends and respected colleagues use EUR-Lex as a reference source for EU legislation. Being generally sensible people, some of them have backed away from the overfull slopbucket of bulk DGT data and built more selective corpora of the legislation which they actually need for their work.

However, the issue of how to get the data into a usable form with a minimum of effort has caused no little trouble at times. The various texts can be copied out or downloaded in the languages of interest and aligned, but depending on the quality of the alignment tool, the results are often unsatisfactory. I've been told that AlignFactory does a better job than most, but then the question of how best to deal with the HTML bitexts from AlignFactory remains.

memoQ LiveDocs is of course rather helpful for quick and sometimes dirty alignment, but if the synchronization of the texts is too many segments off, it is sometimes difficult to find the information one needs even when the (bilingual) document is opened from the context menu in a concordance window.

EUR-Lex offers bi- or tri-lingual views of most documents in a web page. The alignments are often imperfect, but the synchronization is usually off by only one or two segments, so finding the right text in a document's context is not terribly difficult. So these often imperfect alignments are usually quite adequate for use as references in a memoQ LiveDocs corpus. Here is a procedure one might follow to get the EUR-Lex data there.

The bilingual text of a view such as the one above can be selected by dragging the cursor to select the first part of the information, then scrolling to the bottom of the window and Shift+clicking to select all the text in both columns:

Copy this text, then paste it into Excel:

Then import the Excel file as a file for "translation" in a memoQ project with the right language settings. Because of quirks with data access in LiveDocs if the target language variants are specified and possibly not matched, I have created a "data conversion project" with generic language settings (DE + EN in my case as opposed to my usual DE-DE + EN-US project settings) to ensure that data stored in LiveDocs will be accessed without trouble from any project. (This irritating issue of language variants in LiveDocs was introduced a few version ago by Kilgray in an attempt to placate some large agencies, but it has caused enormous headaches for professional translators who work with multiple sublanguage settings. We hope that urgent attention will be given to this problem soon, and until then, keep your LiveDocs language data settings generic to ensure trouble-free data access!)

When the Excel file is added to the Translations file list, there are two important changes to make in the import options. First, the filter must be changed from Microsoft Excel to "multilingual delimited text" (which also handles multilingual Excel files!). Second, the filter configuration must be "changed" to specify which data is in the columns of interest.

The screenshot above shows the import settings that were appropriate for the data I copied from EUR-Lex. Your settings will likely differ, but in each case the values need to be checked or set in the fields near the arrows ("Source language" particularly at the top and the three dropdown menus by the second arrow below).

Once the data are imported, some adjustments can be made by splitting or joining segments, but I don't think the effort is generally worth it, because in the cases I have seen, data are not far out of sync if they are mismatched, and the synchronization is usually corrected after a short interval.

In the Translations list of the Project home, the bilingual text can be selected and added to a LiveDocs corpus using the menus or ribbons.

The screenshot below shows the worst location of badly synchronized data in the text I copied here:

This minor dislocation does not pose a significant barrier to finding the information I might need to read and understand when using this judgment as a reference. The document context is available from the context menu in the memoQ Concordance as well as the context menu of the entry appearing in the Translation results pane.

A similar data migration procedure can be implemented for most bilingual tables in HTML files, word processing files or other data sources by copying the data into Excel and using the multilingual delimited text filter.

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.

SDL Trados Studio vs. memoQ: Translating Text Columns in Excel

Paul Filkin of SDL recently showed a few "little known gems" of SDL Trados Studio 2011 in one of his recent blog posts, which is quite useful for learning how to approach some not-so-rare project challenges with Trados Studio. Here I would like to share his video tutorial about one of those gems - how to translate multiple columns of text in an Excel file. (HINT: these embedded videos are easier to watch if you do that in full screen mode by toggling the icon at the lower right of the play window.)



memoQ can also translate Excel files with a similar structure, and here's how to do that, with a little bit of Dragon Naturally Speaking thrown in just for fun:

Translating multilingual Excel files in memoQ

Some weeks ago on a Friday, in the late afternoon, I received one of those typical Friday project inquiries: a request for a fast response on whether I would like to translate some 15 to 20 Excel files distributed in three folders, with file names redundant between the folders and over half the 50,000 source words already translated. My translations were, of course, to take the previous work into consideration and remain consistent with it. No translation memory resources were available. Fortunately for my blood pressure, I was offline that afternoon until after business hours. When I saw the request later that evening, I considered what sane approach there might be to such a project, and when none occurred to me at the time, I wrote a note to the project manager requesting more information about the source data, received no response and forgot the whole business as the usual Friday nonsense.

About a week later, while I was engaged in something completely different, it occurred to me that it would have been a fairly straightforward matter to translate the remaining text scattered through those files and build a reference translation memory from the existing translations. In fact, I could even use the available translations from other languages as references in a preview. How? By using a multilingual filter option that Kilgray added to memoQ version 6.2 (with build 15).

Finding that option is not exactly intuitive. I had heard about it but had not followed the discussions closely in the online lists, nor could I remember it from the online demonstrations I had viewed in recent months. But I knew that it worked with Excel files, so I started to import such a file and looked for the proper settings to import the source and target columns. And found nothing.

Fortunately, I used to be a software developer, so I put on my old developer's thinking cap and considered how I might best mystify users with a new feature. Aha! Name the feature something completely different! So I looked again at the list of import filters for my Excel file and found a likely candidate, the multilingual delimited text filter. (To use this filter, you must Import with options.)

The first page of the settings dialog for that filter offers Excel as one of the base formats to import:

The columns can be specified by marking the Simple bilingual configuration option, or with somewhat less confusion by examining the options on the Columns tab of the dialog. For the following test file with English source text and German as the desired target language

I used the following settings for the import:

After a little experimentation, I found that I could specify the third language (Portuguese) as a translation even though it was not a language indicated in the project. (Additional target languages are only possible with the PM edition of memoQ, but this information can be designated as a comment if needed in the Translator Pro edition.) This added the Portuguese translations (where available) to the preview in my working window:

Some odd property of the import filter in the version of memoQ tested caused the source text to be copied to the view of unpopulated translations of the project's target language in the preview, but that is of no real consequence. The preview, unlike a typical preview of an Excel file, bears no resemblance to the layout of the source file, but is instead organized by the source text grouped with other specified columns.

Considering how often I have encountered Excel files and other sources structured like this in the past decade, I would say this is probably one of the most useful filters that has been added to memoQ recently. More complex data structures may require cell background colors to be used to exclude unwanted parts of a spreadsheet (colors can be added while configuring the import). It's a shame that the current version of the filter doesn't support ranges or conditions for exclusion, but perhaps that will come later.

Making a translation memory from the existing translations in the file (which were locked and confirmed upon import in the example shown above) is a simple matter of using the command Operations > Confirm and update rows... and selecting the appropriate options. For the example shown here, selecting the locked rows would write all these to the primary translation memory:

Kilgray has a blog post and a recorded webinar (47 minutes long) with further details about using this filter. They state that "This webinar was designed for language service providers and enterprise users managing multilingual projects." However, given the frequency with which many freelancers encounter such formats and their desire to use other language information, comments, context data, etc. in their translations, I think this feature is just as relevant to freelance translators.

Update 2013-07-25: After a series of recent tests involving imports and segmentation, I wanted to see how the multilingual Excel filter would import data in which individual cells contain multiple sentences or line breaks. Theoretically the segments should correspond to the cell structures, but would they in fact? I decided to import one of my Excel files that I use for segmentation demos. To keep all the content of a cell in one segment with the regular Excel filter, I have to use a "paragraph segmentation" ruleset and set "soft breaks" as inline tags in the filter's import settings. But the default settings of the multilingual Excel filter achieve the same result:

This showed me that the "multilingual" filter might in fact save me time and trouble for importing files from certain customers where I want to avoid segmentation inside the cells altogether. And of course, the multilingual filter is an obvious quick way to load data from an Excel file and, as mentioned above for partial data, send it to a TM - a process which used to involve saving as a CSV file from Excel, worrying about saving as UTF-8, etc. That process might not even work with the test file shown here (I'm not really inclined to try it).