Ergonomic optimization for memoQ windows & more!

Click the graphic to see the mind-blowing details of all you can get on two silly little screens. Imagine two big ones!

How many functional windows do you see for working in the memoQ project of the screenshot here? Do you need more? It's possible. Are you familiar with all the functions shown in this two-screen view of my laptop and a repurposed television screen on my working holiday?

Of course one need not be restricted to just the many undockable, resizable and relocatable windows of memoQ; other, third-party like the SDL MultiTerm Widget (for searching SDL term bases in memoQ or other applications) or IntelliWebSearch, which offers many customized, configurable multi-tab web searches with the browser engine of your choice, or others can be added as needed.

"But wait!", you say. "You can't undock memoQ windows except for the preview, and it's impossible to get enough space to see all the information in the Translation Results pane or see the comparison of large matches well!" Well, here you can. The Translation Results hit list can take the whole height of your screen if you want it to. And you can even see more than one translation and editing grid for files if you need to.

Just because memoQ Support or some expert in the company says stuff like that is not possible doesn't make it so. For something like a decade now I have heard users ask for a lot of layout customization features to improve working ergonomics in memoQ. Heck, I've heard myself beg for that for ages. But typically, one is told how difficult and expensive such efforts are, how there are other priorities, yada yada yada. What, apparently, nobody realized was that while all these discussions were going on, someone actually implemented the requested features, deliberately or otherwise. In any case, somehow that secret never got out. Until I stumbled over it last week while trying to enjoy a few days at the beach.

"How do I get there?" you and David Byrne may ask. Join us for the Best Practices in Translation Technology course from 15 to 20 July (next month) in Lisbon and find out! Or wait until I get around to opening my upcoming online courses, Working Ergonomics in memoQ and New Beginnings with memoQ 9.0, coming soon. Or look in all those memoQ basics tutorials from memoQ Translation Technologies Ltd. on YouTube - something as basic as ergonomics for using the software must be in there somewhere. Or maybe not. Yet.

Or... explore and discover the tricks yourself. And while you're at it, you might find some of the other hidden surprises cleverly concealed in the world's greatest translation environment toolkit.

Those pesky memoQ previews

For many translation tasks in some translation environments such as memoQ or SDL Trados Studio, the document preview functions are enormously helpful to understand the context of the text to be translated, and the integration of the preview in the working windows of the CAT tool saves time over staring at printouts or scrolling through PDF files in many cases. The ability to use a preview to jump to a particular point in the translation grid is also a fine thing.

But too often the document preview in memoQ looks like the screenshot above - i.e. no preview visible, even when the file import dialog indicated no trouble creating one. I have cursed a lot about this for a long time, reimported files in the hopes of seeing a preview, sometimes opened and closed the file in memoQ to get the preview to show. It's pretty much of a crapshoot sometimes, and too often I throw "snake eyes". The problem seems to be worse on a slow laptop I sometimes use, which has far less RAM than my usual fast working machine.

Quite by accident recently, I noticed that one can often "recover" a missing memoQ preview by toggling between the HTML preview and one of the other two options which appears when the cursor passes over the upper right portion of the view pane. While I hope that Kilgray's developers can sort out these problems in a better way, in the meantime this procedure might reduce the irritation of some who work with this generally good tool.

memoQuickie: "Partial deliveries" from the preview

Earlier today a friend asked how she might deliver just a table from a larger report she was translating in memoQ in a word processing file. My quick answer was to use the recent export functions in memoQ which enable one to export partially completed work, then open the file and delete everything but the table.

But then I thought... there must be a better way. So I built a test file in Microsoft Word:

And then I imported this into memoQ, copied the text from the preview and pasted it back into Microsoft Word .

Content copied from the memoQ preview: the red box is placed at the currently selected segment.

The Excel object copied from the preview as a bitmap graphic, but the ordinary table and the other text were normal and editable. This would often suffice to send some small section of a translation quickly, and this could even be used with the monolingual review feature to update the translation with suggested changes.

Text preview workaround for memoQ

For years I have been nagging Kilgray to add a preview for plain text files imported to memoQ. I translate quite a number of TXT files sometimes, and it bothers me not to be able to see the text in the preview as I work. The workaround I have used for this - resaving the file as RTF, DOC or DOCX - runs the risk of getting me in trouble if I don't remember to re-save as plain text before delivery.

While editing some video caption texts recently, it dawned on me that users now have another alternative. One of the quiet improvements made in memoQ 6.2 was the introduction of a preview for files imported with the Regex text filter.

If a text file is brought into the project using Import with options... and the import filter is changed from the plain text filter to the regex text filter (with the defaults - no other settings needed), a preview will be created as shown in the screenshot above.

There will be lines between the paragraphs, and the imported text will have a green background highlight. A bit annoying perhaps, but better than the previous complete lack of a preview.

Those who work with Sanskrit and Arabic may note some minor problems in the example shown. I was a little surprised to notice that there were no problems displaying the words with other scripts on the right side of the working window, but the results in the translation grid are not quite as good. I thought perhaps this was due to my choice of display font, and that may be the case, as switching to Arial Unicode MS fixed all but the comma display, but perhaps there is more to the problem.

The new Trados TTX preview in memoQ 6

When I heard some weeks ago that memoQ 6 would offer a preview of TTX files, I was curious what this would be and how it was possible. In my mind, I had a picture of the view of the original format, and I couldn't see how this could be reproduced from a Trados TTX. Of course it can't.

I made a little file with two sentences, one footnote and one comment in Microsoft Word.

Then I made a TTX from that using SDL Trados 2007 and imported it into memoQ:

The memoQ tags, can of course be displayed in a shorter form using toolbar options; I'm just showing the full tag text here for demonstration purposes. The preview of the TTX is shown below the translation grid. It is of course a preview of the tags one would see in the Trados TagEditor.

At first I thought this was rather useless, but then I realized it had value after all:

• The original tags are easier to understand than the tags in the memoQ grid, and the color differentiation between inline tags (green) and other tags (grey) is helpful.
• Unsegmented content is shown, giving you an indication of important content that may require attention like numbers or numeric dates. (I tested this with a different file.)

In the case of that second point, I would re-import the document and select the option to include the unsegmented content. Then use the X-translate function available with version management to pick up where you left off without losing much time. I always leave versioning active in my memoQ projects to allow for possibilities like this. It is also helpful that the new version 6 offers all the features of versioning previously available only in the Project Manager edition of memoQ, which makes comparisons and reporting easier.

Final checks in memoQ

"Having to do a separate final check in Word is a major MemoQ disadvantage over the Word/Trados Workbench (and Wordfast Classic) WYSIWYG procedure. It might even make some of us abandon MemoQ."

I read that statement in a recent digest from the Yahoogroups memoQ forum with some puzzlement. What exactly does the author of those words mean?


There are a few arguments I can muster in favor of the necessity to do a final check in MS Word or another original format. The limitations of the spellchecker in memoQ is one of these. Even when the MS Word spellchecker is used, as I recall memoQ (in the versions where I noticed this problem) did not flag doubled words, and I have a bad habit of typing "and and" and the like.


The use of style guide and consistency-checking tools like PerfectIt! are other good reasons to do such external checks.


But when I do such things, I work on my second monitor and immediately incorporate changes in my memoQ project to keep the TM updated among other things. Also, the filters in memoQ enable me to examine the scope of some problems faster and with greater ease than multiple "Find" operations in a word processor or other software.


But if the person quoted meant simple ease of reading on the screen, I wonder if he has paid any attention to the optimal use of the memoQ translation preview. One could simply resize that pane after translation and read through a preview of the translation:

If a problem is found, clicking on the text will select it and cause the translation window (above the preview) to jump to the segment to be corrected. And of course this works for any format that yields a preview in memoQ, so you are not limited as you would be working with the Trados Workbench macros or Wordfast Classic in MS Word. Excel files, PowerPoint slides, HTML, ODT files and other formats enable you to work this way.


But another reason why I would hesitate strongly before regressing to the tools mentioned is that I would sacrifice the ability to do terminology checks with the QA module. (This is, of course, possible to a limited extent in TagEditor.) Or other QA checks which may be of interest. These features are severely underutilized, but they aren't hard to learn, and they offer considerable benefits to freelance translators in the competition for consistent formal quality.


Similar advantages are likely to be had from other recent versions of leading translation environment tools. Very often it pays to consider the points of difficulty we have with these and discuss them with other users, because often new and better ways of using them will come to light.