This is the 500th blog post published on Translation Tribulations and a minor milestone of sorts. After some delay, I have released the first electronic edition of memoQ 6 in Quick Steps, a guide compiled from my collection of instructions and tutorials which I use for training and consulting. It contains over 190 pages of tips and insights for beginning and experienced users of the memoQ desktop editions.
Online distribution is being handled through Lulu.com initially until I decide a better way. Those who forward proof of purchase of this release to me will receive updates of the electronic edition for a year. The translation environment tool memoQ has evolved rapidly in the four years I have tested and worked with it, and I'll be adding and updating modules appropriately as the software and methods of working with it improve.
Some of the content in the book is taken from the memoQuickie tutorials on this blog, some of it has been shared only with clients and a few colleagues until now, and other material has not been published previously.
A print edition is in the works and will be released in time for memoQfest USA early next year after the book is updated to reflect new developments and services.
Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteJust downloading it now. Look good!
ReplyDeleteMichael
Hi Kevin,
ReplyDeleteGreat news about your book! I look forward to reading it.
In view of the frequent changes Kilgray has made to memoQ translator pro, it might be best to stick to an e-book format that (presumably) can be updated easily every few months, say. A printed version is likely to start getting outdated quickly, don't you think? I actually much prefer printed matter myself, but an electronic format seems predestined for this kind of material.
Regards
Carl
Thank you, everyone! A note to purchasers: if you have not forwarded your purchase record to memoQuickies [at] lossner.net to register for updates, please remember to do so. I have about a third of the records so far. I have found another distributor to handle the e-mail matters more smoothly and am considering that alternative channel.
ReplyDelete@Carl: The print version would be POD for exactly the reason you cite. One of my collaborators suggested doing it as a loose-leaf to make substitution of new content or the inclusion of additional notes easier, but I have not seen an acceptable production service for that yet.
At the very least I'll be doing spiral-bound volumes as support materials for selected workshops I do and perhaps making these available for others who want to use them this way. An A4 spiral lies flat on the table and the white space on the pages allows plenty of room for adding notes from a class or from your own discoveries - and it doesn't take up much space on the desk.
If I ever switch to memoQ, first thing I'd do is buy this book. By the way, the cover is remarkable.
ReplyDeleteThe cover was a contribution by an engineer named János Szabó who has quite a talent for such things. I would have had quite a boring, generic text cover, and then I was shown that bit of art and I was hooked. Now I have a problem: I have a lot of material that didn't really fit in this book that I plan to publish in another way, and it'll be hard to come up with something that nice again! I'm working on a volume for interoperability for a workshop I want to teach next year, and the best I've come up with is a big ball of mating earthworms.
ReplyDelete>> LanaJoseph@Interpreting Services November 15, 2012 8:33 AM
ReplyDelete>> I have read the memoQ 6 in Quick Steps but it is not much helping the newbies.
I'm sorry to hear that you are apparently disappointed, Lana. Would you be kind enough to tell me more specifically what you expected? There are quite a number of excellent guides for absolute beginners, including those who have never used a CAT tool. The "Quick Start" manual and webinars (and recordings of these, available free) from Kilgray are very good, and even though it's based on memoQ 4, the free tutorial video on Jost Zetzsche's Translator Training site tells one just about all the basics needed to get started and translate simple documents.
Unfortunately, for many people, things get murkier after that. A very large part of MemoQ 6 in Quick Steps is based on actual questions from friends, colleagues and clients who simply got lost trying to do simple things like fix the segmentation so that names like "Dr. Hoffmann" don't get split into to parts or export a TMX file for an agency that wants it with a delivery. If I were a new user, I would probably go nuts trying to read the book from cover to cover; a lot would make sense and appear useful, other stuff would just seem bizarre and pointless. Why do you need to know about how to do a Star Transit project in memoQ? You don't of course - until you're short of work and someone asks you to translate something with Star Transit and you want the job and don't want to screw it up :-) Think of it like a specialist dictionary of sorts. I have a lovely little welding dictionary. I've probably only looked up five obscure words in it over the past decade while translating repair or manufacturing instructions. I don't need the rest of the words in it (I hope). But it has paid for itself five times over....
You'll pardon me please for having removed the original comment with its backlink to an interpreting agency in the UK. For quite some time this blog has been targeted by Russians, Pakistanis, Pakistanis or others with questionable English in the UK, etc. trying to post spam comments or get links to improve their Google rankings. This surely does not apply to you, but there is no obvious connection between the name you have used and the agency to which you linked, so as a matter of caution I have taken this measure. Please pardon me if I have misunderstood your intention :-)
@Lana: I forgot to add that these and many other help resources for beginners as well as advanced users are listed on page 6 ("Help resources"). The fourteen online sources of help cited there with live hyperlinks are often very helpful to me when I need to find information about some feature I've forgotten or I want to see how others approach some thorny problem.
ReplyDeleteThis is interesting, but as for now, I must rely on bookboon dot com, for they offer their ebooks for free!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link, Ingeborg - looks like there may be some interesting subject matter texts there for my specialties. Couldn't find anything useful about memoQ, however :-)
ReplyDelete