What's busy?

Ken Fagan, a French to English translator, made an interesting comment in a recent forum discussion:

At the risk of making an obvious point, a translator who averages 5,000 words/day is clearly going to find it much more difficult to keep busy, week after week, than a translator who translates 2,500 words/day.

Personally, I define "busy" as the total number of words I'm offered (= total number of words translated + the approximate total number of words turned down).

With all the to-do about busy or not busy, business good or bad in all corners, I think this is the first time I've heard this particular quantitative perspective brought up. I suppose if someone used to churning out 4,000 words a day only finds 3,000 on offer, there may be concern, whereas a person able or content to do 2,000 words a day will still feel deluged. I think my own perception of "busy" is probably a lot in the sense I understand Ken's own definition. It's not just how much I do, which may be a lot or a little, depending on my personal choices and other commitments, but also how much I turn away. Saying "no" in a professional way can also be time-consuming; for me, it often involves careful consideration of the work calendar, consultation with my partner, counterproposals and often detailed alternative recommendations. There have been days when "no" involved far more work than the actual translations, because basic courtesy requires some response to valued clients and strangers who approach you politely.

That's how I see it. How do you define "busy"?

No saving needed if you work with Déjà Vu!

The following question arrived by e-mail a short time ago from a new user of Déjà Vu X:

When I save the project file, is everything saved, or do I have to also save the translation memory file?

Here was my answer:

Save the project file? How do you do that? You won't find a Save command under the File menu. It's actually a database of sorts which autosaves every few seconds or so and every time you exit a segment cell. And if you have your settings done right, the segments are written to the TM immediately when they are marked finished (on Ctrl + down arrow). So no saving necessary - that's one of the best aspects of DVX compared with Trados or Star Transit. You can lose a lot of work in those if you forget to save. With DVX, the worst that can happen is you lose one segment in a crash. (Assuming the project file is not corrupted, and if it is, most of the info you need is in the TMs and termbases anyway!)

Addendum:

As it turns out from a later conversation, what she was really interested in was advice about backing up DVX resources. That's a very good question, which people answer very differently.

My personal approach is to save everything. This includes the project (DVPRJ) files. The "official" reason is that my understanding of German laws is that it is wise for me to archive this project resource, preferably in a manner compliant with auditing standards. The real reason is that it makes my life easier very often to be able to look up old projects as they were set up, re-check word counts and match statistics, rescue a lexicon that I forgot to export, etc. I find the project file to be more than the sum of its parts in many ways and worth saving or backing up.
Of course, other important resources like TMs and termbases should be backed up, but that goes without saying.

Proofreading Trados jobs with the free version of MemoQ

The other day I was asked by a friend at an agency to review a few points of linguistic dispute with an end client's proofreader. It wasn't one of my translations at issue, thank God, because although it wasn't horrible, it did have a few things in it to make one cringe. But as I talked to my friend about the project, I realized that the problems went far beyond quality, and some of the problems lay with a lack of technical preparation on the part of the reviewer to deal with the translated files efficiently, so there was a great deal of manual work involved in incorporating legitimate changes.

This friend and I have been arguing about CAT tools for years. He's probably the best expert I know for Trados, but there are a number of technical challenges we've faced from time to time where DVX would have done the job better, usually avoiding a nasty problem. The inability of the proofreader to modify the TTX file from the project under discussion was another such case. If the agency had a copy of DVX, the translated TTX could be read into a DVX project, then exported as an RTF table for a proofreader working with nothing more than a word processor. Or a satellite project could be created for use with the free DVX Editor version. That is in fact what may happen next time, though whether the agency will get a DV license or whether I will process the project for a small fee is still up in the air.

After a rather long phone chat, however, another possibility occured to me. MemoQ can also read pre-segmented TTX files. Or bilingual Word/RTF files for that matter. So theoretically a reviewer could use the free (or the licensed) version of MemoQ to correct uncleaned Trados files. I'm not one to let a theory remain untested for long, so I tried it and it works.

There are a few caveats. With the current state of MemoQ, I think the DVX approach is better, primarily because the RTF tables and satellite projects allow comments to be shared efficiently. I keep bugging Kilgray about this point, and I'm told it's "in the works", but I'm the kind of guy who needs to stick my fingers in the wounds before I'll believe. Given the progress of MemoQ over the past year, however, there is good reason to hope. The current free version is actually not a bad tool. It is limited to one file in a project, and has other limitations, like no importing of TM material for a self-created project, but in general, one can use a lot of the MemoQ features and get a pretty good idea of what it's like to work with the program. I'm running the free version, because despite Kilgray's generosity in extending my multi-month test license several times, I haven't finished evaluating the program to my satisfaction. (I am also waiting for exportable comments. Make me believe, guys!) When the ever-patient Istvan offered to extend the temporary license yet again, I decided to do penance instead and see how far I could go without a license. In fact one can do a lot for no money, almost enough to make me want to shell out for a license (which costs less than DVX). But not without exportable comments! And preferable an editable RTF external view feature like DVX too.

In any case, I have a lot of translated TTX files, so I started importing some of these into MemoQ Free v 3.2.10. Each file as a separate project (that's the limitation for cheapskates). In a few cases, I experienced crashes in the set-up dialogs; TTX files from some "top secret" Open Source experiments were indigestible (but OK with Trados), and clicks in the "wrong" place probably precipitated other crashes when trying to import other TTX files that I know are 100% OK. However, most of the time I was able to import the translated TTX file, proofread it, make changes and export the modified versions. Without being able to export the comments I made in the MemoQ project. Nag, nag. Still, this is the only option I am aware of at the current time which enables someone to edit a TTX file in a tag-protected environment, do basic QA, filter to compare similar strings, etc. etc. and export an edited TTX file all for free. Not bad, really. This could open up the possibility of a few extra emergency editing jobs to put cash in the pockets of starving, technology-poor reviewers and help agencies out of a bind if the only editor that can be found isn't a Trados user.

While I was on a roll, I thought I would take a look at uncleaned (bilingual) Word/RTF files. That works with MemoQ too (free version). Just like the procedure I've published for editing these files in DVX, one must search and replace the string '<}0{>' for No Matches and change the zero to '01' or some other fuzzy score. Otherwise the target content will not be shown.

So MemoQ, even the current free version, is an effective tool for editing uncleaned Trados files, just like DVX. Kudos to Kilgray for creating this viable, if limited, option and making it available to the translation community at no cost. If some of the stability issues in the import routines can be sorted out and the exportable comments implemented, I think MemoQ will become a killer app. On the subject of exportable comments, here's a suggestion for Kilgray, or Atril too for that matter: when exporting comments associated with a TTX file or files, there should be an option to generate TagEditor comment files for the individual TTX files. I doubt this is hard to implement, and it would make the workflow between agencies which use Trados only and translators who use MemoQ or DVX for Trados projects even better.