memoQ 4.5: Making editing life easier with LiveDocs

It's been a rather busy past few weeks with work, dog trials, bad colds and getting consigned to the scrapheap of relationship history. So I allowed the most important event of recent weeks (after the revelation of the latest Google technology, naturally) to pass without comment, even without trying it myself. I am referring, of course, to the release of memoQ 4.5. Today, however, I read the following fascinating comments from Guus Visser, an EN/ES > NL translator, in the Yahoogroups memoQ list, which spurred me into evaluation action:

"I just wanted to report that I tried a new way of reviewing yesterday, using LiveDocs. The scope was pretty limited (a simple 2 page MS Word file), so I may have missed some problems here and there, but overall the experience was great!

In this case I had a very bad translation that needed to be reworked into good Dutch. I hate reworking translations in Word (single source file, single target file, syncing, searching, comparing, grrrrrr), so I imported a LiveDocs alignment pair of the source and target file and then added the source file to my project. It almost felt like translating the file with constant fuzzy matches. The only thing I had to do is change or overwrite the automatic LiveDocs match and go to the next segment. It all felt very natural, and I could even benefit from repetition changes in my review. Great!"

When asked how the process differed from previous efforts, he explained further:

"Without LiveDocs... you would ... align and create a new TM with these matches (another extra step) ... with LiveDocs, I simply add the files and they are available for matching in my project immediately. No need to export, create a TM, import etc."

Now I was aware of this new feature in memoQ version 4.5, and the application is fairly obvious, but this got me to thinking about the potential convenience of dealing with bad editing situations or updated source documents where no TM is available for previous translations. As Guus mentioned (at some length in text not quoted), this approach is also less onerous than correcting bad bilingual files when there are repetitions to deal with.

So I was inspired to install memoQ 4.5 at last and start working with it. I created a test scenario using some files I had edited recently, and I was delighted by the quality of the automated alignment and the ease of use of the new LiveDocs feature. As is typical of me, I also failed to read the help instructions, and I found that the module was so well designed and intuitive that it didn't matter. I look forward to testing other aspects of LiveDocs, like the monolingual corpora features!