Colors in memoQ lookup results - which termbase?

A subject that comes up time and again with experienced colleagues is the desire to distinguish more easily where matches come from in memoQ. Of course, clicking on a match in the Translation Results pane of memoQ's working grid provides additional information for each type of resource (the example of the LiveDocs match has different information than one would expect to see from  TM hit, a termbase match, a non-translatable or other kind of entry). But many want more obvious information in the working display and bilingual RTF exports to indicate the source of matches.

In the graphic at the left, segment matches from two different translation memories and two different LiveDocs corpora are shown. There is no visual clue to indicate the differences between these corpora and TMs. One would have to click on a particular entry and look at the meta-information at the bottom right to see which data collection the hit came from, the name of the document translated, when the translation unit was created, who wrote it, etc.

With termbases, however, the situation is now different. For those with excellent eyesight (I don't really qualify), there are subtle gradations of color to reflect termbase priority, the higher priority termbases showing darker colors for their hits. This is clever and useful, and unfortunately not able to be customized in a meaningful way at this time as far as I can tell. I might like to set a special match color for a termbase I want to take particular note of but which has a lower (and hard to distinguish) priority. Can you tell how many termbases are showing hits in the screenshot here? Look carefully.

I find the color cues used for matches in the memoQ working window quite helpful in most cases. Although these can be customized under Tools > Options > Appearance > Lookup results, I refuse to do so, because I use these color cues to explain things to other users sometimes, and I cause enough chaos telling them to use my personal customized keyboard shortcuts based on an old version of Déjà Vu, having long forgotten what the default keyboard shortcuts are. I also don't see an easy way to reset the default colors if I mess things up.

I'm grateful for the little bit of help that color differentiation in termbase results provides in recent versions of memoQ, and I hope that Kilgray takes this concept further. Similar gradations of color for TMs and LiveDocs would be helpful, and it would be very nice if custom colors could be assigned temporarily to particular resources of any type where some collections of data require special consideration. And then we need a simple way to reset those temporary color assignments.

If you agree with this or have other ideas for improving the accessibility of match result information, please write to support@kilgray.com and express your thoughts. Too often users remain passive with their frustrations and thoughts about changes or additional features needed. Kilgray tends to be a very responsive solution provider, but if the user community does not express its needs clearly and consistently, it's not reasonable to expect that what we need will happen and it's even less reasonable to be annoyed when it doesn't. In the five years I have used memoQ, things have often taken time to implement, but in that time the developers and product designers have usually given careful thought to matters and mostly exceed my expectations when they do provide the solution.

Online workshop plans: memoQ for legal & financial translators

As readers of this blog know, I've spent a good part of the last year or more investigating some instructional practices for translators' continuing education and forming my own opinions about what works, what does not, and what might be improved. I've looked at different approaches to blogging, developed e-mail based tutorials for one company, acquired some familiarity with remote coaching options via Skype and TeamViewer, begun the production of short training videos on a YouTube channel, learned to use Moodle and other online courseware platforms, released a PDF e-book with short tutorial modules, supported the localization of some of the preceding things into Portuguese and... probably a few other things I don't remember at the moment. Somewhere in all of that I moved countries and translated a bit to pay bills and buy dog food.

Now I am considering working with a specialist translator to plan a flexible course on the use of memoQ in an optimal way - together with other technologies as required - to achieve better results in processes involved with legal and financial translation. The intent is in no way to teach anything about legal/financial translation as a subject, but rather how to organize the software and work processes to overcome frequent problems, satisfy particular customer requirements or achieve specific improvements in quality management for the translation work.

I have specific topics in mind based on my own work and questions directed to me from specialist colleagues in these areas, but I would like to have suggestions from others, particularly those who might be interested in involvement in such a course in some way. These suggestions can take any form and can be as simple as an observation regarding a difficulty you find in this area which you suspect might have a solution involving technology or working methods.

The delivery media planned are a combination of e-mail, "live" sessions for about an hour each week for small groups or individuals using Skype or TeamViewer, with these recorded and made available for viewing and/or download in a private Moodle course forum on my server. As it makes sense to do so, supplemental material will be provided as web pages, video clips, practice files for testing, memoQ light resources (such as stopword lists or auto-translation rules), PDF "handouts" from my new book edition and other sources.

I've set up an (experimental) mailing list - "Translate Solutions" to discuss this, other topics related to continuing education for translation technology and education/training resources. You are welcome to join the discussion there with a subscription request to translate_solutions-subscribe (at) lossner.net.

The scheduling and detailed subject matter of the course will be announced as specific content requests are received and assessed.

So let the fun begin.

The fix is in for PDF charts

Over four years ago, I reviewed Iceni Infix after I began working with it. I'm not as strong a fan as some, because I generally have little enthusiasm for direct editing of PDFs and dealing with frequent problems such as missing unusual fonts and having to play the guess-my-optimum-font-substitution game, but I do find it useful in many situations. I found another one of those today.

A new client of a friend works with a horrible German program to produce reports full of charts. The main body of the text is written in Microsoft Word and is available as a reasonable DOCX file, but the charts are a problem, as they are available only in the specific, oddball tool or PDF format. Nobody wants to deal with that software, really. It is supported by no translation tools vendor I am aware of, and like another example of incompatible German software, Across, it enjoys the obscurity it deserves.

After thinking about the approach needed in this case, I realized that if the graphics could be isolated conveniently on pages, the XML export from the PDF document would contain only information from the graphics. After translation, the format could be touched up with Infix before making bitmap screenshots at an enlargement which would yield decent resolution when sized in  layout. Of course, in projects involving multiple languages the XML files could be used with great convenience.

Selecting and deleting the text on the pages with Iceni Infix is really a no-brainer. The time charge for such work will be quite reasonable. And exporting the XML or marked-up text to translate is also quite straightforward:

The exports can be handled in nearly any CAT tool, so TMS and terminology resources can be put to full use. Or you can edit in a simple, free tool like Notepad++ or an XML-savvy editor.

The screenshot above shows the XML in memoQ. No customization of the default filter is required. Reports from other users who have worked in a similar way indicate that OmegaT and other environments generally have few, if any, problems. In one case there was trouble re-integrating the graphics in a project that also had 50 pages of text, but there may have been other issues I am not aware of in that case.

With the content in the TM, if the chart data are made available in another format, the translations can be transferred quickly to that for even better results. The same approach can be used for a very wide variety of other electronically generated graphic formats (except some of the really insane ones I've seen where the text is broken up; I don't know if Iceni sanitizes such messes or not).

I think this is an approach which can benefit many of us in a variety of projects. It is not really suited for cases of bitmap graphics, but I have other approaches there in which Iceni Infix may also play a useful role and allow CAT integration. Licenses for the tool are quite reasonably priced, and the trial version (in Pro mode) is entirely suited for testing and learning this process.