Colleague Simon Berrill, who works from Catalan, Spanish and French into English, writes a rather thoughtful blog which I have enjoyed very much in recent months. His latest post, "Better Together", describes a rather interesting mutual review arrangement, a linguists' triangle, which I thing could be an interesting and beneficial thing for translators at any stage of their careers.
The particular arrangement between Simon and his revision partners, Tim and Victoria, is striking for me because of its flexibility and the fact that it is not linked to specific work assignments. My first thought while reading his post was something like "Gee, I could really benefit from something like this!", and my mind began to drift to all of the interesting things that could be learned in a swap like this with the right people.
No more spoilers... go read the post yourselves and comment there. Thank you, Simon, for another thought-provoking contribution.
Showing posts with label proofreading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label proofreading. Show all posts
Mar 28, 2017
Jan 28, 2014
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:
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.
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
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.
Apr 17, 2012
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.
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