memoQuickie: "compatible" XLIFF in memoQ 6, 6.2 and 2013

The recent builds of memoQ 6 have caused some confusion with Kilgray following the SDL practice of creating its own extension for XLIFF files, so these may not be recognized by other applications and would need the extensions changed to XLF or something else generally recognizable as XLIFF.

This can actually be done directly in the export dialog for the bilingual XLIFF file. Just change the file extension in the File name field. Despite a renamed extension, the file will be recognized as a memoQ bilingual when re-imported, and the translation of the original file will be updated.

If you encounter a compressed memoQ XLIFF export (MQXLZ), be aware that this is just a ZIP file. Rename the extension to ZIP and unpack it to get the real XLIFF (MQXLIFF) file. That file has a generic name (document.mqxliff) and should probably be renamed before it is shared.

Update 2013-07-23: Here is a short video I posted on YouTube to show how to export an XLF file and open it in SDL Trados Studio:

Reimporting memoQ 6 bilingual files

Changes in the translation menu options in version 6 of memoQ have caused a little confusion with some users. The differences in handling "memoQ bilingual" files, which are used for external translation or review, seem to cause particular stress in some cases.

In previous versions of memoQ, the bilingual files had a special command for importing, re-importing or updating (Import/update bilingual). In memoQ 6, this was consolidated with the Import function, which replaces its predecessor in earlier versions, Add document.

memoQ automatically detects that the file is a bilingual document associated with a file in the project. When the file is selected, the appropriate import options for the bilingual update will be set automatically:

The file name displayed is actually the name of the file to be updated, not the name of the bilingual file. Clocking OK updates the translation file with the changes in the bilingual document - in the example shown above a bilingual RTF table created from the document to be translated. The results of the update are shown in a dialog:

After that, the changes can be viewed with tracked changes features if desired (if versioning is activated):

Even without tracked changes, the status of updated segments will be set to edited, so these segments can be found quickly using the filters to confirm that the changes are acceptable before the finished document is exported.

Replacing bitmap graphics in MS Office 2007/2010

A few weeks ago I published a series of posts about different aspects of embedded objects in DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files and how to translate them a bit more conveniently. When I described this procedure to a colleague this afternoon, he thought it was a solution for convenient substitution of bitmap graphics in these files as well. Well, sort of, but not quite.

If you rename the extension of a DOCX file to ZIP and open the ZIP file using Windows Explorer (in order not to mess up the compression), you will see a folder named word.

 Inside this word folder are other folders of interest:

The embeddings folder has the objects such as Excel tables or PowerPoint slides described in previous posts. The bitmap graphics or pictures are in the media folder, however:

The view inside the media folder above shows one bitmap graphic (the JPEG file) and various other files with images of the embedded objects (an equation, and Excel table and a PowerPoint slide). Only the bitmap files are of real interest. If other graphic files localized for the target language are named the same as the original files in the media folder and substituted there, when the ZIP files is renamed to have its original extension, the substituted graphics will appear in the document the next time it is opened.

This way, for example, screen shots for an entire file can be substituted quickly. One could, of course do this by a number of other means, but this way is fairly convenient and could probably be automated without much ado if your organization needs to make such substitutions a lot.


Addendum: I was curious about those other files in the media folder - the ones with the views of the embedded objects. So I deleted them to see if they would re-generate when the document is opened. Instead, this message was displayed at the location of each object:

Double-clicking the "broken" object display opened the object and restored the view. So clearly, refreshing object views involves updating the content of the media folder.