Finding a file in some random memoQ project

One of the nice things about new users of any software is that they approach it without the ingrained habits of routine users of that software and often ask useful questions that the rest of us might not have considered. One such question was posed today by Aloísio Ferreira, a translation student at FCSH/NOVA in Lisbon. He thought it would be useful if there were a function to help translators or project managers locate a file in some memoQ project no longer remembered. I can see the point of this; on a number of occasions in the past, I have clicked around through various projects trying to do just such a thing, and I had not considered any better way of achieving my objective.

As many of you already know, the Windows Explorer is able in some cases to index and search the content of files, and I knew that the majorVersionStore.info files in the project subfolders for memoQ included the names of files. So I went through the steps needed to ensure that the file contents would be indexed as plain text. All quite unnecessary it turned out.

Feeling very sophisticated after updating which folders were to be indexed, I tested the idea in the folder window for my memoQ projects, which contains all the subfolders with the name of each project. As you can see from the results in the screenshot above, the projects also contain placeholder files (0 bytes in size) with the names of the files imported to translate.

So the short answer to Aloísio's question is that no new feature programming is needed in memoQ; simply go to your projects folder and do a search with part of the filename (use quotes if there are spaces in the name, as in the example above), and the path for the files in the results will show you which projects have what you ate looking for.

From there you can use part of the project name in the filter field of the memoQ Dashboard to find the project you need, open it and work with the file in some way.

And of course once you have opened the project, if there are a lot of files in the list of Project home > Translations, there is another filter you can use to zero in on the one(s) you want quickly:

This screenshot is from a project with two target languages, created by the useful PM Edition of memoQ

What good is all this? It depends. I usually go on a hunt like this if I am given a new version of some file I translated years ago, and I can't remember where it is to use the X-translate feature so the pretranslation will use and lock any unchanged blocks of text from the old version. This can also be used (indirectly) to figure out which heavy resources (attached to the old project) may be useful for other work. I'm sure you can come up with half a dozen reasons of your own if you think about it.

Yahoogroups is dead. Check out groups.io and the migrated memoQ peer support!

A few weeks ago I saw a notice that Yahoo is taking down its old groups facility, which, back in the day, was like a jazzier version of the old listserves. At the beginning of my career as a commercial translator, I found the translation-related groups there to be enormously helpful, and I met many colleagues who were mentors to me and remain friends to this day. Unfortunately, some years ago, Yahoo reorganized the interface of the groups feature so that I often could not figure out how to use it any more, so aside from occasionally peeking at mailed digests of the content in half a dozen groups, I haven't participated actively in many years.

So I really wasn't sad to learn that YahooGroups are about to be axed. However, the need for better organized sites of this kind has hardly gone away. Although for many organizations and interests, Facebook has come to dominate group communications, Facebook sucks like a Kremlin vacuum cleaner from Hell when it comes to managing content for user advice and Help. Even users who are not lazy find it difficult to search for solutions already posted, so one tends to see the same help requests every week, sometimes the same issue more than once in a day. The archives of a good listserve are usually much better sources of help.

So I was pleased to hear that the YahooGroup for memoQ peer-to-peer support had migrated to a new platform at https://groups.io/g/memoQ/. And I hope other good CAT tool support groups do the same (feel free to post any such links in the comments).

Even if Facebook were not the cesspit of fake news, political and social manipulation that threatens the stability of so many countries around the world as well as the physical safety of everyone (live streaming mass slaughter isn't my idea of fun on a Saturday night, but then I am a bit old-fashioned), it is unlikely that it will ever become a good platform for the kind of technical information sharing among professional peers that we need. YahooGroups met that need once, and I think that these new incarnations on Groups.io may do a better job with less (or no?) trashy ad spam.

If you are a memoQ user, I encourage you to join the new group if you were not already on the old YahooGroups platform. (If you were, you have probably already been migrated by the helpful moderators.) Contribute your expertise, and ask the questions that need asking and answering for all of us to move forward with the technical challenges of the tools we use.