Translation Tribulations

memoQ 6: more power under the hood

2012-06-01T17:19:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, Kilgray held its virtual memoQ Day on ProZ. Given what a disaster the ProZ online conference interface was in the first virtual conference I attended long ago, I had no intention of looking in, but since this was the first occasion on which the new version 6 of memoQ was to be presented in public, I decided to "visit" after all. The format and management have improved since my last experience with these virtual conferences, and it was definitely worth the time. I encourage those with access to the recordings of the sessions to see what's on offer; there may be many things of value. Despite over 1000 participants during the day, the event worked well.

The memoQ 6 presentation was in the evening for the Central European time zone, so I did not catch that session live. The day was long enough before then. When I did tune it, I was pleased to see confirmation of may useful changes I had heard about and see a live demo of many more I had not expected. Given that the software is still pre-beta, I expect there will be a number of changes and additions before the release, so I will simply share my impressions using the list of running feature notes I kept and a few screenshots I made. And a few addenda from conversations at memoQfest 2012.

A smaller footprint – previous versions of memoQ suffered increasingly from “bloat”. (That statement reveals an attitude I like - SDL, which takes up about ten times as much space and uses more resources, does not seem to be similarly inclined to streamline.)
Vastly improved scalability and handling of large files and large numbers of files. Speed improvements of an order of magnitude in many cases.
memoQ 6 has added support for binary MS Office (DOC & XLS) formats – and can be used without MS Office being installed. This new functionality also includes the server APIs for sophisticated, automated workflows – no more manual saving to RTF or DOCX, etc.
TM corruption problems have been decreaseda and can no longer crash servers; servers generate diagnostic exports for better troubleshooting
Improved concordance functions – no more result count error, additional viewing format. LiveDocs can now be opened from the concordance and edits/corrections can be made to TMs from the concordance window.Meta data can now be used as sorting and filtering criteria in the concordance.

"Content connectors" now in the Translator Pro edition to watch folders and automate operations such as file imports and statistics in projects

Versioning features will be identical in the Translator Pro and Project Manager editions. Now anyone can create a comparison view of two source versions.

Preferred languages will be added to the top of selection lists, saving time. This is a major improvement over the previous workaround of hacking the XML configuration file.

Translation results can be ordered by preference
The horizontal editing option has been changed to "pin" the segment being translated in the middle of the text view

Spelling checks for locked rows
Confirm locked & proofread segments in TM
A new QA warning shows TM matches not used
4 new MT engines integrated
Several new server workflows, including "cattle calls" and one with a subvendor group to maintain translator/reviewer anonymity from the higher level service provider
Enterprise IT integration: Active Directory integration, proxy support, security protocols
memoQ 5 & 6 can co-exist, and each needed for the respective servers; opening a mQ5 project will migrate it to mQ6 (create an upgraded *copy* of your project). This actually sucks. There should be middleware to ensure that any client version of memoQ can talk to any server version. The current incompatibilities cause too many headaches.
Inconsistent translations can be extracted directly into a view in the QA module! This feature saves a regular memoQ view combined from as many documents as were checked.
An AUTOSUGGEST feature which mines resources to suggest target content
TMX as a translation document format (this has interesting possibilities for TM maintenance).

This list of notes is by no means an exhaustive representation of what we can expect in about a month. And I do believe there are a number of other interesting things scheduled for minor releases in the months to follow. The progress Kilgray has made with the "refactored" version of memoQ will benefit everyone and surely inspire further rounds of "Follow the Leader" with the competition.

There are introductory webinars for memoQ 6 scheduled in June. See Kilgray's schedule for details and sign up.

memoQfest 2012: another great year and great things ahead

2012-05-29T13:23:00.001+02:00

Some say translation technology has gone to the dogs, and

this was certainly the case in Budapest this year as Ajax

and Benny noted to their satisfaction.

Although I was first asked to consider memoQ by a client of mine in 2007 and actually began to look it a year later, I was very skeptical about the software when István Lengyel convinced me to take a break for the first memoQfest at the Benzcur Hotel in Budapest in 2009. I had seen interesting progress in the year I had tested the software, but it was simply too immature for my needs and lacked nearly all the features which were most important to me. About a week before the conference, Kilgray released a version that barely met my minimum requirements for a small portion of my clients. I was impressed and actually did my first bit of commercial work with memoQ - a press release - the night before the conference began. The event itself was a blast, and I was convinced that this team had the right stuff or at least the potential to make it.

The next two years confirmed the wisdom of this leap of faith as the company raced from strength to strength despite a few stubbed toes; the advance of memoQ clearly played a role in improving other leading tools like DVX and SDL Trados, the latter borrowing generously from Hungarian innovation or using it and the unmatched service ethos on the Danube as an inspiration to overhaul the catastrophic mess of legacy Trados and enter the modern age of CAT tools, even surpassing memoQ in a few points, though with the current Renaissance of creative development in what appeared just a few years ago to be a dead-end IT ghetto, it's not an easy guess as to who will stay ahead anywhere for long. These are indeed good times for users despite the renewed threats of lock-in posed by the current misguided server politics of most providers.

Nonetheless, Kilgray's rapid growth has not been without difficulties, and despite anticipating most of the challenges long before they arose, the team doesn't always put in the performance its demanding fans expect. This is often to be expected when a company experiences the exponental growth which can obscure long-turm interests in the confusing melee of daily business. And the product which seemed so fresh and clean just a few years ago is beginning to look like a car that has been taken on too many roatrips without a good cleaning, has hauled too many dogs and needs new tires. But last week I saw clear signs that there may be a new Maserati getting a tune-up in the development garage. The hints regarding memoQ 6 and the company's further roadmap led me to scratch of most of the items on my technical gripe list. The organizational wishlist has gotten longer, but it's clear that the "refactoring" process at Kilgray is not limited to the software, so I think I can trust them as I did four years ago when few could have anticipated the company's impressive track record.

I almost did not go to Budapest this year. When I read the published schedule, it sounded far too skewed toward corporate interests, a bit like a sell-out now that server sales revenue has far surpassed that from Translator Pro licenses. And bad calls like the confused differences in implementation of versioning features in memoQ 5, weariness from providing support for issues arising from a lack of professional service consulting in the sales process with some of my agency clients and my own stupidity of forgetting to vaccinate my puppy against rabies before the trip (which required me to leave him with someone else for the first time) had me considering a week of vacation at home.

That would have been a mistake. I only expected to draw value from one presentation - regular expressions by Polish guru Marek Pawelec - and even there I didn't expect to understand very much. Instead, every one of the rather random sessions I attended had a lot to offer, even for a freelancer. The agency presenters who talked about their approaches to challenges in complex translation projects shared a great deal of information that is directly relevant to my agency and direct client business and can help make it better. And the general talk on refactoring your business through innovation by Richard Brooks, which I expected to be the biggest hot air balloon of the week, was the absolute highlight for me. I might even have gotten something out of the Asia Online keynote on machine translation, though an idiotic quote I read from the speaker about how we need to get on the MT boat or drown suggests perhaps not. I do hold out some hope he might have been misquoted or taken out of context, however. It's the least I can do in a world where people still believe in the Tooth Fairy and US Republican politics.

When Kilgray releases the videos of the talks, do watch them. I do hope the sound and picture quality will be good, because too often I really did wish I could have been in two rooms at once.

The Twitstream shared a lot of the gritty details of the presentations; the hashtag #memoQfest or an archive established by a Ukrainian user will show these for a while at least. And I'll be drawing on the tweets, my other notes and the memories of conversations in the breaks to share insights, many quite trivial, all of which confirm that memoQ is the right choice for most of my translation IT needs. The only thing I'll say now is that in memoQ 6 the versioning features will be the same in all editions of memoQ. Big deal. For some of us.

Oh yes, and next year's memoQ fest might not be in Budapest. If I weren't visiting that city with some frequency now for dogs, I might be disappointed, because I love it and the rest of the country I have seen, but the change is unlikely to be a problem, because what makes Kilgray's memoQ truly great is not the venue and not the rather good technology, but the people: the ones who make it and the ones who use it.

The memoQ ménage à trois

2012-05-22T10:46:00.001+02:00

A few years ago, I tagged along behind Kilgray COO István Lengyel as he gave guests remaining after memoQfest a tour of the lovely city of Budapest. It was a beautiful spring day - what better opportunity to talk about the pressing matters of software licensing and server availability for small teams? We talked about the difficult position of translating couples who spent far too much time trading data on the SneakerNet or e-mailing TM exports to a partner sitting five meters away. He proposed a "honeymoon edition" of the memoQ Server to serve the needs of these teams, a licensing scheme certain to evoke warm feelings on par with a romantic cruise on the Blue Danube. But, alas, the promised edition never saw an official release.

But if there is one thing I've learned in my four years as a migrant to memoQ, it's that the swinging software developers in Hungary have a knack for taking a good idea and adding just a little more spice. Thus it was again as István announced to the audience in the final session of memoQ 2012 that a new small team edition of the memoQ Server is now available from Kilgray, with three licenses. The cost mentioned was € 3000, very competitive when compared to other tools in editions above the basic standalone freelancer package. I expect that when the Kilgray team recovers from the great efforts of hosting this year's excellent event there will be a follow-up announcement of what I have dubbed the memoQ Ménage à Trois edition, and those teams looking for an affordable entry solution to the industry's current best option for translation resource and project management in small- and medium-sized companies will surely celebrate.

Contact Kilgray for more details on this server solution or other excellent translation technology.

Dissecting SDL Trados Studio project files (SDLPPX) for translation with other tools

2012-05-19T12:03:00.000+02:00

When a translation request with an SDLPPX (SDL Trados Studio project file) shows up in my inbox, it's always a bit irritating. The current version 5 of memoQ can't do a thing with these project files, unlike those from Star Transit, where a nicely automated wizard sets up a memoQ project with everything I need except terminology. To translate the content (SDLXLIFF files) of an SDL project file, you have to take the thing apart.

Of course, if you own an SDL Trados Studio license, it's usually a simple matter to open the package with Trados and export the resources you need. But today that didn't work. An error message informed me that the PPT source file for one of the SDLXLIFF resources was missing. Indeed. It was sitting on an FTP server to which the PM had failed to give me the access data before the weekend. Looked like I was SOOL.

In the past, when I took these SDLPPX file apart manually to get at the components I wanted, my luck was mixed. These are just ZIP files, so if you take a project file named MyWonderfulSubcontractedJob.sdlppx and rename it MyWonderfulSubcontractedJob.zip you can unpack it with WinZip or other utilities. Inside the ZIP file, the structure will look something like this:

Inside an SDL Trados Studio project package with Source language German (DE) and target language English (UK)

Both the source and target language folders contain an SDLXLIFF file with the source content. But there's a catch. You must take the SDLXLIFF file from the target folder.

Here's an example of a translation segment from the SDLXLIFF in the source fiile:

<trans-unit id="4e4fc380-8fac-4570-942b-a4bf6c4a4c7f"><source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</source><seg-source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</seg-source></trans-unit>

Notice anything missing? There is no tag set for target content. This is essentially a monolingual file. When imported into memoQ it will show zero segments! A look at the same translation unit in the SDLXLIFF file out of the target language folders shows the difference (a bit more than just the target tags highlighted):

<trans-unit id="4e4fc380-8fac-4570-942b-a4bf6c4a4c7f"><source>Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</source><seg-source><mrk mtype="seg" mid="560">Die neue Maschinenrichtlinie</mrk></seg-source><target><mrk mtype="seg" mid="560" /></target><sdl:seg-defs><sdl:seg id="560" /></sdl:seg-defs></trans-unit>

This second SDLXLIFF file will import fine into other tools like memoQ using the XLIFF filter and allow you to translate without difficulty. I had not noticed this before, because in the past, if the SDLXLIFF file I imported had no segments, I just opened it in SDL Trados Studio, copied source to target and resaved it, and the resultant file imported without trouble and showed all segments. It took a missing original file that Studio demanded to save changes for me to look at matters a bit more closely.

I really do hope that a future version of memoQ will include a project import routine for these SDL projects similar to that for Star Transit projects. I am encountering SDLPPX files with increasing frequency due to the general lack of understanding interoperable workflows by those living in the Trados ghetto, and this added functionality in my primary tool would be a great help.

What should an SDL Trados Studio user do to ensure a less troublesome collaboration with those who use other tools? Don't send a damned project file. Send SDLXLIFF files and export the relevant TMs to TMX. If you are part of the 1% of Trados users who have a clue what to do with terminology, export the MultiTerm data, if you have any, to a delimited format of some kind. Most tools can take it from there, and you'll get back your finished SDLXLIFF files to review.

memoQfest 2012: practical outsourcing with memoQ desktop editions

2012-05-10T14:40:00.000+02:00

This week I'm in Budapest for Kilgray's memoQfest, the annual gathering of users and curious bystanders as well as CAT tool competitors who want to learn how to get the technology right.

This morning I gave a presentation on a topic which has become a regular part of my consulting with colleagues and clients... or better said, has been a part of my work with them from the beginning of my association with the language services industry. Every time I hear a translation agency or corporate translation consumer say that a qualified translator with the subject expertise needed cannot be used because he or she doesn't work with the "right" translation environment tool, I am saddened by the foolishness of that statement or the lack of understanding it reveals. In mature IT sectors interoperability and lossless data exchange have been common for decades, though sometimes one must be clever to get there. But the cottage industries for languages are, in many ways, stuck in the IT mentality of the early 1980s despite the fact that the actual technology today is more like Y2K. Gut Ding braucht Weil as the Germans say.

At a memoQ master class yesterday, Kilgray COO István Lengyel stated that "Interoperability is the art of compromise." True, but if you keep your wits about you and apply them, the compromises are usually not as awful as originally assumed.

memoQ is distinguished by the great ease with which it can manage data to be used in translation with nearly any other translation environment. SDL Trados Studio actually does a few things better, but overall, the utility and ease of use for memoQ is far greater in most cases. It's like a Swiss Army knife of translation integration, with one or more reasonable workflows for almost anything.

Today's talk was a 45 minute distillation of a workshop I usually deliver in half a day. It was a bit of a challenge to pare it down in the limited time available with last-minute translation projects having more content than planned and late nights talking to colleagues from around the world. For experienced users, most of what I had to say was "old hat"; some new memoQ users were surely overwhelmed by a flood of "new" information. I hope that each listener was able to leave the session with at least one useful idea to apply and improve their business. For those who fell asleep and couldn't take notes or anyone else who likes to play "guess the context" with lecture slides, here is a link to the slides from the talk. Questions are welcome on whatever appears mysterious; most of it is somewhere on this blog in great detail. Re-use is permitted for any morally acceptable purpose (with attribution please). When Kilgray puts the video of the talk online, I'll post it here so those slides make more sense.

memoQuickie: fixing source segmentation from abbreviations

2012-05-05T10:34:00.000+02:00

Do you see segmentation like the above in your projects? Annoying, right? This is easy to fix in memoQ.

Go to Tools > Options... > Default resources > Segmentation rules (in the row of icons):

Select the language (including sublanguage if relevant) and select the editable rule set, then click Edit.

On the tab for custom lists, add the offending abbreviations to the #abbr_short# list.

Re-import the document(s) on the Translations > Documents list of the Project home tab. The number of segments in my document was reduced from 197 to 134, because it was so laden with academic titles. Since I use versioning, any previously translated segments can be recovered quickly by Operations > X-Translate...

Sometimes I think that abbreviations I added aren't fixing the segmentation. In those cases I have usually switched to a sublanguage for which they were not entered.

Tracked changes in memoQ 5 & what more we need

2012-05-05T01:56:00.000+02:00

A recent round of e-mail with colleagues reminded me of how critical revision workflows are for many people and how too often we must resort to workarounds, because our translation environment tools don't quite do what we require of them. Tracking changes and comparing versions is necessary in many different situations, and no single method will cover all needs.

memoQ 5 offers the ability to track differences between minor versions in the translation window. What is a minor version? A major version is created when a version of a source text is imported. The first version of the source text imported will be version 1.0, the second will be 2.0 and so on. When various things occur with the translation of a source text version, such as an export, an update by importing a bilingual file, a change in the person working on the document or the creation of a status "snapshot", a minor version is created with sequential numbering after the decimal point: version 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. memoQ allows you to compare the current translated text to any previous minor version of the same source text version. Of course, in order to use versioning and tracked changes, versioning must be enabled for a project on the first page of the project setup wizard. It is currently not possible to enable versioning later, nor, unfortunately, is it possible to make versioning active as the default for new projects. I hope that memoQ will allow both of these options in the future.

There are three ways to activate the tracked changes view in memoQ. Two of these are equivalent: the menu option Translation > Toggle Track Changes > (options) and the corresponding icon in the memoQ toolbar with the same options:

Selecting the Custom option opens the following dialog:

The third way to activate tracked changes is undocumented as far as I know. It was shared with me just recently by a new user who has a brilliant knack for finding new ways of pushing memoQ to its limits. Pressing Ctrl+F5 with the cursor in a target segment begins tracking changes to that segment. Confirming the segment removes the tracking. Change tracking can be turned on for various individual segments this way, and the toggling of the feature is independent for each target segment. This can be useful if you are changing several segments but don't want to lose track of the original text until you are sure of the edited text. Here is an example of a minor version comparison with additional editing in Segment 2 using this undocumented mode for tracked changes:

Combining or splitting segments appear to erase the row histories for the segments affected.

The process of comparing minor versions will work well to review changes made by editors working externally to memoQ on bilingual files with other tools, for example. What is missing is an effective way to revert changes made to individual segments other than by retyping. Nor is it possible to revert entirely to a previous minor version (except by the workaround of saving a corresponding bilingual file as a backup and re-importing it).

There are also issues if changes between versions are to be exported for review in other tools, such as a word processor (Microsoft Word and others). While one could use the document comparison function in these or other tools to create a mark-up of changes, it would be nice if this were possible directly from memoQ (in the RTF table bilingual format as well).

Another idea shared by the same translator who discovered the use of the Ctrl+F5 key combination for toggling tracked changes is making changes stand out through the use of color in an export format that would support this. The color could be applied to the text which has changed or to the text which remains the same. (The latter case might be more appropriate if the changed text has significant formatting to be reviewed and the color would cause confusion.) Background highlight colors might also be used. In a similar vein, she suggested that this coloring of the target text might be used to indicate other things, such as 100% or context matches. Not only would this make it easier to focus on changes scattered throughout a large text, it would also be of great help in cases where one is not supposed to look at 100% matches and make changes to them. Proofreading is otherwise difficult. This is why clients often using color marking of some sort for text changes, but applying this to matches or version changes of a translation for the same source text would make this concept far more useful.

A few possible workarounds do come to mind for memoQ, but these only apply to a few situations. In the bilingual RTF table exports, one could sort by the status column, then change the background color of rows that are 100% or context matches, then re-sort the table by segment number. Or write a macro to do that. The bilingual DOC format could also have 100% matches marked in color using a macro with an appropriate regular expression to identify those segments. Such coloring options are available in Trados Workbench and are important to the revision workflows of some financial translators I know and probably many others. Similar ideas were shared with Kilgray about a year ago, and I do hope that the upcoming version 6 will offer us something of this sort as well as many other advancements in the management of translation versions.

Preparing MS Word text with a specific highlight color

2012-05-04T14:43:00.000+02:00

If the Catholic Church decides its needs an official backup for Jerome as the patron saint of translators (and in these times of tribulation, one cannot have enough divine help I suppose), Dave Turner of ASAP Traduction gets my vote. His CodeZapper macros for Microsoft Word have saved us so many thousands of hours of grief dealing with rogue tags in RTF and MS Word files, which screw up TM and termbase matches and make work very difficult, and other more recent contributions also offer useful support. He is the first one in my mind when I see a problem and think "There ought to be a macro for that!"

Dave's latest contribution was part of an old discussion about preparing texts for translation in which the text to translate was marked by a highlight color. As I remember the original discussion, there were several highlight colors, and only one was to be chosen for work. Usually, if text of a certain color is to be hidden or shown in preparing a file for translation with a CAT tool which filters out hidden text, I use the search and replace function in Microsoft Word. That does not work for selecting a highlight of a specific color. You need to use a macro for that, and I no longer have the VBA skills to handle that myself. I can adapt a working macro, but no way I can manage a good one from scratch unless I spend a few days or more re-learning the skills of a decade ago.

So I was very happy when I saw his answer to the problem in the memoQ yahoogroups forum, which I have reproduced here with just a minor change to reflect the usual highlighting I encounter:

Sub HideExceptYellow()
'
' Translation assistance macro
' by Dave Turner
' http://asap-traduction.com/

Dim rDcm As Range
ActiveDocument.Range.Font.Hidden = True
Set rDcm = ActiveDocument.Range
With rDcm.Find
.Text = ""
.Highlight = True
.Forward = False
While .Execute
If rDcm.HighlightColorIndex = wdYellow Then
rDcm.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
rDcm.Font.Hidden = False
rDcm.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseStart
rDcm.Start = ActiveDocument.Range.Start
End If
Wend
End With
Set rDcm = ActiveDocument.Range
Options.DefaultHighlightColorIndex = wdYellow
With rDcm.Find
.Text = ""
.Font.Hidden = False
.Forward = False
.Replacement.Highlight = True
.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End With
End Sub

In MS Word 2003 and earlier versions, the macro can be created under Tools > Macros > View Macros. Name the macro, then click the Create button to paste in the code. The Run button will execute an existing macro if it is selected.

In MS Word 2007/2010 the same functionality is accessed on the View ribbon with the Macros icon or Alt+F8.

To adapt this for another highlight color, just rename the macro and change the designation of the color (wdYellow). The macro can be adapted to deal with combinations of highlight colors as well, and similar methods can be used to deal with text colors, though these can be handled by the search and replace dialog.

Übersetzertreffen Berlin-Kreuzberg am 3. Mai

2012-05-01T21:15:00.000+02:00

Liebe Leute,

hier die Einladung für das nächste Übersetzertreffen am:

Donnerstag, 3. Mai 2012, ab 20.00 Uhr

Wir gehen noch einmal ins:

Max und Moritz

Oranienstraße 162

10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg

U-Bahn: Moritzplatz

www.maxundmoritzberlin.de

Diesmal sind wir allerdings nicht im abgelegenen Studierstübchen oben, sondern ordentlich im Ballsaal hinten, wie (fast) alle anderen auch (einfach geradeaus durch die Kneipe). Die Küche aus deutschen Landen ist in Ordnung, wenn auch etwas träge.

Bis Donnerstag!

Andreas Linke

Walled gardens

2012-05-01T20:27:00.000+02:00

Ashgrove walled garden, roadside view. Kilwinning, North Ayrshire, Scotland (from Roger Griffith)

In the beginning, online networks and platforms were largely separate, walled off from one another. In the California state university computing system that I remember from my youth in the 1970s, it was a big deal that the diverse campuses were linked and that certain operations were possible between the systems - truly useful stuff like directory searches for new versions of text-based Star Trek programs. When the first chat application was introduced and became popular, it was banned at the Los Angeles campus because it used too much bandwidth.

Later platforms like CompuServe, AOL and others I have long since forgotten - as well as many old corporate systems - had their own walled-off e-mail systems. Connections to the Internet eventually killed off most of these.

Today's business networking platforms such as LinkedIn and XING and social media such as Facebook also have private messaging systems that do not co-exist well with the wider world of Internet communication. Even with notifications set, forwarded messages are often difficult to recognize as important in the flood of spam these platforms typically generate. As a result, over the years a number of potentially interesting business prospects have slipped by because I didn't notice the private request for a quotation on XING. Or some colleague or other person feels insulted because months go by without a response to mail on the platform or to a "connection request" of some sort.

I don't worry about the lost business; my usual contact information is easy to find, and it is typically on those sites as well. Not everyone camps out on LinkedIn or Facebook 24/7; many have other commitments and ongoing business that make it impractical to "check in" with great frequency. I do see value in these platforms and use them to communicate with some friends and former coworkers, but I never do so expecting a quick response. If I want that I use real e-mail or pick up the phone.

The phone? Yes, indeed. Years ago I recall being attacked on a public portal by some troglodyte translator who was offended by my suggestion that the telephone system still has a role to play in business. But e-mail is not the reliable medium many believe it is, and after some of my old addresses (one in use for nearly 20 years) were used by impersonating spammers, my e-mail messages often landed in spam folders or disappeared into The Void. Despite its reach and apparent openness, the Internet is in many ways just another sort of walled garden, one rather neglected in parts and full of traps and hazards, and to get where we want or need to go, we must often engage with the wider world, the real world.

Twitterview: SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, DVX2 and PDF extraction

2012-04-26T03:09:00.000+02:00

When I began using Twitter somewhat hesitantly three years ago, I never expected that it would eventually prove to be one of the most useful social media tools for gathering information of professional value. Much of this is serendipitous; I really never know what will come floating down the twitstream or where some of the conversations in it will go. Like the direct chat I had with with a colleague in New Zealand about features she liked best in the two main CAT tools she uses, SDL Trados Studio and memoQ.

We both really appreciate the TM-driven segmentation in memoQ and the superior leverage this offers. But to my surprise, she expressed a preference for SDL Trados Studio, particularly for the quality of its PDF text extractions from electronically generated files. This is not a feature I make heavy use of in either tool, though I have used it more often lately in memoQ for alignments in the LiveDocs module and found it generally satisfactory. Most of my work involving PDF files is with scanned documents - there one has no choice but to use a good OCR tool like OmniPage or ABBYY FineReader.

So I was quite intrigued that the quality of PDF was "better" than from standalone tools. Especially because my experience is quite different. Further discussion (not shown in the graphic) revealed that what she actually meant was that the quality of the text extraction with the CAT tool usually beat the quality of text received from translation agencies who performed conversions. That is easy to explain, really. In my experience, most agencies are clueless about how to use conversion tools and too often use automated settings and save the results "with layout". This is very often utterly unsuited for work with translation environment tools or requires a lot of cleanup and code zapping.

For years I have recommended to agencies and colleagues that they spare themselves a lot of headaches by saving PDF conversions as plain text and adding any desired formatting later. Most people ignore that advice and suffer accordingly. So in a way, a CAT tool that does so encourages "best practice" for PDF translation for those files they are actually able to handle.

Encouraged by the Twitter exchange, I decided to do a few tests with files from recent projects. I took a PDF I had with various IFRS-related texts from EU publications. It appeared to extract quickly and cleanly in memoQ, giving me a translation grid full of nicely segmented text. SDL Trados Studio 2009 choked badly on it and extracted nothing. Her extraction in SDL Trados Studio 2011 caused a timeout with the project I was told, but the text itself was completely extracted and converted to DOCX format. This is useful, because unlike the extraction to plain text in memoQ, this offers the possibility to add or change some text formatting in the translation grid. Other extraction examples from SDL Trados Studio 2011 showed that text formatting was preserved.

A closer examination of the extracted texts revealed some problems with both the memoQ and Trados Studio extractions. The memoQ 5 PDF text extraction engine proved incapable of handling text in multiple columns properly. The paragraph order was all fouled up. The extraction with SDL Trados Studio had a great number of superfluous spaces. Whether it is possible to optimize this in the settings somehow I do not know. The results of all the extraction tests are downloadable here in a 6 MB ZIP file. I've included the SDL Trados Studio extraction saved to plain text as well for a better comparison of the text order and surplus spaces problems.

Overall, I am personally not very pleased with the results of the text extractions from PDF in either tool. The results from SDL Trados Studio are clearly better, and other examples that were shared made it clear that this tool works better than many an untrained PM with better PDF conversion software. This is certainly much better than solutions I see many translators using. But really, nothing beats good OCR software, an understanding of how to use it well and a proper workflow to get a good TM and target file better fit for most purposes.

*****

Google's blog software is acting up and deleting some comments that are supposed to be moderated, so if this happens to anyone, please let me know privately. Here's one that didn't make it through which sheds a bit more light on SDL's PDF extraction technology:

Paul Filkin: Interesting article Kevin. I would completely agree with you about how best to handle PDFs, but also see a place for a CAT tool to have a method for handling these files as well as they can.
Interestingly I downloaded your test files and gave them to our filter developer. The original PDF seems to contain very wide spaces (probably some special formatting settings). As the PDF converters are designed to replicate the design, multiple spaces are inserted to cope with this.
Not all files are like these so it's probably not a consistent problem for Studio... but using a dedicated OCR tool like ABBYY FineReader would clearly do a better job with any PDF.

*****

Update 2012-05-22: I met colleague Victor Dewsbery at a recent gathering in Berlin, and he told me about his tests with the recently introduced PDF import feature of Atril's Déjà Vu X2 translation environment. He kindly offered to share his results (available for download here) and wrote:

Here is the result of the PDF>DVX2>RTF>ZIP process for your monster EU PDF file. Comments on the process and the result:

The steps involved were: 1. import the file into DVX2 as a PDF file; 2. mark all segments and copy source to target; 3. export the file as if it were a translated file (it comes out as an RTF file). The RTF file is 20 MB in size and zips to 3 MB.

Steps 1 and 3 took a long time, and DVX2 claimed to be not responding. For step 1 I just left it and it eventually came up with the goods. Step 3 exported the RTF file perfectly, even though DVX2 claimed that the export had not finished. I was able to open the RTF file (it was locked, but I simply renamed it), and this is the version which I enclose. Half an hour later DVX2 had still not ended the export process (and had to be closed via the Task Manager), although the exported file was in fact perfectly OK. The procedure worked more smoothly with a couple of smaller PDF files. Atril is working on streamlining the process and ironing out the glitches in the process, especially the “not responding” messages.

The result actually looks very good to me. There are hardly any codes in the DVX2 project file (the import routine also integrates CodeZapper). I didn’t spot any mistakes in the sequence of the text. Indented sections with numbering seem to be formatted properly - i.e. with tabs and without any multiple spaces.

The top and bottom page boundaries in the exported file are too wide, so most pages run over and the document has over 900 pages instead of just under 500. Marking the whole document and dragging the header/footer spaces in Word seems to fix this fairly quickly.

I note that some headlines are made up of individual letters with spaces between them. This may be related to the German habit of using letter spacing (“Sperrschrift”) for emphasis as an alternative to bold type.

I found one instance where text was chopped up into a table on page 857 of the file.

There are occasional arbitrary jumps in type size and right/left page boundaries between sections.

On the strength of this sample, it would usually be OK to simply import the PDF file into DVX2, translate in the normal way, and then fix any formatting problems in the exported file.

Five favorite things about the CAT

2012-04-24T00:23:00.000+02:00

When I listen to colleagues talk about the tools they use, I find it interesting how diverse the points are that they emphasize when describing the advantages of their environments. I'm not surprised, really, because the needs of individuals vary a lot as do the projects they may encounter in different phases of their careers. And the limits of a tool itself influence the "advantages", of course.

So I sent off a few e-mails to some friends, asking what they felt the "top five" features of their choice of CAT tools are for their purposes. I'm still waiting for a few responses, but I'd like to share what I've heard so far. I'll add more as and when I get more feedback. Others are welcome to add their Top 5s in the comments.

OmegaT
The respondent here uses this tool exclusively and does a fine job of correcting me every time I put my foot in my mouth with a misstatement about the capabilities of the software. He wrote with his typical humility:

I don't think I'm the right person to do this. Mainly because OmegaT is the only tool I've used for the last nine years.

Favourite features:

It runs on Linux.

It does what it says on the box.

It *always* works. It doesn't hang or crash. I can't remember when it last did, if it ever did. Bugs are rare and when they do happen tend to concern secondary features that are still at the beta stage.

It's fast; almost everything is near-instantaneous. (An exception is the "Search files" function, though I don't use that much and I doubt many others do, either.)

"Upgrading" means downloading and unpacking, that's it.

Not very sexy, sorry. Like my '99 Mazda 626 wagon, it just gets the job done

Just gets the job done? Well, what more could one want? There are plenty of tools that often don't manage that. I've seen huge improvements in this environment in recent years, and there are certainly worse tools to start with. It is Open Source but worth taking seriously for professional work.

SDL Trados Studio
The respondent here is still using Studio 2009, so surely more notable features will be discovered after an upgrade to Studio 2011. But for his team of top-notch translators, the three he indicated are pretty persuasive:

AutoSuggest (which is apparently so good that Kilgray will implement it in the next memoQ version, a rare exception to emulation that more often runs the other way)

File format filters. (I have often used SDL filters to prepare content to translate in other environments)

Project package sharing. (This is useful in any environment which offers it, but there is a need for all vendors to get off their butts and support interoperable package standards.)

Déjà Vu
See Victor Dewsbery's comment below. DVX used to be my favorite tool, one whose innovations have still to be matched in some respects by any of the competition. Its visionary software architect is arguably one the greatest contributors ever to the development of user friendly CAT tools.I am not personally familiar with the current version of the software at the present time nor with the server solution which was finally released.

memoQ
I spend far too much time on my blog talking about my fave features of this tool, so I asked a few others to have their say. One said that the things she found most helpful were

PDF alignment (although it doesn't always work)

The infinitely customizable interface - fonts, colors, sizes of windows, placement of windows, horizontal/vertical split, etc.

Extensive [bilingual] export options (memoq bilingual, xliff, trados, two-column rtf)

Lean software - version 5.0.62 is under 26 MB download, even smaller than version 3.0.37 which was nearly 35. Compare this to the bloat of SDL - currently 338 MB if my research is correct.

"Duh" comments: very responsive support, frequent new releases and features, inexpensive

*******

Do you use one of these tools or another and want to share the features which help you most to be productive or which just put a big smile on your face? Have your say in the comments.

.

Spamalot: desperate translation agencies

2012-04-22T15:22:00.000+02:00

Soon after I started this blog in 2008 I found it necessary to take various measures to protect against spam comments. In the early days, the spam was a lot of the same that somehow makes its way to my e-mail inbox, usually real estate scams, offers of wondrous herbal mixtures to supersize various anatomical parts or God-knows-what in Chinese. Spam filters have become sophisticated enough to catch most of that now, so that the trash encountered most of the time now appears to have a bit more human intelligence behind it. That is, if you associate bottom-feeding translation agencies with human intelligence in some misguided way.

I have a definite impression that the competition in the race to the bottom for low prices and garbage quality has led some of these agencies to think they can improve their position in the global dog race by getting backlinks on popular translation blogs. This is done in comments on blog posts, sometimes as a link embedded in the rather vacuous text (as Rosetta once did to a New York agency rival's blog below) or in the link associated with the poster's name (as "Cassy" - surely not its real name - tried above on behalf of "LanguageTran"). What started out as the practice of a few sleazy Pakistani agencies years ago seems to have become routine for a number of UK and US bottom-feeders.

I've seen this happen on almost every translation blog I read. There are so many attempts made on my blog that I make it a point to check the name link on every comment that seems a bit "vacant", and a very large number get flushed to where they belong.

I'm not against comments from agency owners or personnel - quite the contrary. These people are a legitimate part of our business and have a lot to contribute to discussions - and many do. I love it when they or others have something interesting to say in a post discussion, particularly if they can point out an error on my part or add some useful point. But if the point of the visit is simply to post drivel in the hopes of getting a link to drive traffic to your agency's site or improve its search engine ranking, y'all can save yourselves the trouble because you will most likely not be getting through.

TM Follies

2012-04-21T18:36:00.002+02:00

A recent comment by Iwan Davies on Twitter revealing a reviewer's rather odd notions of the requirements imposed on translation by the use of a translation memory tool led me to reflect with a friend on some of the very strange and wrong ideas that persist in some minds with regard to such technology. In the case of the twitstream discussion, the reviewer's stupid notion that each segment in a translation must stand on its own without context provoked an interesting flurry of responses, ranging from the astute observation from @PaulAppleyard that "if you wanted to translate segments as 'standalone', then you would work in a random segment file, not a text that flows..." to some rather disturbing remarks from a few to the effect of "this is why I don't like to use such tools". Various people pointed out that modern translation environment tools such as SDL Trados Studio, OmegaT and memoQ make use of context in their translation memories to avoid the problems of more primitive systems which, in the hands of translating monkeys, too often result in matches being used in very inappropriate ways.

The list I could compile of wrong-headed ideas about TMs is a long one, and I would probably only capture ten percent of the foolishness on a lucky day. A few highlights in my memory include:

A statement by an otherwise respected colleague some years ago that translators must not sacrifice potential "leverage" by combining segments to make sense in the translation. This included cases where someone inserts
carriage
returns and line
breaks into the sentence to
make it fit in some odd space. In a source language like German, where word order is often very different than in a good English translation, this can quickly pollute a TM to the point of being worst than worthless. This in fact describes the real state of many "promiscuous" agency TMs that I have seen over the years. Fortunately, advanced features in modern translation memories, like memoQ's "TM-driven segmentation" encourage much better practice among smart service providers today.
The widespread notion that translation memory systems are only useful if one works on repetitive texts. I've got news for you: much of the repetitive stuff was outsourced to King Louie & Co. years ago. And yet I still find great value in working with good TMs. Why? A friend of mine summarized it nicely the other day when she talked about how she spent two hours researching a very obscure term for roadworks equipment in a minor European language: "The next time this comes up, I can find it right away and see the context." Indeed. I am amazed sometimes at the obscure technical terminology that comes out of my personal TM with its 12 year record of my work. Sometimes that amazement is even positive. An hour invested in researching a term and saving it in a TM (or much better: a proper termbase with metadata including domain´, source and examples of use) is probably several more hours saved over the next few years. At least.
The idea that a translation memory is a reliable source of terminology and obviates the need to create and maintain termbases or proper glossaries. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Particular offenders in this regard are agencies with their brothel-like practices of letting any number of translators screw the end customers' texts. Do a concordance search to find the right term in one of those TMs? Riiiiiiiiiight. Even agencies I've worked with for years who have made a real effort to keep TMs clean can't keep the terms in them on the straight and narrow. And using TMs to replace a real termbase, even a limited one, sacrifices the enormous potential benefits of automated terminology QA procedures offered by some modern translation environments.
King Louie & Co. as well as many other agencies in the race to the bottom of the quality barrel truly believe that once a good TM has been established by top translators, the second- or third-tier team can take over at lower cost and keep the customer happy. Well... at the moment, the lock on my Volvo's rear hatch is broken. I could get it fixed by a mechanic on Monday, or I could follow my neighbor's suggestion, and just hold it shut with a bungee cord. And the next time a tail light cover gets broken, I could just tape some red or yellow plastic film over it. Replace the hubcap that flew off when I hit that pothole? Naw. But sooner or later, people will notice the difference and draw their own conclusions. Will those be good for business? Can a jobbing student equipped with a good TM really produce the quality of legal translation you can rely on before the court? Trägt er auch 'nen gold'nen Ring, der Affe bleibt....

I have noted over the years, that most of the best clients never ask about translation memories or the tools related to them, even though a good number of them are aware of the technology and many of these use it. But these are the ones who understand that the monkeys who rely slavishly on CAT tools without the use of BAT* too often produce stale, stilted text unsuited for its communication purpose. At best. And all the king's machine translation engines won't change that.

Nonetheless, I believe there is great value for nearly all translators, even "creatives", in using advanced translation environment tools. But that value will not be in the same methods nor in the same features necessarily. Calls to "throw away your TMs" with the introduction of advanced alignment technologies like Kilgray's LiveDocs in memoQ, which allow final edited versions of past documents to be incorporated quickly when a new versions are to be translated, may be a bit premature, but they are often appropriate in my recent experience. And combinations of that with voice recognition technologies, term QA tools and other features offer a wealth of creative possibilities for taking the best and leaving the rest in our quest for better results and working conditions.

* brain-assisted translation

Kilgray survey until April 25th: ready, aim, respond!

2012-04-20T00:23:00.000+02:00

Kilgray is conducting a survey until April 25th, the results of which will be discussed at the conference in May. This is an opportunity for users of memoQ and their other products to say what's working and what's not and perhaps influence the future course.

It's a short survey and should take little time to answer. The first question asks three things they are doing right, the second one asks which three things are wrong and need to stop, and further questions ask your opinion on the importance of maintaining independence (in contrast to SDL Trados, Star Transit or Wordfast, for example, which are owned by language service resellers which compete with agency customers and freelancers for business) and what "big idea" you might like to see implemented.

On several occasions in past years, I have seen Kilgray respond quickly to clearly expressed user feedback, and I believe that this is still a reasonable expectation. So have your say to help make some good tools better!

April-Übersetzertreffen in Lehnitz

2012-04-17T23:33:00.000+02:00

Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

das nächste Übersetzertreffen steht an, und zwar am:

Donnerstag, 19. April 2012, ab 19.00 Uhr

Wir gehen nach der Pause im letzten Monat noch einmal ins:

Restaurant Kellari

Gutsplatz 1

16515 Lehnitz/Oranienburg

S-Bahn S1: Lehnitz

Bis Donnerstag!

Andreas Linke

Vorschau:

Das übernächste Übersetzertreffen findet wie üblich am dritten Donnerstag des Monats statt, nämlich am 17. Mai 2012.

Final checks in memoQ

2012-04-17T10:00:00.000+02:00

"Having to do a separate final check in Word is a major MemoQ disadvantage over the Word/Trados Workbench (and Wordfast Classic) WYSIWYG procedure. It might even make some of us abandon MemoQ."

I read that statement in a recent digest from the Yahoogroups memoQ forum with some puzzlement. What exactly does the author of those words mean?

There are a few arguments I can muster in favor of the necessity to do a final check in MS Word or another original format. The limitations of the spellchecker in memoQ is one of these. Even when the MS Word spellchecker is used, as I recall memoQ (in the versions where I noticed this problem) did not flag doubled words, and I have a bad habit of typing "and and" and the like.

The use of style guide and consistency-checking tools like PerfectIt! are other good reasons to do such external checks.

But when I do such things, I work on my second monitor and immediately incorporate changes in my memoQ project to keep the TM updated among other things. Also, the filters in memoQ enable me to examine the scope of some problems faster and with greater ease than multiple "Find" operations in a word processor or other software.

But if the person quoted meant simple ease of reading on the screen, I wonder if he has paid any attention to the optimal use of the memoQ translation preview. One could simply resize that pane after translation and read through a preview of the translation:

If a problem is found, clicking on the text will select it and cause the translation window (above the preview) to jump to the segment to be corrected. And of course this works for any format that yields a preview in memoQ, so you are not limited as you would be working with the Trados Workbench macros or Wordfast Classic in MS Word. Excel files, PowerPoint slides, HTML, ODT files and other formats enable you to work this way.

But another reason why I would hesitate strongly before regressing to the tools mentioned is that I would sacrifice the ability to do terminology checks with the QA module. (This is, of course, possible to a limited extent in TagEditor.) Or other QA checks which may be of interest. These features are severely underutilized, but they aren't hard to learn, and they offer considerable benefits to freelance translators in the competition for consistent formal quality.

Similar advantages are likely to be had from other recent versions of leading translation environment tools. Very often it pays to consider the points of difficulty we have with these and discuss them with other users, because often new and better ways of using them will come to light.

Another approach to OCR for translation

2012-04-16T13:12:00.000+02:00

OCR is often a touchy subject for translators. There is unfortunately too little expertise in this area, though the practice of converting scanned text for translation is now quite common. And recent developments in tools such as ABBYY FineReader have catered to the worst of the idiocy I have seen, starting processes automatically which are best executed manually with greater care.

Too many people rely on automatic settings for OCR conversion and save the result in a format (usually an MS Word or RTF file) which more or less preserves the look of the original. The result may look pretty to the ignorant eye, but when the translator begins work, a host of problems may arise. In CAT tools, there are usually innumerable superfluous tags (which sometimes even CodeZapper cannot clean up), even embedded in the middle of words, which prevents matching with TM and glossary entries. Kiss consistency and quality control features goodbye in such cases. In older versions of Trados, font changes and other format trashing are common. Disappearing text in ill-defined text boxes and column is often a problem, even for those who do not use translation environment tools.

For these reasons and others, I have long been an advocate of manual zone definition and (where necessary) the use of templates to achieve the best conversion results, and I usually save the results as naked text or, at most, preserving some font formatting (in which case further adjustments by mass selection are usually necessary to ensure that body text is, for example, consistently 10 point and not 9 point or 10.5 point in some spots due to image distortions).

If the result of a translation will be given to a graphic artist for subsequent layout, you do in fact perform a good deed by avoiding the "save with layout" options for your OCR text. A document with a straight text flow is much easier to import into the layout environment (such as InDesign). Of course, where such things are to be done, it is often best to try to get the content in that environment's format in the first place, though in such cases, certain clean-up (of hyphenation, kerning and column breaks, for example) is necessary to avoid problems and tag checks are essential after translation.

However, when you work with OCR texts, no matter how they are created for translation, some errors are almost inevitable. When the OCR engine has a spellchecker and "intelligent" correction features, some of these errors may even be plausible, just wrong, so beware! It is vital to have a copy of the original scanned document as a printout or perhaps on a second working screen for reference. I have followed this approach for years. But when I have a good conversion, I might translate happily for a number of pages before encountering a whiskey tango foxtrot moment in which I must consult the original to see what the text really says. This is a real problem for me in a multi-column patent with small type, and I often spent quite a bit of time looking in the scanned PDF for the relevant passage.

That was the case at least until one day, the light went on, and I realized that making a searchable PDF from the original scan could enable me to find the relevant text faster. If this searchable PDF is made from the same OCR process used to create the text to translate, then any errors will be the same, and by putting in the questionable text, you can go precisely to the right place in the document! My original post on this subject on another blog was primarily about making searchable PDFs for reference documents (to find terms and usage easily in documents not intended for translation), but I actually use this error-finding technique more often in my work lately.

memoQuickie: character controls

2012-04-13T13:58:00.002+02:00

memoQ has a few useful, though somewhat badly organized, functions in the Edit menu and on the toolbar which provide support for special characters or the visibility of non-printing character (to clean up extra spaces or verify the presence of a non-breaking space, for example).

To toggle the display of non-printing characters (spaces, etc.), click the corresponding icon in the toolbar:

Special characters are a bit disjointed. The omega icon on the toolbar offers a few useful options:

However, if you need other characters, such as mathematical operators, copyright or registered trademark symbols, etc., you must go to Edit > Insert Symbol...

This opens the familiar Windows dialog:

Personally, I think this should be re-organized with that dialog also accessible under the toolbar's omega icon. I like the selection offered there, but adopting the "see more" approach of Microsoft Word would be helpful:

Notifications in OTM

2012-04-11T15:19:00.000+02:00

For more than two years now, I have used the SaaS project management system from LSP.net (the Online Translation Manager or OTM) to handle my project tracking, quotation, delivery, archiving and invoicing workflows. Since early 2010 when the system was first made available to others beyond the group it had served for nearly a decade previously, it has developed rapidly into a unique, full-featured system for translation agency operations. For an individual translator like myself, it is arguably overkill, but its secure delivery features and excellent 24/7 client access to data via private archives as well as the very modest cost and the fact that I have no infrastructure to maintain are the decisive factors for me. I haven't seen anything else I can afford which takes my business as seriously as I do. Or more so, to tell the truth :-) As a matter of full disclosure, I will remind readers of what many already know: I do the English localization for the product, and I have a formal employment relationship with another member of LSP.net's corporate group. But all that is the consequence of liking and using the product and wanting to see it develop further, not the other way around.

The project mail system in OTM is excellent in most respects, but limited. As mentioned previously, it uses text only for reasons of data security to prevent the transmission of viruses via graphics of JavaScript in HTML mail. Some potential users have not adopted the solution for this reason, but I usually prefer straight text in my e-mail anyway unless I am doing a quick tutorial with screenshots, so I don't care. And it's nice to know that I can't accidentally infect my clients with an "innocent" e-mail. Another "limitation" of the system is that it is web-based, and for quite some time I was vaguely annoyed at having to log in to the system or refresh the Task Board view to see if new mail had arrived. It is not possible to query the mail system via POP or IMAP configurations.

As is so often the case, when we are annoyed by such shortcomings, the solution is usually there for those of us who will RTFM or simply ask the support personnel. One day when I was chatting with the system architect about new features for translation certificates being added, I mentioned my annoyance, and he kindly reminded me of the mail forwarding setting in the user profiles of the administration module. In just a few minutes, the usability of the system increased drastically for me as every incoming e-mail was forwarded to an account I monitor on my laptop and on my smartphone, so I no longer missed interesting inquiries or urgent requests because I had no time to log in to the web interface.

The relevant portion of the user profile is shown below. The critical setting is marked with a red arrow:

Both project mail that has been sorted using the project number and "orphaned" e-mail (no identifiable number present for assignment) are forwarded to the external e-mail address.

Source text versions in memoQ

2012-04-03T20:36:00.000+02:00

This feature of memoQ is slightly controversial at the moment, because the scope of functions available in the Translator Pro and PM versions differ.

The idea behind source file versioning in memoQ 5 is to save time and avoid possible problems of pretranslating from TM(s) which may spit out the wrong material. To use source versioning in memoQ, you must specify it on the first page of the Project Wizard:

In the Project Manager edition of memoQ, the source document versions will be shown; currently that is not the case in the Translator Pro edition, but the various versions of the source text that are imported are tracked in the project just the same:

When a new version of the document is received, it is brought into the project using either the Reimport or the Reimport as... command in the Translations view.

Clicking No in the dialog enables you to browse for the new version, which may have a different name or even a different file format. Here I replaced a DOCX with an ODT file. I could just as well have imported a PowerPoint file for content previously translated in an RTF file.

To use a previous major version as the translation reference for the new file, select Operations > X-translate... (instead of Pre-Translate..., which uses the translation memory), selecting the major version of the source file you want to use and the relevant options. (Each time you reimport the source file you create a "major version". A "minor version" is created when a version is imported, each time a target file is exported for that source file version, and when the version is "finalized" before another source file reimport is carried out.)

Here's the result:

Easy to filter out the old material and translate the new stuff. If you do a pretranslation (Operations > Pre-Translate...), the TM will supply you with other matches which were not exactly corresponding to the previous major version selected.

In the Project Manager version of memoQ, it is possible to select various versions and output comparison views of the differences:

Note the fuzzy matches which will come from a second step of pre-translation

I find the HTML comparison table for major versions very useful, and I think it would be helpful for legal translators and financial specialists who are sometimes bombarded with dozens of version changes on tight deadlines. Thus it would be a good thing for Kilgray to reconsider this history feature for the Translator Pro version as well.

Übersetzertreffen in Berlin-Kreuzberg (5. April)

2012-04-03T10:29:00.002+02:00

Liebe Leute,

hier die Einladung zum nächsten Übersetzertreffen am:

Donnerstag, 5. April 2012, ab 20.00 Uhr

Dieses Mal gehen wir in eine alte Kreuzberger Institution:

Max und Moritz

Oranienstraße 162

10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg

U-Bahn: Moritzplatz

www.maxundmoritzberlin.de

Das Berliner Wirtshaus feiert in diesem Jahr seinen 110. Geburtstag und wir sind dabei. Angeboten wird Küche aus deutschen Landen, darunter auch Vegetarisches.

Unser Tisch soll in der ersten Etage sein (Bibliothek, Treppe hoch, rechts, rechts).

Bis Donnerstag!

Andreas Linke

Just the facts: real rates and earnings of real translators

2012-04-02T16:31:00.000+02:00

For several years now, I have published excerpts on quantity and hourly rates from the rate surveys conducted by the German translators and interpreters association BDÜ. These data are quite extensive and available for purchase at a nominal fee. I have found them quite helpful in understanding the relationship of my rates to the qualified market in the German-speaking region of Europe.

Colleagues and clients in other parts of the world have some problems with these data. First of all, they are published in German only, and other than my small translated excerpts I do not believe that they are easily accessible to those without competence in that language. This is too bad, because the publication also contains data for the translation of some languages beside German to and from English, since German clients sometimes use English as the "gateway" language for large, multilingual projects. But another problem that is claimed with regard to the German data is that they are alleged not reflect the market in other western countries. Anecdotal evidence from qualified translators I know who live elsewhere often does not support this assertion, but it is heard often enough from members of the poverty cult and erstwhile bottomfeeding resellers of language services or those without the competence or confidence to package their services at sustainable rates.

Thus I welcomed the news that the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL) and Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) in the UK had published a new survey of rates and salaries for translators and interpreters. This 56 page document offers an excellent overview of the current demographics and economics of the markets in which members of those organizations are active. It also includes valuable information on business practices regarding job cancellation, rush work and more.

Altogether 1750 translators and interpreters responded to the survey conducted in 2011, providing an excellent statistical basis for the report. Over 80% of all respondents (male and female) were freelancers, with an average age of 46 years. The age distribution is normal, so the median age (not reported) is around the average. Fifty-four percent reported English as their native tongue or language of habitual use (I like that term!). Seventy-three percent of respondents were UK residents with the rest distributed in Continental Europe and the rest of the world. The median years of experience for freelance and salaried full-time translators was the same (13 years), with slight differences for interpreters (10 and 7 years respectively). One percent of respondents listed "no qualifications", the rest having some sort of relevant degree or certificate/exams.

The median gross income for translation and interpreting, a shockingly low GBP 22,000, was distributed fairly evenly over the range from less than GBP 5,000 per year (pin money for part-timing spouses) to GBP 75,000, with a sharp drop above that and only about 1% reporting a six-figure income. The names of these individuals are a closely guarded secret, and there is probably no truth to rumors that members of the Occupy movement will be setting up camp in their front gardens shortly. A strong majority (80%) reported incomes to be the same as last year or higher, contradicting general mutterings of "plunging rates". Apparently there is indeed a demand for quality despite the reluctance of some talking heads in the MT subsector to admit that such a concept applies to language services.

Over 80% of respondents work for translation brokers, with just under 50% setting their own rates and about 70% arriving at rates by negotiation. So much for the "powerlessness" that is so often cited by the poverty cult when discussing compensation for services.

The report contains a further wealth of data on business practices, CAT tool usage and discounts, voice recognition technology, output and specialties as well as a wealth of information on salaried positions, which might be very valuable for assessing one's own status or reasonable terms for working with others.

The section with translation data for the various language pairs is not as granular as the BDÜ report, which has five client categories. Here the data are simply divided into "direct" and "agency" clients. Comparing the data to those with which I am familiar from the BDÜ survey I note that at the present rates of exchange between the euro and the British pound, the figures are lower than I can usually accept, but they are not nearly as grim as many claim. If the pound rises again, some of these rates could look quite reasonable to those living elsewhere. In interpreting the data for planning in other markets, I might use a different theoretical rate for GBP as I now do for the Australian dollar, which has risen sharply in recent times.

In each category. the highest, lowest and most frequent rates are reported along with the number of respondents, the maximum and the median.

Members of the ITI and CIoL received confidential copies of this report a few weeks ago, and private translators forums have been abuzz with the discussion of its implications. There is indeed much to think about, and the modest price asked by the organizations for a copy is well worth the investment. Non-members can purchase the report for GBP 20.00 by telephoning the ITI office at +44 1908 325250 - payment can be made by debit or credit card over the phone. (Please note that credit cards and non-UK debit cards are subject to a 5% processing fee.)

TM-driven segmentation in memoQ

2012-04-02T15:37:00.002+02:00

One old feature of memoQ which continues to put cash in my pocket and make my work go faster is TM-driven segmentation. It is a pretranslation option. In theory, it combines and splits segments to improve matches from the TM; in reality it is biased toward combination, which is a good thing, as it emphasizes coherent text chunks.

I recently completed a translation for my least favorite end client of an agency partner I rather like. I suppose the folks at this end client company are nice enough; most probably do not beat their dogs or their children. But the texts they send for translation are abusive in the extreme: Microsoft Word files generated by some sort of program on a host system, with a bizarre mix of colors and font changes (both type and size), as well as lots of superfluous line breaks and carriage returns. I presume the thought for the latter is to avoid overlapping graphics, but since text wrap is turned on for the graphics anyway, I don't see the point. What I do see is horrible German sentences horribly mutilated into as many as five or six chunks, but at least two or three most of the time. A real crime.

And did I mention that segments break at the color and font changes even for sentences which appear intact? No CAT guru has ever been able to figure that one out.

One such horror revisited me last week, and I put it off as long as I could. Finally, I got to work at the point where the deadline was very much in doubt, and as an afterthought I did something I usually forget about: I pretranslated the file. I applied the "TM-driven segmentation feature", which is not considered in the file analysis. To my amazement, most of the file pretranslated with matches over 95%. When the remaining empty segments were examined and 4 or more parts joined to make a sentence, most were 99% matches. I had completely forgotten that I had translated this material a year ago. And the agency was unaware of that as well, because they rely on traditional Trados methods for file analysis and processing. What I thought was going to be a very hard slog through about 500 horrible segments turned out to be a bit of tag tweaking and a few sentences of updating the text.

This is part of what my agency friends who have gone over to memoQ mean when they talk about improved leverage over time from legacy resources.

To demonstrate how this works, I took a bit of text on "technical terminology" from Wikipedia and prepared it as a text with coherent sentences and also as a text with lots of superfluous carriage returns like one might find with text copied from a PDF file, for example:

I translated the file with intact sentences in memoQ, then ran an analysis using the Operations > Statistics... function:

The file's segments looked like this in memoQ:

Then the file was pretranslated using the TM-driven segmentation option:

This was the result:

The exclamation marks indicate missing tags, which may cause problems. In cases like this I usually insert them at the end and clean up the spacing in the output target file. And if I send a TMX to someone I clean the crap tags out of it with a search and replace operation in a text editor.

To satisfy my curiosity I then deleted the contents of the TM and made a new source file with a couple of broken segments:

Note the lesser quality of what will be going to the TM. This is the diet Trados users have enjoyed for a long time or, for that matter, what anyone who uses a CAT tool without the ability or knowledge to join segments may swallow routinely. After that was sent to the TM, I re-translated the file with intact sentences:

In Segment 1, a split was made, but no pretranslation was done of the fragment (even though it was in the TM as "101%"). In Segment 4 the sentence was not split but instead taken as a fuzzy match. The information pane at the right of the translation window shows the differences with the TM information:

I am not disturbed by the more restrained matching when splits are involved. I consider it a good thing, a feature which encourages users to wean themselves off the bad practice of "translating" text which has been impossibly chopped up. Smart translators use the functions for segment joining and splitting frequently in a good CAT tool, and with memoQ this habit is rewarded particularly.

memoQ workshop: terminology mining, QA and sharing with Trados

2012-03-22T09:21:00.002+01:00

On Monday, March 26th in the afternoon there will be a short workshop held in Berlin covering the basics of terminology extraction with memoQ 5 and the use of selected terminology for quality assurance (checking the compliance of the terms used). Finally, a few standard, adaptable methods for sharing the terminology acquired in memoQ with others using Trados MultiTerm or other tools will be presented.

The workshop is planned for 2 hours with some time for Q&A and follow-up afterward. Participation is limited to 5 persons. If you are interested in joining us next Monday or on another occasion for this workshop, contact me privately for further details.