My translated document won't export! A 3-step preventive solution

A file export failure in memoQ

How many times have I heard that? Experienced it myself in various CAT tools? No idea. Lots.

About three years ago I published an article on the "pseudotranslation" feature of memoQ, which had been introduced in version 5. This was a feature I had made good use of years before in Passolo (before SDL did its Packman thing with the good company) to determine whether all text in software to be localized was accessible to the translation environment. In that article and on many other occasions, I have discussed the idea of roundtrip testing files to be sure they can be translated and then transformed afterward back into the desired formats. Often I just refer to this as "roundtripping".

Roundtripping is very simple. Anyone can do it, and it generally takes about a minute, sometimes a bit more, often less. And it more or less guarantees that your plans to translate a file and get a technically usable result will succeed. Roundtripping can be done with any respectable CAT tool and possibly with some of the ones that aren't.

Here's how it goes:

1. Import the document(s) you intend to translate into your translation environment (Wordfast Pro, OmegaT, SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, etc.).
2. Copy the entire source text exactly - including all tag structures - to the fields for target text. (This is actually a pain in the ass in OmegaT currently because even its developers don't understand how that somewhat hidden, idiotically command-line based function works. But for everyone else pretty much it's a piece of cake.)
3. Export the target text document (which of course is exactly the same as the source text) from the translation environment and ensure that it opens properly in its relevant application.

If there are problems in Step 3, then your source document is either corrupted (very likely) or the working environment screwed up the document on import. If the file type involved is one you work on regularly, you can be pretty sure that the problem lies with the original document and has nothing at all to do with your translation tool.

Corrupted documents occur with some frequency when PDFs are converted to editable formats such as RTF, DOC or DOCX, particularly by persons without a proper understanding of the best procedures for doing so. Even top-end tools like Omnipage or Abbyy Finereader sometimes create documents with hidden flaws in their file structure, which might open in a word processor but which go to Hell once imported in a CAT tool. Table structures used to be particularly vulnerable to corruption and probably still are.

So a smart outsourcer or translator roundtrips files before the actual translation starts to avoid last-minute panics and missed deadlines. It's fast, free insurance.

But what can you do if the corrupt file is all you have?

Sometimes nothing except go back to the client and ask for a new file. But I have also noticed rather often that corruption can be avoided by zipping file attachments to e-mail, and it seems that the corruption of unprotected files often occurs when these files are downloaded from the mail server. So if you can, try another copy of the attached file off your e-mail server.

In the case of Microsoft Office files (for Word, Excel and PowerPoint), re-saving the file in a different format causes its structure to be reworked by the application and often repaired. Sometimes that corrupt DOCX file can simply be re-saved as DOCX and all will be well with a roundtrip in your CAT tool, but if that doesn't help, saving the DOCX as RTF and then re-saving that RTF file once again as DOCX will effect the necessary "repairs" to the file and ensure that you can get a usable result.

Why not just translate that RTF file if it's OK? I prefer not to, because if there are tags present, these may be represented differently in some working environments (such as memoQ, which shows very different tagging in RTF and DOCX), and this messes up my matching a bit and obscures the tag function as well, forcing me to look at a printout or PDF too often to see what the markup is about. 

Get it right the first time

The files I work on often have unusual abbreviations which affect segmentation (and require me to update my rules), or I join and split segments while I work on a complex patent or legal pleading in order to make the work go better. This takes time. And if I discover at the end of a three-day job with 10,000+ words that my translation will not export to a target file, then I can look forward to a lot of extra time recreating my desired segmentation, especially if I was lazy and did not update the segmentation rules. While features like memoQ's "TM-driven segmentation" can overcome this somewhat, there are limits, and those limits are exceeded in cases where I might join 7 or more segments because the source language segmentation rules were seriously suboptimal.

So take a minute. Or two. And roundtrip those documents before you start translating or send the job out for someone else to do!

Caption editing for YouTube videos

I've spent a great deal of time in recent weeks examining different means for remote instruction via the Internet. In the past I've had good success with TeamViewer to work on copywriting projects with a partner or deliver training to colleagues and clients at a distance. So far I have avoided doing webinars because of the drawbacks I see for that medium, both as an instructor and as a participant, but I haven't completely excluded the possibility of doing them eventually. I've also looked at course tools such as Citrix Go To Training and a variety of other e-learning platforms, such as Moodle, which is the tool used by universities and schools around the world and which also seems to be the choice of Kilgray, ProZ and others for certain types of instruction.

Recorded video can be useful with many of these platforms, and since I've grown tired of doing the same demonstrations of software functions time and again, I've decided to record some of these for easy sharing and re-use. When I noticed recently that my Open Source screen recording software, CamStudio had been released in a new version, I decided quite spontaneously to make a quick video of pseudotranslation in memoQ to test whether a bug in the cursor display for the previous version of CamStudio had been fixed.

After I uploaded the pseudotranslation demo to YouTube, I noticed that rather appalling captions (subtitles) had been created by automatic voice recognition. Although voice recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking is usually very kind to me, Google's voice recognition on YouTube gave miserable results.

I soon discovered, however, that the captions were easy to edit and could also be exported as text files with time cues. These text files can be edited very easily to correct recognition errors or combine segments to improve the timing and subtitle display.

Once the captions for the original language are cleaned up and the timing is improved, the text files can be translated and uploaded to the video in YouTube to create caption tracks in other languages. As a test, I did this (with a little help from my friends), adding tracks for German and European Portuguese to the pseudotranslation demo. And if anyone else cares to create another track for their native language from this file, I'll add it with credits at the start of the track.

It's easy enough to understand why I might want to add captions in other languages to a video I record in English or German. But why would I want to do so in the original language? My thick American accent is one reason. I like to imagine that my English is clear enough for everyone to understand, but that is a foolish conceit. Of course I speak clearly - I couldn't use Dragon successfully if that were not true. But someone with a knowledge of English mostly based on reading or interacting with people who have very different accents might have trouble. It happens.

Although most of the demonstration videos SDL has online for SDL Trados Studio are easy to follow, some of the thick UK accents are really frightening and difficult for some people in places like Flyover America to follow. Some Kilgray videos of excellent content are challenging for those unaccustomed to the accents, and the many wonderful demos of memoQ, WordFast, OmegaT and other tools by CAT Guru on YouTube would have been difficult for me before I was exposed to the linguistic challenges of the wide world that can English. All of these excellent resources in English would benefit from clear English subtitles.

How difficult is it to create captions? The three-minute pseudotranslation demo cost me about ten minutes of work to clean up the subtitles. The English captions for another slightly shorter video explaining the use of the FeeWizard Online to estimate equivalent rates for charging by source or target words, lines, pages, etc. also took me about 10 or 15 minutes with all the text and timing corrections. And I've spent a good bit of time in the past week transcribing a difficult spoken English lecture by a German professor: it took me about 7 hours of transcription work to cope with a spoken hour. I don't know if this is typical, because I almost never do this sort of thing, and there were a lot of WTF moments. But I suppose three to seven times the recording length might be a reasonable range for estimating the effort of a draft edit and some timing changes. Not bad, really.

So if you are involved in creating instructional videos to put on YouTube or use elsewhere, please consider this easy way of making good work even better by investing a little time in caption creation and editing. Once you have done this for the original language, it will also be a simple matter to translate those captions to make your content even more accessible.

memoQuickie: pretranslation in memoQ

Pretranslating is the process of automatically translating a text or portions of it by comparison with a translation memory, the application of machine translation or the use of a previous version as a reference document. This description covers the first two cases.

Select Operations > Pre-Translate... from the menus.

 

Select the appropriate pretranslation settings for your file(s). In some cases, using TM-driven segmentation can greatly improve matching.

 

Here is an example of results with fuzzy matches from a translation memory and some segments (2 and 4) machine-translated (using the pseudotranslation engine as an example for contrast). Without machine translation or fragment assembly those segments would remain empty.

This method of pretranslation is often good to use as a follow-up step when translating with a reference document (i.e. a previousversion using the X-Translate function).

Pseudotranslation with memoQ

At the end of last week, Kilgray released Build 53 of memoQ version 5 with a number of interesting new features. One of these is "pseudotranslation".

I grew rather fond of this feature in the localization tool Passolo years ago, when I used it to identify software strings that developers had hard-coded instead of organizing in translatable resources as they were obliged to do. In fact, this is the application Kilgray mentions on the corresponding Help page. I also see it as a useful support for "round trip testing" of translation workflows.

Too often, translators and project managers experience difficulties exporting translated content to some original file formats. This was often a problem with Trados TTX files created and translated with different builds or versions of Trados, for example. So to avoid nasty surprises shortly before delivery after a long project, it is always a good idea to make sure that "what comes in" (such as an InDesign format of some kind) will go "out" again cleanly. Usually this is done by copying the source text to the target text and changing a few words or lines. This preserves complex tag structures, which may affect the stability of a target file, for example.

Pseudotranslation is an improvement over source to target copying, because, among other reasons, it makes the test file more clearly identifiable as such. And in cases such as the software translation scenarios, it offers additional insights into potential problems.

To use the pseudotranslation feature in Build 53 of memoQ 5 or later, do the following:

1. Under Tools > Options, select the Machine translation category:
 

2. Click the Options button and configure the settings as appropriate:

3. Choose Operations > Pretranslate... and make sure that the checkbox labeled "Use machine translation" is marked.

 

The result will be gobbledygook which preserves relevant tag structures: