Substack in #xl8 & #l10n

 As related in my last post, I've been testing the Substack platform as an alternative means for distributing and managing the kind of information I've published for many years now on this blog, professional sites and social media, course authoring platforms, YouTube, Xitter, Mastodon and probably a few other channels I've forgotten. And I'm quite surprised to find any expectations I had to be exceeded at this point. On the whole I can do a better job of creating accessible tutorials and other reference information there, and there is far less effort involved with maintenance, style sheet fiddling and whatnot.

All my various projects there can be found here on my profile page.

Currently, these are the

• Translation Tribulations Substack, a general blog for the language services sector and the
• memoQuickies Substack, with content related to the memoQ TMS platform in one way or another.

Other plans include The Diary and Letters of Charles Berry Senior, a US Civil War veteran from Yorkshire, England, who participated in Sherman's march to the sea and who is my great-great grandfather. Some of his records exist in very deteriorated form in a university archive in the United States and can be found online, but much is missing, and I am in possession of the complete transcript prepared by one of the man's daughters more than 100 years ago when the family feared the information would be lost to the forces of material decay. I'll be preparing clean text from her handwritten record (the typescript done by a cousin about 50 years ago was lost and probably contains more errors) and probably an audio reading. There's some hard stuff there, as well as some surprises and interesting lessons in how our world has changed in the past 160 years.

And at some point I'll probably share some of my culinary obsessions as well as what life was like traveling on the other side of the Iron Curtain sans papers or in dingy Paris bookshops and refugee hotels 40 years ago and more.

This past week, I've done a big blitz on memoQ LiveDocs, for which there are still another dozen or so drafts to be finished, and a lot of stuff from my CAT tools resource online class from last year should be appearing there in updated form in due course. There isn't a lot of translation-related activity that I've found on Substack, at least not for the technical side of things, but a lot of historians and authors I follow are very present there, so I'm hoping the better half of my translation technologist friends will join the Substack party at some point.

Most of my new text, video and teaching content will appear on those Substack channels. It's simply far easier to manage, and there you won't have the same RSS headaches you might have here. And the damned editor of Google Blogger just keeps accumulating bugs I don't have to cope with in Substack. And don't get me started on bloody Wordpress!

I hope to see you in my Substack channels soon! I think there will be something like a memoQ QA course there before the summer is over....

A change of platform?

 

As some readers of this blog may already know, recently I have begun to use the Substack platform for some of my writing. But why?

This blog and my YouTube channel have become, over the course of about 16 years now, leading sources of information for a variety of technology topics related to translation and localization, not all of them having to do with memoQ. As well as a venue for other personal and professional expression. I've also got a presence on a few e-learning platforms and sporadic participation in several microblogging platforms.

The online professional landscape for language services has evolved so much in the past two decades that it is often rather difficult to determine the best messaging venues for educational content for working professionals, Quersteiger aspirants and students. To a large and unfortunate extent, a lot of the relevant discussions take place on commercial platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, where the content is quickly buried in the infamous, often preposterous noise of those spaces. There is also the problem of curation, which was one of the reasons this blog was founded back in 2008 after Proz dot comjob lost its value as a professional space with the imposition of extreme censorship and expulsion of its most experienced and helpful community members, many of them former moderators.

Because of this fragmentation of the translation information space, I often find myself spending too much time digging up old (free) information for people with limited search skills or motivation, and in doing so I recognize time and again how much user interfaces for my professional tools have changed over the years, which also poses navigation problems for those who wish to apply the lessons. Menus are now ribbons, many functions have been renamed or moved to other places in the application, or new features have made some of the old solutions less relevant except for those still using very old software (and there are still many of these, which is why I am careful about "updates").

And several times in the past year, I've been contacted by blog readers who had difficulties getting an RSS feed for this blog, which is apparently a rather oldtimey thing now.

So... in the past few years, I noticed that several authors whom I follow use the Substack platform (the historians Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson, also professor Marco Neves at Universidade Nova de Lisboa FCSH, whom I think of as a "Portuguese John McWhorter", and John McWhorter himself). A brief investigation on my part revealed several advantages to this, including fairly painless ways to organize a mix of free and paid content. So I decided to experiment.

After a month now, I would say I am largely pleased as a user of the website and iPhone app. I am still learning the best practices for using insertable buttons and unexpected features like "Notes" and "Threads", probably making more mistakes than I realize, but this does appear to be a good platform for tying together the rather scattered educational content I've been producing for more than two decades now and adding updates to these summaries. And perhaps the venue will prove more useful for discussions, more so than social media where they are quickly buried in platform noise.

I'm not abandoning this blog nor YouTube. There will still be content posted on both which may never appear in any form on the Translation Tribulations Substack. But that's probably the best place to look for now if you need current overviews of language service technology topics or you want a peek at some of my course content tests or textbook-related projects. I may post occasional pointers here on the blog to content on Substack, but the (free) subscription mechanism there is really a much better way (than RSS here, for example) to keep up to date.

So won't you join me?

Resources for learning European Portuguese (A1-B2)

When I first moved to Portugal eleven years ago, I resolved to avoid the difficulties I had experienced as an exchange student in Germany many years before, where my northern German accent and academic style of speaking caused bartenders and salespeople in the Saarland to refuse service shortly after my arrival. So in Évora, I decided to learn the language "of the street" from neighbors, shopkeepers and daily tasks. It was a slow process to be sure, but I soon learned that other options were hardly available in the interior; even the local university offered essentially nothing except an A1-level course for Erasmus students, which was poorly attended (and often canceled) due to the lack of coordination among the faculty. In that city and in the border town I moved to a few years later, there were also neither language schools nor established, reliable tutors available. The few who could be found had issues with low business volumes and soon ceased their registered commercial activities.

In the heavily populated coastal regions with a large number of immigrants or tourists with money, there are a number of good programs at universities or private institutions, but the time commitments for these (typically weeks or months of full-time attendance) were not really compatible with my lifestyle and work schedule, and the most highly recommended programs cost thousands of euros that I needed for other things.

When it came time to take the CIPLE exam to certify A2-level competence for my permanent residence (which is also required for citizenship for those not married to a Portuguese citizen), I enrolled in online courses offered by the Camões Institute in Lisbon. These had three options: an entirely self-guided program, and two programs with some level of interaction with an assigned tutor for 30 minute sessions each or every other week. I opted for the latter, and the excellent tutors (who in my case were usually native Portuguese enrolled in some graduate program in Spain) were probably the main reason I was able to pass the exam and get my título da residência permanente. The actual exercises in the online courses weren't very good (except for the writing assignments), and I found a lot of functional errors in some of them. Plain sloppy programming, which is really shameful in a country that hosts the Web Summit every year.

My early explorations of apps available for language learning a decade ago were not very satisfying. Flashcard programs like Anki or Memrise are really too limited for achieving any kind of functional competence, and at the time I found nothing with any kind of systematic structure for acquiring basic grammar and conversational skills. I could open and read an entirely Portuguese grammar book and understand the content without difficulty because the concepts were largely familiar to me from other language study, but without some systematic practice or more social opportunities in the country, the grammar books were of little real use.

One hears that "immersion is critical", and when I moved to Portugal, I assumed that my learning curve would be even faster than it was years before for German, Russian and Japanese, but there's immersion in the shallow end of a language, with simple, comprehensible input to build a foundation of basics, and then there is immersion in the fast river of daily adult life with bills to pay and neighbors and authorities of all kinds to deal with, where in the comfortable slumber of a language novice, it is more likely that "human voices wake us, and we drown".

For a long time, the only "comprehensible input" (in Krashen's sense) that I could find to help improve my Portuguese was the podcast "Portuguese with Leo", which is intermediate level, about right for me by the time I discovered it, but still lacking the content I needed to patch up gaps in my competence.

Duolingo, allegedly the world's most popular language learning app, while helpful for basic Spanish, simply sucks whale dork when it comes to learning Portuguese for Europe or Africa. People have no idea how bad and useless its teaching of Brazilian Portuguese is for a visit to Portugal until they get here and realize that what they hear sounds nothing like what they learned. There's nothing wrong with Brazilian, and if I were planning to visit Brazil or spend a lot of time with people from there, I would certainly spend time mastering the quirks of pronunciation and the great differences in vocabulary and grammar in informal speech particularly, but for Portugal all that is simply unhelpful in the extreme. The differences are far greater than between ordinary speech in the UK and the US, for example, and on my first visit to London in 1977, I understood almost nothing of the directions people gave me on the street. In what was supposed to be my native language. So don't expect to get far with Brazilian in Portugal. Even if you are a native speaker from Brazil, the pace and manner of speech here may make you feel like a victim of a traffic accident.

But meanwhile, there are a few good apps and sites that focus on European Portuguese and may help you prepare for holidays or life in Portugal. The best of these I've found are described below.

I didn't realize until someone in a Facebook language learner's group mentioned the Practice Portuguese app that I had actually discovered and subscribed to their YouTube channel some time ago. But I didn't pay enough attention to the YouTube content to realize that there was something more on offer and that this something was, to a large extent, something useful for me, even after eleven years of living in Portugal and a competence level that allows me to conduct daily business and socialize in my hunting club without a lot of difficulty.

I'm currently working my way through the A1 level of the Practice Portuguese iOS app and website, though I also skip ahead and enjoy a lot of the B1/B2-level content in lessons, videos, podcasts, etc. After a few days of looking at the free content, I decided to subscribe (the best deal here is via the web site, not the online app stores for phones and tablets), and I am finding a lot of useful material to fill basic knowledge gaps even at the simplest level. I'm also impressed by the well-considered and somewhat original options for review, including the recently introduced "audio review" option.

One of the things that distinguishes the content of Practice Portuguese from Duolingo, for example, is that the voices used in the app are real ones (sometimes with shitty audio and a lot of background noise, but there is always a button to click and hear the same expression in a clear, noise-free native speaker's voice). The use of a large number of different speakers is helpful, I think, to recognize some of the different pronunciation one might encounter, and this is often dealt with explicitly in the lessons. Not differences between Brazil and Portugal but rather how one might here something in Lisbon as opposed to Beja or Braga.

Another resource I found recently is "Conversa Portuguese". It uses the Learnworlds platform (similar to Teachable, which I use sometimes to offer online CAT tool instruction for memoQ) and has what looks like a well-structured program for those needing Portuguese competence for countries other than Brazil. The platform also offers quite a number of useful, free resources for practice. I've looked at these resources, and I like them, but I haven't tried the commercial instruction program (yet) for lack of time. I hope to do so later this year and offer an in-depth report on what I find.

***

Some may wonder how it is that I can still find useful learning opportunities for European Portuguese with programs like Practice Portuguese or Conversa Portuguese, given that I've lived in the country for so long, I have a Portuguese partner with whom I share a farm and a life, and I've had a lifelong reputation of being "gifted" with languages (said reputation being largely unearned and taken seriously mostly by monolinguals). Well, I ask myself that too sometimes, but it is what it is, and "fluency" is really context-dependent, and depending on one's needs and commitments may differ greatly between individuals. It all really comes down to comprehensible input, I think, and that depends a lot on interests and background. Within a few weeks of coming to Portugal, I could grab an organic chemistry textbook in the library and read it, understanding everything in Portuguese (even though I could pronounce none of it). But it was probably a year before I could reliably order a pizza or tell the butcher just what I wanted.

For my friends and colleagues and others who plan to visit Portugal for a holiday or a professional conference or who may consider living here at some point, the options I have described in this article should give you a good foundation for coping with the variety of Portuguese you'll encounter here and perhaps make the culture of the country a bit more accessible. Portugal is not the Paradise some claim it to be, but of all the places I've lived in my life, I find it the least problematic for the things that matter most to me. Your mileage may differ, but equipped with some basic language skills, you'll be more fit for the journey.

memoQ Inside Out: Templates for Translators

In the summer of 2021, I was coaching a group of project managers and translators at a Portuguese service company, helping them to develop processes to overcome some rather complicated filtering and configuration challenges for recurring project types. It was clear to me that some of their difficulties could be overcome with the use of templates, but I had only recently begun to use these productively myself, and my attempts to communicate the subject matter overwhelmed the group for the most part, and examining the sample templates provided with memoQ installation simply made matters worse.

After several frustrating tutorial sessions and the failed acceptance of a template that I had developed which was tailored to a rather long wish list of automation that came out of our discussions, I decided that the only way to make the value of templates clear to this group of professionals was to wipe the slate clean, forget about all the myriad "wishes" and build a few simple templates which did just a few simple things. Starting from a new configuration with nothing at all. Surprisingly, less was indeed more, and the frustrated people began to "get it".

At almost the same time, my friend and colleague Marek Pawelec, a gifted teacher whom I often refer to quite objectively as "a consultant's consultant", mentioned that he was thinking of writing a book on memoQ templates, because he found that most people were unable to avoid the problems in the example templates provided with memoQ installation, nor were they able to work out most difficulties encountered when making their own templates. I could understand this very well, because the user interface in the configuration dialog for a template is not a stellar example of clarity, and it took me years to make proper sense of much of it. Disappointing, really, because I had been part of the chorus begging for something like templates for years, but when they were delivered, little about them made obvious sense to a dummy like me.

He sent me a chapter he had drafted, where I noted that he had adopted the same reductionist approach to getting started. A template with just a pick list or two for meta data to avoid the problem I've had for years of accidentally using different designations for the same clients, subjects, domains, etc. He had come to the same conclusion independently that the best approach to helping people use templates effectively is to start with one or two simple things they do all the time but often mess up.

That interesting draft chapter took time to evolve into a full-fledged guide of nearly 70 pages, with many practical, relatable examples of the kinds of challenges that individual translators (and many other service providers) often face in configuring translation projects. The topics cover the full range of options, from very simple tasks to extremely complex workflows involving pre-import scripts for preparing translation data and post-processing to recreate the original data formats. At every stage he offers clear examples and guidance on how to make things work in cases I have seen time and again in more than two decades of commercial translation work.

I had the pleasure to edit two drafts of this work as it neared completion. And pleasure really is the right word to use here. Marek has a very different explanatory style than mine, but one which I prefer for my own education. He manages very well the deep dive into messy details without drowning the reader in jargon and other unhelpful complexity. His guide gives valuable suggestions and information for every level of expertise. Much of the content can be understood and applied by unsophisticated new users of memoQ, but some of the details on content connectors and scripting can light a chandelier full of bulbs in the heads of alleged experts like myself.

Templates for Translators is an essential reference work for all memoQ users in my opinion, the sort of thing which ought to have been provided seven years or so ago when templates were introduced. Instead we got some imperfect examples which too often - especially in the hands of under-trained PMs at translation agencies - result in unworkable projects with 50+ translation memories and term bases grinding performance to a halt or a lot of mysterious and unwanted automation that does stupid shit like write unfinished and defective translations directly into one's master TM.

In addition to explaining clearly how to create your own helpful project shortcuts and automation from scratch, Marek included a great  chapter in which he describes in detail the templates provided for local projects, what works in them and what doesn't, and how to fix any issues so things work right for you. Even if you are a server user working primarily with online projects, there is a wealth of material in this version of the templates guide to help you work more effectively with templates for online projects. A second edition is planned for later this year, which will cover the additional features of templates for memoQ Server projects, but the real problems of most people working with those are covered in the basics presented in the "translators" edition, not in a lack of guidance on the many extra event "triggers" for online projects or other details. So if you are a server user, don't wait for the later edition, get this guide now, read every damned page and try to contain your exuberance as you finally understand a lot of stuff that has been confusing the Hell out of most of us for a long time. Then when the "server edition" of the guide is published, you'll be better prepared to absorb the increment of information it offers.

This book is now a valued part of my teaching "arsenal", and I recommend it without reservation to every memoQ user who aspires to work independently and create more effective processes for the special needs of various clients and subject matter. If you are a consultant or trainer at a serious level, it could well be considered malpractice to train without some of the information you'll find in Templates for Translators. But that's just what I see too often: discussions of templates glibly use the few defective examples installed with memoQ with little consideration given to how many translators should work in the real world with real, common client projects. This book is a welcome aid to move beyond all that and improve our satisfaction with the routine of translation in memoQ.

So for less than the cost of half an hour of consulting, the €30 invested here will save nearly anyone a large multiple of that and continue to pay dividends for a very long time, even if you understand and apply only 10% of the material presented. I charge far, far more to teach people less than that.

memoQ Inside Out: Templates for Translators is available for purchase at https://payhip.com/b/agrxM

Understanding and mastering tags... with memoQ!

Everything you need to know... in 36 pages!

Following up on the success of his excellent guide to machine translation functions in memoQ, Marek Pawelec (Twitter: @wasaty) has now published his definitive guide to tag mastery in that translation environment. In a mere 36 pages of clearly written, engaging text, he has distilled more than a decade of personal expertise and exchanges with other top professionals in language services technology into simple recipes and strategies for success with situations which are often so messy that even experienced project managers and tech support gurus wail in despair. Garbage like this, for example:

This screenshot is taken from the import of The PPTX from Hell, which a frustrated PM asked for help with just as I began reviewing the draft of Marek's book about a month ago. It contained nearly 32,000 superfluous spacing tags and was such a mess that it choked all the best professional macros usually deployed to deal with such things. Last year, I had developed my own way of dealing with these things that involved RTF bilingual exports and some search and replace magic in Microsoft Word, but when I shared it with Marek, he said "There's a better way", and indeed there is. On page 23 of this book. It was much cleaner and faster, and in a few minutes I was able to produce a clean slide set that was much easier to read and translate in the CAT tool. A page that costs 50 cents (of the €18 purchase price of the guide) earned me a 140x return and saved hours of working frustration for the translation team.

The book covers a lot more than just the esoterica of really messed up source files. It is a superb introduction to dealing with tags and markup for students at university and for those new to the translation profession and its endemic technologies, and it has sober, engaging guidance at every level for experienced professionals. I consider it an essential troubleshooting work for those in support roles of internal translation departments and, quite honestly, for my esteemed colleagues in First Level Support at memoQ. Marek is a superb trainer and an articulate teacher, with a humility that masks expertise which very often surprises, delights and informs those of us who are sometimes thought to be experts.

I am also particularly pleased that in the final version of his text he addresses the seldom discussed matter of how to factor markup into cost quotations and service charges for translations. memoQ is particularly well designed to address these problems, because weighting factors equivalent to word or character counts can be incorporated in file statistics, offering a simple, transparent and fair way of dealing with the frustrations that too often leave project managers screaming and crying in frustration shortly before... or after planned deliveries.

Whatever aspect of tags may interest you in translation technology and most particularly in memoQ, this book will give you the concise, clear answers you need to understand the best actions to take.

The PDF e-book is available for purchase here: https://payhip.com/b/tHUDx

A memoQ must-have: the definitive guide to MT use!

People who know me and my work know that I have a very low opinion of machine translation use in most language service situations. Even in the best scenarios, it offers no value to me in my routine work as a translator of scientific and intellectual property texts (patent filings and litigation mostly). So why am I totally excited about the new e-book by my friend and colleague Marek Pawelec? For several reasons.

• MT discussions bore the crap out of me. But when Marek asked me to review a pre-release copy, I was actually entertained by his clear, concise writing and the superb way he explained basic concepts of resource management in general that most memoQ users still don't master. I was shocked at how much fun I had reading about a subject I hate!
• He talks about more than just how to configure memoQ to use DeepL, Gargle Trashlate or some other MT engine. He details strategies and best practices for effective use that many people might not be aware of. He talks about how to circumvent prohibitions on MT use and how to catch people who do that. And more. I didn't learn something on every page, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say I did on every other one.
• Pseudo-translation using a special plug-in for the Pre-translation step is covered in wonderful detail. This technique has been very important to my work for nearly 20 years now. I use it to identify hard-coded interface strings in software I translate and to check and quote large documents that might have paragraphs or whole pages scanned and inserted as graphics that look like editable text - or charts whose text can be selected in the document but never show up on the memoQ working grid after import. Marek also discusses other uses of pseudo-translation I never thought of (layout checks, for example) which could have saved me a lot of grief over the years.

The only complaint I have about this book is that it's too cheap. The author teaches me more in its 36 pages than most can in 200 pages, and the learning is worth a Hell of a lot more to my business than fifty cents per page. Anyone else would probably have written much more and communicated far less of value, but that's a special gift that Marek has. Long ago, his talk at a memoQ Fest was the first time that regular expressions (regex) made any sense to me (as a casual programmer for about 40 years at the time I had approached the topic many times and mostly just found confusion). There aren't many people in this world who can take complex topics and make them seem simple and interesting to nearly anyone. Marek can. Richard Feynman could. I can't name many more on that list.

So... all I can really add is to tell you to go spend €18 here: https://payhip.com/b/tF62

The value you'll receive as a memoQ user at any level, even if you never use machine translation, is a large multiple of that price.

~

Update 2021-03-22
The Polish version of the book is now available at: https://payhip.com/b/RWcC

Update 2022-05-05

There are now editions available in Dutch and French:

Dutch: https://payhip.com/b/XaZSU

French: https://payhip.com/b/ltMwQ

memoQ Terminology Extraction and Management

Recent versions of memoQ (8.4+) have seen quite a few significant improvements in recording and managing significant terminology in translation and review projects. These include:

• Easier inclusion of context examples for use (though this means that term information like source should be placed in the definition field so it is not accidentally lost)
• Microsoft Excel import/export capabilities which include forbidden terminology marking with red text - very handy for term review workflows with colleagues and clients!
• Improved stopword list management generally, and the inclusion of new basic stopword lists for Spanish, Hungarian, Portuguese and Russian
• Prefix merging and hiding for extracted terms
• Improved features for graphics in term entries - more formats and better portability

Since the introduction of direct keyboard shortcuts for writing to the first nine ranked term bases in a memoQ project (as part of the keyboard shortcuts overhaul in version 7.8), memoQ has offered perhaps the most powerful and flexible integrated term management capabilities of any translation environment despite some persistent shortcomings in its somewhat dated and rigid term model. But although I appreciate the ability of some other tools to create customized data structures that may better reflect sophisticated needs, nothing I have seen beats the ease of use and simple power of memoQ-managed terminology in practical, everyday project use.

An important part of that use throughout my nearly two decades of activity as a commercial translator has been the ability to examine collections of documents - including but not limited to those I am supposed to translate - to identify significant subject matter terminology in order to clarify these expressions with clients or coordinate their consistent translations with members of a project team. The introduction of the terminology extraction features in memoQ version 5 long ago was a significant boost to my personal productivity, but that prototype module remained unimproved for quite a long time, posing significant usability barriers for the average user.

Within the past year, those barriers have largely fallen, though sometimes in ways that may not be immediately obvious. And now practical examples to make the exploration of terminology more accessible to everyone have good ground in which to take root. So in two recent webinars, I shared my approach - in German and in English - to how I apply terminology extraction in various client projects or to assist colleagues. The German talk included some of the general advice on term management in memoQ which I shared in my talk last spring, Getting on Better Terms with memoQ. That talk included a discussion of term extraction (aka "term mining"), but more details are available here:


Due to unforeseen circumstances, I didn't make it to the office (where my notes were) to deliver the talk, so I forgot to show the convenience of access to the memoQ concordance search of translation memories and LiveDocs corpora during term extraction, which often greatly facilitates the identification of possible translations for a term candidate in an extraction session. This was covered in the German talk.

All my recent webinar recordings - and shorter videos, like playing multiple term bases in memoQ to best advantage - are best viewed directly on YouTube rather than in the embedded frames on my blog pages. This is because all of them since earlier in 2018 include time indexes that make it easier to navigate the content and review specific points rather than listen to long stretches of video and search for a long time to find some little thing. this is really quite a simple thing to do as I pointed out in a blog post earlier this year, and it's really a shame that more of the often useful video content produced by individuals, associations and commercial companies to help translators is not indexed this way to make it more useful for learning.

There is still work to be done to improve term management and extraction in memoQ, of course. Some low-hanging fruit here might be expanded access to the memoQ web search feature in the term extraction as well as in other modules; this need can, of course, be covered very well by excellent third-party tools such as Michael Farrell's IntelliWebSearch. And the memoQ Concordance search is long overdue for an overhaul to allow proper filtering of concordance hits (by source, metadata, etc.), more targeted exploration of collocation proximities and more. But my observations of the progress made by the memoQ planning and development team in the past year give me confidence that many good things are ahead, and perhaps not so far away.

Adding time codes to YouTube videos

For years now, I have advocated the use of tables of contents for long instructional videos, recorded webinars and suchlike. I saw these in a few instances, but it was never clear how the indices were produced, so I suggested merely writing a list of relevant points and their play times and scrolling manually. Understandably, not many adopted this suggestion.

Then I discovered that my video editor (Camtasia) could create tables of contents for a video automatically when creating a local file, an upload to YouTube or other exports if timeline markers were added at relevant points. The only disadvantage for me with this approach was the limit on the length of the descriptive text attached to the markers. Worse than Twitter in the old days.

But when I accidentally added a marker I didn't want and removed it from the YouTube video description (which is where a TOC resides on YouTube), I saw that things were much simpler than I imagined. And a little research with tutorials made by others confirmed that any time code written at the beginning of a line in the video's description will become a clickable link to that time in the video.

So I've begun to go through some of my old videos with a text editor opened along side. When the recording gets to a point that I want to include in the table of contents, I simply pass the cursor over the video, take note of the time, and then write that time code into the text file along with a description of any length.

Afterward, I simply paste the contents of that text file into the description field in YouTube's editor. When the Save button at the top right is clicked, the new description for the video will be active, and viewers can use the index to jump to the points they want to see. Because only a few lines of the description text are visible by default, I include a hint at the beginning of the text to let people know that the live table of contents is available if they click the SEE MORE link.

If Kilgray, SDL, Wordfast and others involved with the language services sector would adopt techniques like this for their copious recorded content on the Web, the value and accessibility of this content would increase enormously. It would also be very simple then to create hot links to important points in other environments (PowerPoint slides, PDF files, etc.) to help people get to the information they need to learn better.

Not to do this would truly be a great waste and a shame in many cases.

"New Beginnings with memoQ" tutorial guide released

The initial version of my new tutorial guide for memoQ has finally been made available through the distribution site I use for convenient promotional distribution. Those interested in this 101-page PDF e-book can see more details or purchase it by clicking on the cover graphic above. A table of contents for this edition can be downloaded here. Many of the discount codes distributed by myself or Kilgray in the past year or two can be applied to anything on that site, including this volume.

The book is organized in three sections. The front part gives a quick guide to navigation in the old and new memoQ interfaces (because even those who have purchased memoQ recently may have to come to grips with older versions to do some server projects for customers using older releases). Then a series of four "job" chapters introduce common, fundamental concepts for basic work and safe data management in the memoQ translation environment. The last section, an appendix called "This & that" covers about a third of the total page count with a great variety of supplemental information to help new and experienced users come to grips with many challenges for working efficiently with this translation environment.

The appendix includes a glossary of terms to "de-nerdify" things a bit as well as an overview of some of the most important or useful features introduced for individual translators in recent versions. I added the latter because I often advise people about which versions to upgrade to for particular features, and with the rapid development of memoQ this is not easy to keep track of!

Until very recently I never considered doing instructional materials specifically focused on new users and their needs because of the large number of people offering beginners' instruction. However, as my conceptual collaborator in this guide and I observed, the feature-focused approach used by many instructors often confuses and intimidates users and sometimes fails to address basic matters needed for their routine, productive work.

The approach here focuses on workflows and possibilities for application rather than features. And because of the challenges many experienced users of memoQ face adapting to the recent changes in the interface and the many new possibilities for the memoQ translation environment, I called the book "New Beginnings" because it offers everyone a chance for a fresh start for better productivity.