memoQ error logs - find 'em, use 'em, purge 'em!

It can be very useful to know where to find the error logs for the memoQ Server and desktop (Project Manager and Translator Pro) editions for two main reasons:

• Including an error log with a message to Kilgray Support (support@kilgray.com) may be helpful to resolve an error more quickly. Look for the error log file that coincides with the time the error(s) occurred.
• memoQ error logs can accumulate and take up a great deal of space on one's hard drive! This is especially the case after new versions have been released without adequate testing.

How much space am I talking about? After the release of memoQ 5 about two years ago, I purged the accumulation of error logs and recovered some 10 GB of space. The individual files are small, but there were a lot. After the release of version 6, I did another purge, which freed up several gigabytes, and my purge today - which covered the time since the release of version 6.2 at the end of November 2012 - recovered about 600 MB, with very few errors logged for version 6.2 after February. The number of error logs increased again after version 6.5 (memoQ 2013) was released, but they were not too frightening in number, because I still work in the stable version 6.2 most of the time.

Where can these error logs be found? The locations depend on your operating system version. For information on where to find the relevant memoQ error logs, consult the up-to-date information in the Kilgray knowledgebase here.

Coping with objects and graphics to translate in Microsoft Office documents

About a year ago, I published a series of posts describing a simple way to get at the objects and graphics embedded in Microsoft Office documents, such as Microsoft Word DOCX documents or PowerPoint PPTX presentations. These investigations were inspired by a series of jobs where I had to cope with up to 60 embedded Excel tables in a Microsoft Word document. The four related posts are:

• Translating embedded objects in Microsoft Office documents
• Coping with embedded BIN objects in Microsoft Office documents
• Replacing bitmap graphics in Microsoft Office documents
• Refreshing embedded objects in Microsoft Word (a macro)

The post titles may differ a little from the text in the links here, which is updated for a little more clarity.

I've also added two short videos to my YouTube channel which illustrate how to remove embedded objects from a DOCX for translating separately from the Microsoft Word document and how to put them back afterward.

Here's how to extract the embeddings folder from the DOCX file:



And here is how to put the translated embedded objects into the DOCX file and refresh the view of the embedded objects in your translation:



These and other videos I've produced recently are part of an effort I began recently to develop integrated courses for self-instruction and review with software tools used by many of us. These courses use the Moodle platform and offer text, screenshots, audio, video and data files such as examples of file formats to translate, backups of memoQ practice projects to restore on your local computer for training, configuration resources for memoQ, useful macros to support work with many translation environment (CAT) tools and a host of other resources and learning links.

Text preview workaround for memoQ

For years I have been nagging Kilgray to add a preview for plain text files imported to memoQ. I translate quite a number of TXT files sometimes, and it bothers me not to be able to see the text in the preview as I work. The workaround I have used for this - resaving the file as RTF, DOC or DOCX - runs the risk of getting me in trouble if I don't remember to re-save as plain text before delivery.

While editing some video caption texts recently, it dawned on me that users now have another alternative. One of the quiet improvements made in memoQ 6.2 was the introduction of a preview for files imported with the Regex text filter.

If a text file is brought into the project using Import with options... and the import filter is changed from the plain text filter to the regex text filter (with the defaults - no other settings needed), a preview will be created as shown in the screenshot above.

There will be lines between the paragraphs, and the imported text will have a green background highlight. A bit annoying perhaps, but better than the previous complete lack of a preview.

Those who work with Sanskrit and Arabic may note some minor problems in the example shown. I was a little surprised to notice that there were no problems displaying the words with other scripts on the right side of the working window, but the results in the translation grid are not quite as good. I thought perhaps this was due to my choice of display font, and that may be the case, as switching to Arial Unicode MS fixed all but the comma display, but perhaps there is more to the problem.