Much Ado About AdSense

In Ye Merrye Olde World of Translation Workhouses, there has been renewed debate lately regarding immodest and professionally unacceptable Google Advertisement in the kingdom. This was noted, along with a few examples, in my Facebook commentary "Get your mail order brides through ProZ!". After I wrote my comments, the original debate thread (in German and English) continued and has not yet been locked, though my post (see below) took more than 24 hours for vetting (yes, I'm on probation again - God only knows why), and even Ralf Lemster's posts must now be individually approved, because the management is concerned about his "tone" in the matter. I find it rich that a person who was one of the longest-serving moderators on ProZ, who helped establish the brand in Europe and handled its payments here for years, who is respected by everyone who knows him for his competence and absolute straight arrow ethics as well as his helpfulness to those who are serious about the business of translation be treated like a naughty teenager because he thinks that fraudulent diet ads and offers of mail order brides do not project an image that will help translators in their business. His calls for action and accountability - and those of others - have been brushed off with platitutes about "two ecosystems" and other irrelevancies. There is a problem, however, when sewage from one ecosystem - the advertising system that constitutes the bulk of revenue at ProZ - pollutes the ecosystem in which translators try to do business. I commented:

Durchaus bedenklich. Altogether worrisome.

Imageschaden sind bei solcher Werbung vorprogrammiert. Für uns, auch für ProZ allgemein.

Es ist klar, dass Werbung wohl einen notwendige Beitrag zum Betrieb leistet und auch leisten muß, und ich finde den angemessenen Einsatz von Werbung in Ordnung, sogar positiv. Diese muß auch nicht rein sprachdienstleistungsbezoge sein - die Reisebranche ist lukrativ und auch passend zu einem internationalen Image. GermanWings- oder EasyJet-Werbung würde sogar ich von Zeit zu Zeit anklicken. Aber der aktuelle Ansatz ist einfach nicht akzeptabel, und ich finde, es gibt akuten Handlungsbedarf.

***************

With such advertisement, damage to image and reputation is inevitable, for us and for ProZ in general.

It is clear that ads probably make a necessary contribution to operations and that this must also be. I find the appropriate use of advertisement OK, positive even. It also need not be strictly related to language services; the travel sector is lucrative and fits an international image. Even I would click on GermanWings or EasyJet advertisement occasionally. However, the current approach is simply not acceptable. I find there is an urgent need to take action.

Time and again ProZ staff have claimed that it isn't possible to filter properly for languages other than English. However, information from other colleagues contradicts this. I won't speculate about this discrepancy, and in this case I'm not sure if all parties are really talking about the same thing. I'm not comfortable with this lack of reliable information, so I'm contemplating doing what any trained scientist would do: design and run an appropriate experiment. I have an AdSense account which I had to set up for purpose unrelated to any blog (and which I have never used, so I know next to nothing about it). I am considering immersing myself in the cesspit of Google ads and experimenting with them on this blog so that I can understand myself how these filters work, what the options are and who is giving the real story in the whole argument on ProZ.

If I do this, I will tweak the filters in various ways, then sit back and watch the results. I'm sure that not all of them will be good, so I apologize in advance for anything offensive. And then I'll take those ads off, because I don't want this space polluted with them for the long term. I have nothing against stuff like the AIT partner program, because I like their products for the most part and feel that they play a useful role in a freelance translator's business, and if SDL wants to sponsor a square centimeter of space at the bottom for fifty million euros a year, I might not say no, but I can't imagine allowing Google to determine what is relevant and helpful for someone who takes the time to read what I have to say. And *if* I do this, I will report the results, of course.

 

"Advanced" MemoQ webinar

Despite a horrible workload today and constant telephone harassment from Switzerland (literally dozens of calls from Guess Who), I managed to find a little time (i.e. took a necessary break) to join one of the many free seminars Kilgray offers. Today's topic was "Advanced MemoQ"; the material presented wasn't necessarily for power users, but there was a presumption that participants were familiar with basic functions.

Gábor Ugray, Kilgray's head of development was the presenter. I like his style: simple, clear and honest. When I made a comment praising MemoQ's handling of TTX files, he volunteered information about cases where everything might not work perfectly with unsegmented content. It takes integrity and confidence to share information like that, though I actually think he misunderstood the question and there is no issue for what I was talking about (numbers and dates). Anyway, any time I have the pleasure to hear or read information from him I learn a lot, and today was no exception.

He started off the hour by showing us important tricks for configuring an RTF import, including how to sort out footnotes properly. Other topics covered included the frequent questions about how to migrate term data from Excel (CSV works but can be a disaster with some languages, so he recommends saving as Unicode text from Excel to avoid code page issues - this also avoids the "guess the code page" game), custom settings for the termbase at the term level (very, very powerful for complex matching of multi-word terms, etc. - use to learn the pipe character!), cool shortcuts for using the text filters in the translation window, fixing segmentation issues by defining brand names with goofy capitalization like "iPhone" and "memoQ" as capital letters, other segmentation tweaks, creating special views for frequently occurring segments and a lot more. This is the first "advanced" webinar I have attended for MQ, but I have the impression that the content is different every time. At the end there was about 20 minutes of Q&A in which participants had a chance to ask their ow questions, which Gábor handled very competently.

Although I use the memoQ software a lot, I learned a lot today. I really appreciate a well-organized presetation with good information and no hard sell, and I especially appreciate Gábor taking the time to show special techniques of the "old" 3.6 version as he prepares for the release of version 4.0 in a few weeks. Thank you.

There are five more free memoQ webinars currently scheduled for this month; information on these can be found on Kilgray's calendar page.

The experience of a new MemoQ user

I have been testing MemoQ for about two years and working actively with it since the breakthrough version 3.5 release. Shortly after I purchased my license, Kilgray offered a great group buy opportunity through ProZ (for far less than I had paid), so we bought a second license for my partner, who had developed a certain fascination with MemoQ or at least the effect that working with it had on me. For weeks she heard such strange squeals of delight from my adjacent office that she began to suspect that my mistress was hiding under the desk. Much to her disappointment, I was simply enjoying the clean design and innovative features of the software.

Although I installed the software on her laptop, it wasn't until many months (and quite a few updates) later that she got around to using it. There's simply too much going on in this office on many days with a heavy work schedule and three hunting dogs who demand their share of attention. Then about two weeks ago, we had a high volume rush project that pushed our capacity to a scary limit and demanded great efficiency in collaboration. Since we don't currently have a good TM server running, I decided to set up the master project on my machine and export bilingual exchange files for parts of the files we worked on. In addition to that, regular exports of TMs and terminologies were exchanged. We also reviewed each other's work by exchanging views in "MemoQ bilingual" format (as this also permitted the exchange of written comments). In the course of several very hard days of work I answered a number of beginner's questions and was occasionally greeting with a "Wow!" or a "This is soooooo much better than...", so I thought that perhaps a little "in-house interview" on Monique's new software experience might be in order.

Translation Tribulations: Ms. Simmer, could you give us some background on your previous experience with translation environment tools?

Monique Simmer: You mean CAT tools? I started using Trados in the 1990s and continue to process files with it [editor's note: Trados Classic] today. I've been using Déjà Vu since 2000. I tried SDLX at some point but didn't like it. And now MemoQ.

TT: What did you like about Trados [Classic]?

MS: Nothing.

TT: What's not to like?

MS: I'm not a sheep and don't fall for sleazy marketing tactics. It doesn't handle numbers and dates. It's full of bugs. Often the target files won't save from TagEditor or there are cleaning problems. Do you really want the whole list? Its creators ought to be tarred and feathered!

TT: How would you compare Déjà Vu with MemoQ?

MS: I don't have enough experience with MemoQ to make a comprehensive comparison. The filters seem to be better. I find that the labeling of menus on the MemoQ screens is not very intuitive sometimes. I got confused between importing and exporting the bilingual exchange files and "ordinary" files. 
On the positive side, it's an easy program to use overall. It's übersichtlich as we say in German. I like the fact that the keyboard shortcuts could be customized so the ergonomics are basically the same as when I use Déjà Vu. And the QA window was very, very useful for checking my work at the end. It caught a few places where I had mistyped numbers.
I also like the fact that I can use more than the two databases, which is the limit for my Déjà Vu Pro license. We've been talking about spending over 1000 euros to upgrade my DV license so I can do this, and now I can do it - and generate uncleaned Trados Word files for some of our customers - without spending all that money on DVX Workgroup.
Oh, yes... one thing that drives me up the wall about the MemoQ editor is that I can't reposition words by dragging and dropping, and the leftmost character is often dropped in selections.

TT: I'm told that version 4 of MemoQ, scheduled to be released next month, will feature a new editor without those problems.

MS: Let's hope so! So far I understand why you like the program. And the kind of support that Kilgray provides is really important.