memoQ Terminology Extraction and Management

Recent versions of memoQ (8.4+) have seen quite a few significant improvements in recording and managing significant terminology in translation and review projects. These include:

• Easier inclusion of context examples for use (though this means that term information like source should be placed in the definition field so it is not accidentally lost)
• Microsoft Excel import/export capabilities which include forbidden terminology marking with red text - very handy for term review workflows with colleagues and clients!
• Improved stopword list management generally, and the inclusion of new basic stopword lists for Spanish, Hungarian, Portuguese and Russian
• Prefix merging and hiding for extracted terms
• Improved features for graphics in term entries - more formats and better portability

Since the introduction of direct keyboard shortcuts for writing to the first nine ranked term bases in a memoQ project (as part of the keyboard shortcuts overhaul in version 7.8), memoQ has offered perhaps the most powerful and flexible integrated term management capabilities of any translation environment despite some persistent shortcomings in its somewhat dated and rigid term model. But although I appreciate the ability of some other tools to create customized data structures that may better reflect sophisticated needs, nothing I have seen beats the ease of use and simple power of memoQ-managed terminology in practical, everyday project use.

An important part of that use throughout my nearly two decades of activity as a commercial translator has been the ability to examine collections of documents - including but not limited to those I am supposed to translate - to identify significant subject matter terminology in order to clarify these expressions with clients or coordinate their consistent translations with members of a project team. The introduction of the terminology extraction features in memoQ version 5 long ago was a significant boost to my personal productivity, but that prototype module remained unimproved for quite a long time, posing significant usability barriers for the average user.

Within the past year, those barriers have largely fallen, though sometimes in ways that may not be immediately obvious. And now practical examples to make the exploration of terminology more accessible to everyone have good ground in which to take root. So in two recent webinars, I shared my approach - in German and in English - to how I apply terminology extraction in various client projects or to assist colleagues. The German talk included some of the general advice on term management in memoQ which I shared in my talk last spring, Getting on Better Terms with memoQ. That talk included a discussion of term extraction (aka "term mining"), but more details are available here:


Due to unforeseen circumstances, I didn't make it to the office (where my notes were) to deliver the talk, so I forgot to show the convenience of access to the memoQ concordance search of translation memories and LiveDocs corpora during term extraction, which often greatly facilitates the identification of possible translations for a term candidate in an extraction session. This was covered in the German talk.

All my recent webinar recordings - and shorter videos, like playing multiple term bases in memoQ to best advantage - are best viewed directly on YouTube rather than in the embedded frames on my blog pages. This is because all of them since earlier in 2018 include time indexes that make it easier to navigate the content and review specific points rather than listen to long stretches of video and search for a long time to find some little thing. this is really quite a simple thing to do as I pointed out in a blog post earlier this year, and it's really a shame that more of the often useful video content produced by individuals, associations and commercial companies to help translators is not indexed this way to make it more useful for learning.

There is still work to be done to improve term management and extraction in memoQ, of course. Some low-hanging fruit here might be expanded access to the memoQ web search feature in the term extraction as well as in other modules; this need can, of course, be covered very well by excellent third-party tools such as Michael Farrell's IntelliWebSearch. And the memoQ Concordance search is long overdue for an overhaul to allow proper filtering of concordance hits (by source, metadata, etc.), more targeted exploration of collocation proximities and more. But my observations of the progress made by the memoQ planning and development team in the past year give me confidence that many good things are ahead, and perhaps not so far away.

SDLTM to TMX conversion update (without SDL Trados Studio)

From time to time I hear from colleagues or read social media posts from people who have been given particular SDL reference resources to use (like an SDLTM file for translation memory or an SDLTB termbase file). But without a license to the corresponding SDL software, it can be troubling to deal with these formats and convert them into files which are easily imported into other environments, such as memoQ, WordFast, OmegaT or whatever.

There are a number of solutions to this problem published on YouTube, and memoQ Translation Technologies Ltd. (mQtech, the solution artists formerly known as "Kilgray") even has a nice help page in their knowledgebase, but all the solutions I have seen so far are either a bit dated, or they omit some information which might help to avoid problems.

The best free solution I have seen is the one described on the mQtech knowledgebase page, but the current description still leaves a few potential stumbling blocks.

There are two pieces to the solution:

• a conversion utility kindly provided by WordFast on the page https://www.wordfast.net/wiki/Translating_SDL_Trados_packages and available in the current version directly here, and 
• a DLL that is needed in the same folder as that utility for it to function. Only the 32-bit version of sqlite3.dll on the page https://sqlite.org/download.html will work; the 64-bit version is useless in this case.

Extraktion der Terminologie mit memoQ u.v.m.: das Video

Seit etwa ein Jahr hat memoQ Translation Technologies Ltd. (ehemals „Kilgray“ – „mQtech“) diverse hilfreiche Erweiterungen der Terminologieoptionen in der Software memoQ eingeführt, unter anderem welche, die die Erforschung der Terminologiebestände in großen Dokumenten, Translation Memories und Korpora vereinfachen sowie die Verwaltung deren Befunde auch besser ermöglichen.

Für mich persönlich sind die verbesserten Möglichkeiten für Stoppwortlisten und die Möglichkeit, sehr einfach Kontextbeispiele den Terminologieeinträgen hinzuzufügen von größter Bedeutung. Aber auch die neue Export- und Importfunktionen nach und von Microsoft Excel i.V.m. dem roten Text für verbotene Terminologie sind für kundenbezogene Prozesse sehr hilfreich (obwohl die Rottextfunktion in memoQ Versionen 8.5 bis 8.7.3 noch auf Reparatur für den Import wartet!).

Da deutschsprachige Informationen für den Einsatz der leistungsfähigeren Aspekte von memoQ relativ dünn gesät sind, und einige verantwortliche Verbandsleute nach wie vor eher unter dem Einfluss von SDL* stehen, habe ich es mir erlaubt, meinen deutschsprachigen Kollegen folgendes Video über die Extraktion, Einsatz und Pflege der Terminologie (von dem gestrigen Webinar) zu Weihnachten zu schenken:


Also Frohes Fest sowie Frohes Schaffen mit dem derzeit besten CAT-Tool – nach angemessener Pause für die Feiertage, natürlich! Glühwein muss sein.


* man sagt, der Herr Putin habe diese Beziehungen als Vorlage für seine mit Donald Trump genommen :-)