iPhone Google Maps in translation

When I first moved to Portugal I had a TomTom navigation system that I had used for a few years when I traveled. Upon crossing a border, I would usually change the language for audio cues, because listening to street names in one language pronounced badly in another was simply too confusing and possibly dangerous. Eventually, the navigation device died as crappy electronics inevitably do, and I changed over to smartphone navigation systems, first Apple Maps on my iPhone and, after I tired of getting sent down impossible goat trails in Minho, Google Maps, which generally did a better job of not getting me lost and into danger.

For the most part, the experience with Google Maps has been good. It's particularly nice for calling up restaurant information (hours, phone numbers, etc.) on the same display where I can initiate navigation to find the restaurant. The only problem was that using audio cues was painful, because the awful American woman's voice butchering Portuguese street names meant that my only hope of finding anything was to keep my eyes on the actual map and try to shut out (or simply turn off) the audio.

What I wanted was navigation instructions in Portuguese, at least while I am in Portugal; across the border in Spain it would be nice to have Spanish to avoid confusion. Not the spoken English voice of some clueless tourist from Oklahoma looking to find the nearest McDonald's and asking for prices in "real money". But although I found that I could at least dictate street names in a given language if I switched the input "keyboard" to that language, the app always spoke that awful, ignorant English.

And then it occurred to me: switch the entire interface language of the phone! Set your iPhone's language to German and Google Maps will pronounce German place names correctly. Same story for Portuguese, Spanish, etc. Presumably Hungarian too; I'll have to try that in Budapest next time. And that may have an additional benefit: fewer puzzled looks when someone asks where I'm staying and I can't even pronounce the street name.

It's a little disconcerting now to see all my notifications on the phone in Portuguese. But that's also useful, as the puzzle pieces of the language are mostly falling into place these days, and the only time I get completely confused now is if someone drops a Portuguese bomb into the middle of an English sentence when I'm not expecting it. Street names make sense now; I'm less distracted by the navigation voice when I drive.

And if some level of discomfort means that I use the damned smartphone less, that's a good thing too.

(Kevin Lossner)

Track changes in memoQ: misunderstandings and navigation

Although tracked changes have been part of memoQ since the distant days of memoQ 5.0, many users are still confused about how to use these features and how to navigate marked changes in a translation.

The confusion starts with the menu for activating the tracked changes, which in recent versions of memoQ is found on the Review ribbon. What most people do not realize is that the first two options - Against Last Received Version and Against Last Delivered Version - are not relevant to the usual workflows of an individual translator working in a local project created on his or her computer. Often I have caught myself selecting the option Against Last Delivered Version for the tracked changes to show, because I want to compare against the last version I delivered to my client by exporting and e-mailing the document, because I forget that this refers to the actual Deliver function in a server project.

If I am working locally in my own projects, the only track changes option that is relevant is Custom, with which I can show comparisons to specific minor versions:

In the present example, I've selected a comparison with a "snapshot" I made before an editing session. A snapshot creates a record of the status of a translation at a given time and makes rollbacks possible. Use the submenu of the Versions icon on the Documents ribbon to make a snapshot of your translation:

Once the tracking of changes for the current translation compared to a previous minor version has been activated, the relevant changes will be marked in red in the translation grid. If changes have been made to the source text (correcting OCR errors, for example, by editing the source text with F2), these will be shown as well.

Changes can be rejected by choosing Revert To Earlier Version on the Review ribbon, in the context menu (right-click) or with the corresponding keyboard shortcut. Or a version of a target text not shown in the markup can be recalled with the Row History and restored by copying it from the dialog (Ctrl+C) and pasting in the target cell and editing out extraneous information.

But how can one navigate many tracked changes in a larger document? Many users think this is not possible, though in fact it's rather simple with memoQ's filtering features.

Clicking the filter icon above the target text column opens a dialog to specify filter criteria for the working view. On the Status tab under Other properties... the option Change tracked can be selected to show only those segments with tracked changes.

Alternatively, the Go to next segment settings (Shift+Ctrl+G) can be configured in the same way with Change tracked on the Status tab, so choosing Go to next (Ctrl+G) or confirming a segment (if the option Automatically jump after confirmation is selected in the Go to next segment settings dialog) will take you to the next segment with tracked changes.

memoQ filters for static and dynamic views and navigation

The filtering functions for translation documents in memoQ are really cool. I'm not talking about the import filters for different types of documents, though most of these are rather good, and improvements are being made all the time. I mean the ways in which you can use filters to look at the content you are translating and sort and navigate it in different ways.

The filters can be used to create static views from one or more translation documents selected on the Documents tab of the Translations window of Project home using the Create view command.

I use this function a lot to create comment and feedback lists for clients or select some particular part of my content that I want to save and work on or share separate from the rest. Exported as bilingual RTF tables, the content can be corrected or questions answered in the comments column, and all the changes and commentary can be re-imported to update your project.

What I use even more often are the dynamic filters in the translation window. There are three main types: sorting filters in a dropdown list, source and target text filters in the fields above the related columns, and the dilog filter with its many options, which is invoked with the funnel icon (2):

Source and target text filtering of the segments can be made case-sensitive by marking the icon (1). Any number of filtering operations can be applied cumulatively in sequence, and filters applied with the source and target text fields can be cleared with the red X icon (4). To clear a sorting filter, you must select "No sorting" from the dropdown menu.

These view filters can be very helpful for translation and quality assurance. But what many do not realize is that memoQ also allows you to navigate through translation segments using filter criteria. This is done with Edit > Goto Next (Ctrl+G). The filter criteria to apply for navigation are chosen under Edit > Goto Next Settings (Ctrl+Shift+G).

This often has the advantage over view filtering that all the segments remain visible and you can see the context better. Examples of this are shown for navigating to commented segments and navigating through the many footnotes in a document to check their formatting in the short (3.5 minute) video tutorial below. It was prepared with the most recent build of memoQ 2013 (6.5.15) and shows the new "golden" bubble icon for commented segments. The video demonstrates (with footnotes) how tag type can be used as a filtering or segment navigation criterion. This might come in handy for an academic thesis or a legal document with many footnotes to check.


Use the icon at the bottom right of the video to toggle full screen mode for viewing; this makes it much easier to see the details of this somewhat fast-paced clip.

0:17  Static views on the View tab of the Translations window
0:30  Dynamic source and target text field filtering
0:40  Dialog filtering with the funnel icon (3rd cumulative filter)
0:52  Using filters to navigate: Goto Next (rationale & contrast with view filter)
1:20  Goto Next settings for navigating commented segments
1:42  Navigating footnotes in a translation document with Goto Next
1:55  Setting the navigation filter for a tag type
2:30  Getting rid of a static view to allow segment joining
3:23  Oops! I join something I shouldn't and split the segment again, hoping nobody will notice.

Subscribe to my free YouTube channel and I think you'll receive updates of new video tutorials I add (or at least it'll be easier to find them). I would also like to thank Ulrich Scheffler of LSP.net for providing me with a Camtasia license recently to support my teaching - it's much better than the free Open Source CamStudio I started working with months ago, though I can definitely recommend CamStudio as a good tool to get started with making demonstration or teaching videos.