Last night from 6:00 to 9:30 I enjoyed a "memoQ&A Evening" at the Porto Bagel Café as a reward for surviving the long bus ride to Porto/Gaia from Évora to attend the JABA Partner Summit. About 25 local colleagues attended to hear my not-as-short-as-promised presentation and discuss approaches to memoQ and other translation technologies as our working tools. The evening was part of the Translators in Residence initiative and a good start to my second visit to the area after my whirlwind tour last month to investigate venues for teaching events. Many thanks to the sponsors. the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters and Chip7 of Évora for providing the funding and tools (an excellent LCD projector - thank you, Carlos!) to do this.
I very much appreciate IAPTI's commitment to the professional education and continuing development of my good colleagues in Portugal, particularly in difficult economic times when many findit difficult to attend translators' events in faraway places. The evening was free for all attendees, who only had to pay for whatever they drank (great coffee - I had my usual galão) and ate (the best bagels in Portugal!).
After an initial hour of snacks, coffee and chat, the evening began with a discussion of the game-changing implications of speech recognition technologies for our working lives. Not only is it now possible for colleagues to use high-quality speech recognition on desktop computer and laptops in languages such as Hungarian and Portuguese, which are not currently supported by Dragon NaturallySpeaking (using, for example, the integrated recognition tools in the Mac Yosemite OS, as demonstrated with SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in Lisbon the day that SDL conquered Portuguese translation), smartphones are part of the game now too. Since picking up an older iPhone model (4S) for a few hundred euros about a month ago, I have had excellent results testing it with English, German, Russian and Portuguese and e-mailing texts to myself with just a few taps on the phone's screen. Once transferred as an e-mail, the text is then aligned in a CAT tool such as memoQ and subjected to tagging, QA and other procedures of the usual virtual translation working environments.
The use of memoQ and other CAT tools for single-language original authoring and text revision was also discussed. This flexible workflow extends the relevance of translation environment tools well beyond the usual limits within which translators and translation companies live and operate and offers interesting prospects for collaboration and re-use of creative resources. This topic willalso be covered next week in a lecture and workshop at Universidade de Évora and in an eCPD webinar on June 2, 2015.
Interoperability is another important topic for translators; I discussed different ways in which I use SDL Trados Studio and other tools to prepare projects to work in memoQ and vice versa as well as mz highly profitable use of SDL Multiterm to enhance customer loyalty and my professional image with this terminology management ssystem's excellent output management features.
Other tips and tricks in the memoQ&A included the untapped potential of LiveDocs, tracked changes and row histories in memoQ, dealing with embedded objects, graphics and transcription, PDF 3-ways and new tricks for nasty and/or illegible image PDFs, versioning and a concept for transforming translation memory concordancing into something much, much more useful and less prone to errors in editing and translation.
Copies of the slides from the evening's presentation are available here. It is, however, merely a palimpsest of the evening.
Many thanks also to colleague and translation tools teacher Felix do Carmo for kindly chauffeuring me around town and for the interesting tour of the training and production facilities at his company, TIPS.
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