An exploration of language technologies, translation education, practice and politics, ethical market strategies, workflow optimization, resource reviews, controversies, coffee and other topics of possible interest to the language services community and those who associate with it. Service hours: Thursdays, GMT 09:00 to 13:00.
February 26, 2024 @ 2 p.m. UTC. To book your seat, please send an email to info.request@iapti.org
Interpreters and translators are not depicted often in cinema. Here we'll take stock of some cases where they are, and how they are haunted by themes of credibility and betrayal (the two sides of the coin called trust). An atmosphere of mistrust seems to transform actors in these roles into fragile creatures, vulnerable to blame by those who rely on their communicative skills. Persistent dangers remind us too well of the old adage about "killing the messenger" as the professional linguists work against the clock, alone and misunderstood, essential but distrusted, striving to defuse the ticking bomb of looming conflict in hostile circumstances.
The film scenes selected for this presentation will underscore the value of these challenging roles and the importance of professional action in difficult situations, something that will never be reliably given by digital automation.
The webinar is free to IAPTI members and costs USD 15 for non-members.
Javier Rey (host) Javier was born in Buenos Aires, where he studied and completed his degree in journalism. For more than a decade he engaged in many roles and topics: politics, sports, film reviews, even paranormal events. When conditions for journalists devolved to a role without dignity, he took a new path in sales. He has published 3 books: El guapo en su final (2010), La niña con las manos detrás de la espalda (2019) and Superclásico (2022). He recently co-founded Ciempiés Talleres, where he facilitates a movie club and teaches cinema, creative writing workshops and seminars.
The fifth open office hours session for the self-guided online course "memoQuickies Resource Camp" discussed segmentation problems with documents imported to translation environments such as memoQ, Trados Studio, Phrase, Cafetran Espresso, etc. and various ways that these issues might be identified so that they can be corrected.
Segmentation problems waste enormous amounts of time, and bad segmentation rules are a plague on the translation and localization service community. Unfortunately, nearly all the rules I have seen, for all working environments, simply suck sewage. memoQ's rules usually suck less, but still....
This week's talk presented, among other things, some methods for identifying segmentation trouble spots quickly and easily with the use of special regular expressions describing common patterns followed by texts with troubled segmentation. And a Regex Assistant library has been provided (and will be updated during the course period) to help with all of this.
The video and related course pages will remain completely open to the public, with downloads available, at least through the end of 2023. After that the pages and resources may be taken down for updates and reorganization in other courses.
The video recording of the lecture "What's wrong with my segmentation?" can be accessed on YouTube (embedded below) or course participants can access the page to download it by clicking the "segmentation rules" icon at the top of this article.
An important part of checking the performance of your segmentation rules and possibly improving them is to have a good sampling of test data. One of my favorite sources for this are the European Community archives at the DGT, where EU legislation and other important information is available in a parallel corpus of all the official languages of the Community.
Eleven months ago I was supposed to talk about terminology in a three-hour evening class taught by one of my friends at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, but I was so excited about the progress of the quality team I was training at one of my agency clients in Portugal that I twisted what was expected to be my usual straightforward 90 minute lecture on term base best practices in memoQ into an unusual take on the role regular expressions might play in terminology management.
That was a weird one, for sure, but the potential I saw was very real. I was defining "terminology" in rather broad terms to include not only more efficient term base management based on problem patterns but also translation memory clean-up, better filtering and find/replace operations in the working grid and QA.
"What the heck has all that got to do with scary ol' REGEX?" you're probably thinking.
Well, all this was triggered by memoQ's recent release of the One Ring Thing we've been needing to unify our memoQ management processes for the routine use of regex by The Rest of Us. The Regex Assistant. The Nazgul of Trados World are surely jealous.
I was so amazed to see people who had struggled for years to learn regex well enough for simple tasks suddenly become solution powerhouses that I put together (rather spontaneously) a series of three online 90-minute workshops, which were repeated a month later. And new refinements to these methods come each time the ideas are presented.
The raw recordings of those six workshops are included in the current online course ("memoQuickies Resource Camp"), but one - the first of six - is publicly available on YouTube, where you can have a look.
However in the memoQuickies Resource Camp, a self-guided course that is serving as a platform for me to organize and distribute the best resources from my 14 years as a memoQ user, solution provider and trainer before I retire, I'll be taking another more streamlined pass at teaching some of the best possibilities for using memoQ Regex Assistant resource libraries. The webinars offered in most weeks of the course are simply an overview of the current topic emphasized in the course and also serve as a Q&A platform and a means of offering some different perspectives on information from the self-guided units. Recordings are always added to the course for later viewing.
This coming Thursday at 15:00 Central European Time, I'll give a brief overview of the Regex Assistant much like the public YouTube video does and answer any questions that attendees might have. Further information and an event notice can be found here on LinkedIn.
You can join the webinar with this link. The meeting ID is 878 3540 2561, and the passcode is 385434
On Saturday, August 21st at 14:00 UTC, the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) will present a special webinar on note-taking as a critical differentiation skill in the competitive field of remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI), a staple of international communication in our pandemic times and likely thereafter. The presentation is free for members, with a small fee for members of partner associations (€22) and non-members (€25). Send your registration request by e-mail to:info.request@iapti.org!
Note: this webinar has already taken place. A download link for the presentation slides (with links to unlisted instructional videos) is available below, as is some Q&A from the live session... there will be an online course offered soon for teams and project managers using memoQ Servers, so watch this blog for the announcement.
This Friday (April 23rd, 2021 at 2 pm Central European Time), I'll be giving an English-language talk via Zoom discussing my approach to using the memoQ Server and teaching others to do so for workflows involving small teams. These might be groups of collaborating independent service providers, in-house and freelance staff supporting translation and editing services in corporations or at boutique translation agencies, or university and continuing education courses with instructors and a group of student PMs and translators. This talk is not designed to cover the perceived needs of behemoths inhabiting the bulk market bog.
I will discuss the use of the memoQ Server and the hosted memoQ Cloud service with particular attention on user management, permissions, project workflows and resource availability. The last point also includes ideas for using a memoQ server as a platform to make some working "light resources" available which may be beyond the scope of a particular project.
There is no charge for the live webinar, though there will be a fee for those who wish to obtain a downloadable copy later. The recording will also be part of the reference resources provided in a professional continuing education course to be announced soon after some details on certified hour credits are worked out with the relevant Portuguese labor authorities and their representatives.
Register for the webinar here:
(registration now closed - see below for the presentation slides and Q&A)
I welcome all of you who are able to join me this week, and any others who may attend the online server skills course later or have particular training or problem-solving needs in this area.
These are "floating" licenses, not attached to a specific user unless you assign them.
(from Ellen Singer) : CAL (Concurrent Access Licensing)
Does a separate translator login also work when you want to work in your local client and only have a PM license and Webtrans licenses for a memoQ cloud subscription, No Translator Pro?
In that case you can assign a CAL license for some period of time (see the screenshot above), and this will make it available for offline use in a desktop edition of memoQ. For a basic memoQ Cloud subscription with just the PM license, it would be that PM license assigned (presumably) to you.
What are the advantages of a privately-run / hosted MemoQ server, over MemoQ cloud?
Several perhaps.
You have full control over all file paths. You don't have access to all file paths in memoQ Cloud. The only place I can see where that makes a real difference is when changing default resources as I described in my old blog post on that subject, but I think that is an important option for many company teams.
Maybe some economic advantage in the short or long run. A memoQ Server at your site represents a significant capital investment, and there are maintenance fees (about 20% of acquisition cost, isn't it?) incurred each year for support and upgrades. A memoQ Cloud subscription is a fairly manageable expense if it's small, but with a lot of licenses or added options like Qterm, customer portal, etc. it can be a pretty hefty monthly expense, though one which can be adjusted up or down as needed. And memoQ Cloud subscriptions can be suspended or reactivated as needed. Really, you would have to model the costs of each approach in a spreadsheet (or similar manner of calculation) to compare and determine definitively which approach gives you the greatest advantage.
I do believe that even for owners/operators of private memoQ Servers, the memoQ Cloud subscription (trial or paid) offers a superb platform for testing new versions, other "sandbox" work including development which will not endanger your production server and arms-length special projects with outside partners.
Can you create an unlimited number of Users, regardless of the number of licenses you purchased?
Indeed you can. Configured user logins can be configured in any number and have nothing whatsoever to do with any number of licenses you may have available. But if your access maximum for licenses has been reached at any given time, a configured user may have to wait some time until a current active (logged-in) user logs off the server so somebody else can get in to work.
We’ve been using mQ Server for a while now, and you tackled a few very interesting points. (Esp. concerning access control in case of PM accounts.)
With regard to access, I think there are two very important things to do, remember, configure, etc.
Use separate logins for your work as a PM or administrator and any work you may do as a translator/reviewer. These can have the same password for your convenience if you like. But for God's sake, use TWO SEPARATE LOG-INS. This will help you "stay in your lane" for a given role and prevent accidents. If you are logged in using an account that has project manager or administrative access privileges, you cannot easily tell sometimes (or may overlook) where you ought not to be working, and this can lead to difficulties.
"Permissions" can be used to restrict or enable access to any memoQ resources available on the server. This is not an easy topic to get your head around if you are unfamiliar with how permissions and access work in general on computers, especially in server environments, and anything you configure should be tested to ensure that you got the configuration right. The memoQ Help is rather good on this point and should be read and re-read and re-read and re-read carefully, and if there are doubts remaining, ask memoQ Support or other experts for advice.
A useful example of using "permissions" might be to assign an individual "Review" privileges to a specific TM or term base, enabling that person to do many maintenance operations on that resource which might otherwise be possible only with PM or general "terminologist" access. This approach would give a specialist for a rare language access to the specified resource(s) at a higher level, but that person's access would be more limited for other, similar resources (assuming there is no relevant group membership assigned that would provide such access.
Is it possible to do bulk changes to the permissions of more than one server resource at once?
Yes. Select the resources desired by control-clicking (for a discontinuous group) or shift-clicking (for a range in the list) and choose the "Set permissions" command. Changes made should apply to all the resources selected.
You mentioned a book on MemoQ. If so, can you let me have the title.
The book I mentioned in this talk is Marek Pawelec's excellent guide to the use of machine translation resources - including the extremely valuable pseudotranslation function. Information on that guide can be found here.
The new online school offers a variety of resources for new and experienced users of desktop and server editions
For many years now, I have advocated for better professional education for users of translation process support software at every level. I have tested curriculum delivery platforms, better ways of making information more accessible to those who need it, and more. In a limited scope, this has been a successful effort.
My greatest hope in these efforts was to encourage professional associations, technology providers and universities to do better by their clientele. I would judge the success there as mixed, at best. The wind of change discussed, for many of them, could fill one's sails... for a voyage off the edge of their flat Earth. Their reluctance to provide even minimal indexes for navigating copious video content is simply baffling, as an example.
Even with the current pandemic, I have seen little progress, though that may be as much for reasons such as those which kept me largely silent last year. It's hard to think about doing things better when you have to ask honestly which of the people you care for will be lost because of the refusal of so many national governments to do so.
In any case, I've always been one to advocate more personal involvement. If a person says they're hungry, give them food and listen to their stories. Cash may not be the answer. The courses, consulting and resources offered through my license of the Teachable platform will cover much of issues and assistance for which I have been an advocate in the translation sector for two decades. I also hope to involve other language service educators to offer their unique and valuable approaches in this venue. This is not to compete with any existing associations or companies, but rather to continue to show them how we can all work together to help users develop the competence and confidence so often needed and not found.
This, like all of us, is a work in progress. Check out Translation Tribulations Tech (here, or by clicking the school graphic at the top) and see if anything there provides missing elements for your professional toolkit.
Some of the initial offerings include:
re-released help guides I've written for learning memoQ, including some material in Portuguese. The link provided here is for a bundle which includes books and courses.
regular expressions as an aid for translation of patterned information like currency expressions, dates, legal citations, coded information, etc.
better source document segmentation in projects
memoQ server basics for collaborating groups and small companies
memoQ and other technology for legal translation
will be available soon.
This platform provides a long-needed mechanism for providing more detailed learning assistance than I have enjoyed with this blog and my YouTube channel, and future publication habits on my part will reflect that. I'm excited about many ideas for moving ahead in quick and quicker steps with memoQ and so many other resources that many of us depend on for professional relief and productivity.
This presentation has been rescheduled due to unanticipated conflicts. On March 4th at 4:00 pm Central European Time (10 am Eastern Standard Time), I'll be presenting an overview of some popular and/or possible platforms for generating text from spoken words for professional work and language learning. As those who have followed this blog for years know, I have written quite a bit about this in the past and done a number of videos for demonstration and instruction using various platforms, but this is a field subject to frequent change and many new developments, so it is difficult sometimes to understand the value of one tool versus another for different applications.
The webinar is available free to anyone interested, and there will be time for questions afterward. We will compare and contrast Dragon NaturallySpeaking, iOS-based applications (including Hey memoQ), Google Chrome and Windows 10 for speech recognition work in translation and transcription, discussing some of the advantages and trade-offs with each platform working in translation environments and text-editing software, and the range of languages covered by each. Join us, and see if there are good fits for your speech recognition needs!
Note: the pilot phase for this training course has passed, free enrollment has been closed, and the content is being revised and expanded for re-release soon... available courses can be seen at my online teaching site: https://transtrib-tech.teachable.com/
In the past few years I have done a number of long webinars in English and German to help translators and those involved in translation processes using the memoQ environment work more effectively with terminology. These are available on my YouTube channel (subscribe!), and I think all of them have extensive hotlinked indexes to enable viewers to skip to exactly the parts that are relevant to them. A playlist of the terminology tutorial videos in English is available here.
I've also written quite a few blog posts - big and small - teaching various aspects of terminology handling for translation with or without memoQ. These can be found with the search function on the left side of this blog or using the rather sumptuous keyword list.
But sometimes just a few little things can get you rather far, rather quickly toward the goal of using terminology more effectively in memoQ, and it isn't always easy to find those tidbits in the hours of video or the mass of blog posts (now approaching 1000). So I'm trying a new teaching format, inspired in part by my old memoQuickie blog posts and past tutorial books. I have created a free course using the Teachable platform, which I find easier to use than Moodle (I have a server on my domain that I use for mentoring projects), Udemy and other tools I've looked at over the years.
This new course - "memoQuickies: On Better Terms with memoQ! 10 Tips toward Term Base Mastery" - is currently designed to give you one tip on using memoQ term bases or related functions each day for 10 days. Much of the content is currently shared as an e-mail message, but all the released content can be viewed in the online course at any time, and some tips may have additional information or resources, such as videos or relevant links, practice files, quality assurance profiles or custom keyboard settings you can import to your memoQ installation.
These are the tips (in sequence) that are part of this first course version:
Setting Default Term Bases for New Terms
Importing and Exporting Terms in Microsoft Excel Files
Getting a Grip on Term Entry Properties in memoQ
"Fixing" Term Base Default Properties
Changing the Properties of Many Term Entries in a Term Base
Sharing and Updating Term Bases with Google Sheets
Sending New Terms to Only a Specific Ranked Term Base
Succeeding with Term QA
Fixing Terminology in a Translation Memory
Mining Words with memoQ
There is also a summary webinar recorded to go over the 10 tips and provide additional information.
I have a number of courses which have been developed (and may or may not be publicly visible depending on when you read this) and others under development in which I try to tie together the many learning resources available for various professional translation technology subjects, because I think this approach may offer the most flexibility and likelihood of success in communicating necessary skills and knowledge to an audience wider than I can serve with the hours available for consulting and training in my often too busy days.
I would also like to thank the professional colleagues and clients who have provided so much (often unsolicited) support to enable me to focus more on helping translators, other translation project participants and translation consumers work more effectively and reduce the frustrations too often experienced with technology.
On Wednesday, August 14 at 16:00 Central European Time, I will be giving a talk on working ergonomics in memoQ, drawing on the outline of an online course to be released later this month. You can register now HERE. The webinar will be held in English and is available to all interested parties free of charge. The recording will be available later to participants with the course materials.
This discussion will highlight key concepts and approaches from the course outline shown below. memoQ version 9 will be used as the basis for discussion, but most of the talk's content is applicable to any version from recent years.
Working Ergonomics in memoQ 9.0: Technology Practice for Ease of Use
Getting Laid Out
- Standard memoQ Layouts
This can be improved on....
- More Fun with memoQ Working Layouts!
Colors, Visibility and Priority
- Color My Grid!
- Fonts in the Working Display
Wild & crazy? Or legible? You decide!
- Translation Results List Tuning
See the match results in the order you prefer!
- Setting the user interface language
- Showing hidden characters
Tuning Options for Typists
- Autocorrect
- Lookup & insertion
- Autopropagation and Its Implications
- Predictive Typing
- Keyboard Customizing!
The Great Dictators
- Hey memoQ
- Chrome Speech
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking
- Other Speech Tools and the 3-Stage Process
Other Views of Translation
- Combining and Filtering Files for Translation
I'll be presenting a free webinar on the uses, advantages, and quirks of memoQ's often underestimated and misunderstood LiveDocs module: everything you always needed to know about its features and corpora but never thought to ask.
When? On 23 April 2019 at 3:00 PM Lisbon time (4:00 PM Central European Time, 7:00 AM Pacific Standard Time); webinar attendance is free, but advance registration is required. The URL to register is:
After registering, you will receive a confirmation e-mail containing information about joining the presentation.
Particular questions regarding the subject matter or challenges you face with it are welcome in advance via e-mail, LinkedIn or other social media contact. I'll try to incorporate these in the presentation.
Accessing full bilingual document context in an alignment in LiveDocs from the memoQ Concordance
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.
Seit etwa ein Jahr hat memoQ Translation Technologies Ltd. (ehemals „Kilgray“ – „mQtech“) diverse hilfreiche Erweiterungen der Terminologieoptionen in der Software memoQ eingeführt, unter anderem welche, die die Erforschung der Terminologiebestände in großen Dokumenten, Translation Memories und Korpora vereinfachen sowie die Verwaltung deren Befunde auch besser ermöglichen.
Für mich persönlich sind die verbesserten Möglichkeiten für Stoppwortlisten und die Möglichkeit, sehr einfach Kontextbeispiele den Terminologieeinträgen hinzuzufügen von größter Bedeutung. Aber auch die neue Export- und Importfunktionen nach und von Microsoft Excel i.V.m. dem roten Text für verbotene Terminologie sind für kundenbezogene Prozesse sehr hilfreich (obwohl die Rottextfunktion in memoQ Versionen 8.5 bis 8.7.3 noch auf Reparatur für den Import wartet!).
Da deutschsprachige Informationen für den Einsatz der leistungsfähigeren Aspekte von memoQ relativ dünn gesät sind, und einige verantwortliche Verbandsleute nach wie vor eher unter dem Einfluss von SDL* stehen, habe ich es mir erlaubt, meinen deutschsprachigen Kollegen folgendes Video über die Extraktion, Einsatz und Pflege der Terminologie (von dem gestrigen Webinar) zu Weihnachten zu schenken:
Also Frohes Fest sowie Frohes Schaffen mit dem derzeit besten CAT-Tool – nach angemessener Pause für die Feiertage, natürlich! Glühwein muss sein.
* man sagt, der Herr Putin habe diese Beziehungen als Vorlage für seine mit Donald Trump genommen :-)
On December 28, 2018 from 2:00 to 3:30 pm Lisbon time (3:00 to 4:30 pm CET, 9:00 to 10:30 am EST), I'll be giving a talk on terminology extraction in the latest version of memoQ. Recent versions of this tool have included many improvements to its terminology features, and it's time for an update on how to get the most out of the term extraction features of memoQ among other things.
Topics to be covered
include the creation of new stopword lists or the extension of existing ones,
customer-, project- or topic-specific stopword lists, criteria for corpora, term
mining strategies and the subsequent maintenance and use of term bases in
projects. Participants will be equipped with all the information needed to use
this memoQ feature confidently, reliably and profitably in their professional
work.
The same presentation (more or less) will be held in German on December 21 at the same time for those who prefer to hear and discuss the topic in that language.
Am 21. Dezember um 15:00 Uhr bis 16:30 Uhr MEZ findet wieder eine deutschsprachige memoQ-Schulung online statt. Thema: Optimierung der Terminologieextraktion.
Der Vortrag bietet eine Übersicht der Möglichkeiten für effizientes Arbeiten mit dem Extraktionsmodul für Terminologie in memoQ. Von der Neuerstellung bzw. Erweiterung der Stoppwortlisten, kunden-, projekt- oder themenspezifische Stoppwortlisten, Korpuskriterien und Extraktionsstrategien bis zu der anschließenden Pflege der Terminologiedatenbanken und dem Einsatz im Projekt werden Sie mit den notwendigen Informationen gerüstet, diese Funktion bei Ihren professionellen Tätigkeiten sicher, zuverlässig und gewinnbringend einzusetzen.
Teilnahme ist kostenlos aber registrierungspflichtig: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/d68e024c63ad506f7c24e00bf0acd2b8
Ein inhaltsgleicher Vortrag in englischer Sprache findet eine Woche (am 28.12.2018) später statt:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/cfd1a47cd5c54114d746f627e8486654
Nach dem Webinar über Auto-Übersetzungsregeln in memoQ, geht die deutsche Vortragsserie nun am 17. Oktober weiter mit einer praktischen Einführung in sichere, umfassende Basisverfahren für typische Projekte auf dem lokalen Rechner. Schritt für Schritt wird gezeigt, wie man bei einem größeren Projekt vorgehen kann, um Probleme zu vermeiden und wichtige Ressourcen zu erstellen und pflegen.
In den geplanten zwei Stunden dieser kostenlosen Präsentation, werden Sie u.a. erfahren wie
die technische Machbarkeit einer Lieferung der Übersetzungsergebnisse bestätigt wird,
der Umfang des Textes sicher geprüft und bestätigt wird,
wichtige Kundenressourcen im Projekt vielleicht besser eingesetzt werden können,
die häufige Sonderterminologie im Projekt ermittelt werden kann,
neue Textversionen während der Arbeit effizient in die Bearbeitung einfliessen können,
und einiges mehr.
Das Webinar findet am 17. Oktober 2018 um 15 Uhr MEZ statt und läuft bis zu 2 Stunden. Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, aber registrierungspflichtig. Registrieren können Sie sich hier.
Falls Sie sich für weitere memoQ-Onlineschulungen interessieren, geht es hier zu der relevanten Umfrage.
Der Vortrag wurde aufgenommen und ist hier verfügbar.
Auto-Übersetzungsregeln gehören zu den nützlichsten, kaum benutzten Aspekten der memoQ-Arbeitsumgebung. Mit Hilfe dieser Regeln kann man unter anderem viel Zeit bei der Gestaltung und Qualitätssicherung musterbasierter Texte sparen, zum Beispiel bei Datumsangaben, bibliografischen Informationen, rechtliche Referenzangabe,Währungsausdrücken usw. Diese Regeln basieren auf regulären Ausdrücken, aber solche Kompetenzen sind für ihren effektiven Einsatz nicht unbedingt vorausgesetzt. Viel wichtiger ist es, die geeignete Erfassung der Basisinformationen zu verstehen, sowie mögliche Variationen im Ausgangstext, damit technische Ressourcen für Erstellung und Pflege gezielt und richtig anzuwenden werden können. Die geplanten zwei Stunden dieser kostenlosen Präsentation beinhalten Beispiele häufiger Anwendungsgebiete für den praktischen Einsatz dieser Technologie in der Übersetzung mit memoQ. Um die vorgeführten Inhalte üben und anwenden zu können, sind folgende Elemente notwendig bzw. empfohlen:
eine aktuelle memoQ-Lizenz (ohne funtioniert nichts!)
die kostenlose Software Notepad++ (stark empfohlen)
ein tabellenfähiges Textprogramm, wie z.B. Microsoft Word, Google Docs oder der OpenOffice-Editor
Das Webinar findet am 12. September 2018 um 15 Uhr MEZ statt und läuft bis zu 2 Stunden. Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, aber registrierungspflichtig. Der Erwerb brauchbarer Exemplare der vorgeführten Anwendungsbeispiele bzw. persönlich angepasster Versionen ist auch nachher möglich. Falls Sie sich für weitere memoQ-Onlineschulungen interessieren, geht es hier zu der relevanten Umfrage.
For some years now I have heard a steady stream of complaints from colleagues and clients about the availability and quality of memoQ instruction in the German language. There are of course a few excellent offerings of a general nature - usually for raw beginners - from some trainers I've known and respected for nearly two decades now, but there isn't a lot for users who need to go farther, particularly in some important specialist fields.
For nearly a decade now I have offered to assist the largest professional organization for language service providers in the German world (BDÜ) with filling this gap, but peculiar politics and strong input from SDL Trados partisans have prevented anything from happening. My recent acquisition of a long-term license for the Zoom conferencing platform and the positive experiences I have had with this tool for private and public teaching now put me in a position to deal with this without the nonsense of association and corporate politics.
So in September (date and topic to be announced) I will offer a first online workshop for German-speaking memoQ users. To aid in identifying topics of greatest interest for this and possible other talks I have put together a small survey in German (embedded below in this post - note that the embedded frame scrolls to view all questions in the survey - and also available at https://goo.gl/forms/Eq2mvqzdapaGDcjy1) to get an idea of the potential audience's position with memoQ and its training interests and needs. Please pass this around among our DACH colleagues and others in the translating germanophone world.
Click this graphic for more information and registration....
Didier Briel, current project manager of the Open Source OmegaT CAT tool, will discuss what makes this language service community resource unique, how it can enable you to work together comfortably in teams with others who use different tools (interoperability) and other interesting matters.
Have a look and see if this is the versatile, multi-platform tool you've been looking for!
The pre-event webinar for the terminology workshop in Amsterdam on June 30th was held yesterday; for those who missed it, the recording is here, with a few call-outs added toward the end to make it easier to find information on other matters mentioned:
On the whole, I think the new presentation platform I'm using – Zoom– works well. I was particularly happy to discover when my Internet router died suddenly and mysteriously about 50 minutes into the talk that the recording was not lost, and when the talk resumed a few minutes later with a different router connection, a recording of that part was made in a separate folder, so the parts could be joined later in a video editor without much ado.
I've held perhaps a dozen online meetings with clients since I licensed Zoom recently, and I'm very pleased with its flexibility, even though the many options have tripped me up in embarrassing ways a few times. So, time permitting, I'll try to do at least one talk like this each month on some aspect of translation technology in the interests of promoting better practice. The next will be held on June 21st and will cover various PDF workflows using iceni technology. Suggestions for later presentations are welcome.
The talk yesterday on terminology in memoQ was just a quick (ha ha - one hour) overview of possibilities; much more detail on these matters will be provided in the Amsterdam workshop and summer courses at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, which are open to the public at very reasonable rates (about €130 for 25 hours of instruction). There will be a lot more in this topic area in the future in various venues; right now there are some very interesting developments afoot with memoQ and other matters at Kilgray, and other providers also have good things in the works. So stay tuned.
Over the course of the last nine years, I have published a few articles about ways that I have found the PDF editor iceni InFix useful for my translation and terminology research work. Throughout that time iceni has continued to improve that product as well as develop other technologies for PDF translation assistance, such as the online TransPDF service now integrated with memoQ.
It's one thing to have a tool and in many cases quite another thing to know how to make the best use of it. This situation is further complicated by the very wide range of scenarios in which an editor like iceni InFix might be useful and the great differences one often finds in the needs and expectations of the clientele from one translator to another. In the product's early days I followed the commentaries of José Henrique Lamensdorf, a Brazilian engineer with long experience in technical translation, desktop publishing and other fields, and while I consider him to be among the most useful sources of good technical information for me in my early days as a commercial translator, his project needs were very different from mine, and most of the things he mentioned a decade or more ago, though very relevant to people heavily involved with publishing, weren't a fit for my clientele.
That changed as iceni expanded the feature set over the years and I began to encounter many cases where OCR and a full Adobe Acrobat license did not quite do what I needed in a simple way.
Some weeks ago I had an online meeting scheduled with a client company to discuss the advantages of certain support technologies with that company's translation and project management staff. We tried to use TeamViewer for the discussion, but unfortunately my license could not accommodate the 6+ people involved, and I was reluctant to fork over the extra cash needed for a 15 or 25 participant license, especially because some other clients had issues with TeamViewer which I never clearly understood, leading their IT departments to ban it. And the TVS recording files, while generally quite decent for viewing and of manageable size due to an excellent compression CODEC, are a nightmare to convert cleanly to MP4 or other common video formats. Just as I was caught in this dilemma, my esteemed Portuguese to UK English translation colleague and gifted instructor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, David Hardisty, enthusiastically re-introduced me to Zoom videoconferencing.
I had seen Zoom before briefly when IAPTI decided to ditch the Citrix conferencing solutions and use it for webinars and staff meetings, but at the time I was too distracted by other matters to remember the name or notice the details. And, as we know, there one finds the Devil.
Zoom is powerful and flexible. For about €13 a month for my Pro license, I can invite up to 100 people for a web meeting, with quite a few useful options that I am still getting a grip on. Being used to the relative simplicity of TeamViewer, I am a little overwhelmed sometimes, and I have had a few recorded client meetings where the video was flawed because I got the screen sharing options mixed up. But the basics are actually dead simple if one pays a bit of attention.
A Zoom "web meeting", by the way, is what I would call a webinar, but that term means something else in Zoomworld, involving up to 50 speakers and something like 10,000 participants for some monthly premium. Not my thing. If the crowd is bigger than 10 in an online or a face-to-face class, I start to feel the constrictions of time and individual attention like an unruly anaconda around me.
But in any case, for someone who has spent many years looking for better teaching tools, Zoom is looking pretty good right now. And it enables me to share what I hope is useful professional information without dealing with the organizational nonsense and politics often associated with platforms licensed by some companies and professional associations. All for the monthly price of a cheap lunch.
So I've decided to do a series of free public talks using Zoom, not only to share some of a considerable backlog of new and exciting technical matters for translators, translation project managers and support staff and language service consumers, but also to get a better handle on how I can use this tool to support friends, colleagues and students around the world. Previously I announced a terminology talk (on May 24th, mostly about memoQ); now I have decided to share some of the ways that iceni InFix helps me in my work and what it might do for you too.
Soon Thursday, June 21st at 16:00 Central European Time (15:00 Lisbon time) I'll be talking about how you can get your fix of useful PDF handling for a variety of challenging situations. You are welcome to join me for this.
