Beware the document Reimport trap in memoQ!

In between sneezes and hot shots of gingered lime tea I saw the Skype icon on my Windows task bar change to indicate a message. A distress call from a financial translator friend who had just received a new version of the Q3 report she was translating. memoQ has excellent version management features, which include a document-based pretranslation (X-Translate), which allows one to use a current or previous version of a translation to identify unchanged sections which have already been translated when the client sends a new version. This avoids potential confusion with undesired matches coming out of any ofd many translation memories or LiveDocs corpora which might be attached to a project.

This time, however, memoQ seemed to be getting weird on her, with error messages referring to ZIP archives and password protection. Her customer's file was not password protected, and as far as she knew, there was no ZIP archive anywhere in sight. She was dealing with "ordinary Word files". I have no idea what those are, but I hear about them often enough, and that is often where the trouble starts.

Last July I was teaching a week-long introductory course to memoQ in Lisbon, and when I wanted to show the course participants how this X-Translate feature worked, everyone ran into unexpected problems. When it was first introduced in memoQ, I noticed that the updates would work in any format. A translation which starts out as a script in a word processing file might later be updated as a set of presentation slides, and memoQ's document-based pretranslation did an excellent job of enabling me to focus quickly on the new material. It still does, but since the early days, some advocate of unintelligent programming decided that the filter used for the Reimport function to bring in the updated source text should assume that the source format was unchanged from the previous version rather than simply offer an appropriate filter for the current format. One must specify the filter to be used for an updated version if this assumption is not correct (as I also explained in my book New Beginnings with memoQ shortly after noticing this).

I can probably guess why this was done. With certain filters, the filter to use is not obvious from the extension (the multilingual delimited text filter, for example, if it is needed), or there may be a custom configuration of an "obvious" filter needed. In these cases, the assumption of using the last filter settings makes a lot of sense. However, if there is a change of format, where it is clear that the new filter should not apply, then some action should be taken other than a virtual assault on the user with mysterious error messages.

In the case of my financial translator friend, the update came as a DOC file, where the original had been DOCX. Geeks who have nothing better to learn with their time might know that DOCX files are actually renamed ZIP files, so at least the confusing error message above was "truthful" in a sense.

I see this sort of "switch hitting" with Microsoft Word file formats of various generations or changes from RTF to DOC or DOCX rather often. But in the case of importing new document versions, these changes mean trouble for memoQ if the user does not notice the difference, and given that the majority of working translators I have encountered who use Windows operating systems never fix the default system setting which hides the extensions of known file extensions, the chances that your average mortal wordworker will figure out this problem is just about zilch.

Armed with new insight into the problem, my friend was able to import the new document version successfully by specifying the appropriate filter manually and then use X-Translate to get her previous translation applied to sections of source text which had not changed (so that inappropriate 100% matches from a TM or LiveDocs corpus could be avoided). But for the future, I hope that Kilgray will apply a little more intelligent logic to the selection of filters for the document Reimport function of memoQ.

Proofreading LiveDocs bilinguals, recycling versions in memoQ

(These tests were performed with memoQ 2013 R2 but should, in principle, work the same in any version of memoQ 6.0 or later.)

I really like memoQ's versioning features, and I use the X-Translate function fairly often when a document I'm translating has been updated or a new version comes sometime later. However, I don't keep documents in my projects forever. I use "container projects" for particular clients or subject domains so that I don't have to keep reattaching the same translation memories, terminologies and LiveDocs corpora and various light resources (non-translatables, autocorrect lists, segmentation rules, etc.) all the time. These can get rather full, so I send my old translations off to a LiveDocs corpus after a while. And then if a new version of a document shows up, well... I'm sort of out of luck if I want to use the X-Translate function with the previous version.

Or so I thought. And then a friend rang me and asked how she can export a LiveDocs alignment she did to an RTF bilingual file to make it more convenient to proofread in Microsoft Word and pass on to one of her partners with tracked changes. With that the answer to both problems was clear.

Select the corpus and the file in it to export:

Click Export and choose a location in which to save the MQXLZ file:

In the Translations window of any memoQ project with the correct source and target language settings, select Import and choose your MQXLZ file:

After the file exported from LiveDocs has been imported as a translation file, it can serve as "version 1" for a new file version to be translated using the Reimport document and X-translate features. It does not matter that the file types are different. A bilingual RTF file can also be exported for external correction and commentary.

Here is an example of an exported bilingual RTF file with changes tracked. The changes do not have to be accepted before the bilingual file is re-imported to update the translation using the Import command.

Here is the updated translation:

Changed are marked with blue arrows. Only text changes were implemented in this case, no format changes such as italic text, because the XLIFF file does not support WYSIWYG text formatting. (MQXLZ is a Kilgray-renamed ZIP-package with XLIFF and a chocolate surprise inside.)

Now I've got a new version of my text to translate in a DOCX file. I use the Reimport document function, answer No to the dialog so I can select the new version at a different location:

I'm curious what the differences from the original text are, so I use the History/reports command in the Translations window to find that out:

Then using Operations > X-Translate in the working window, followed by pretranslation to get the changed "exact matches" (like "Aussehen und Gewicht" above) and the fuzzy matches, I end up with this:

If you make it a point to store your important versions in a LiveDocs corpus, this procedure will allow you to recover your archived texts and re-use them for more controlled, reference-based translation. It would be nice, of course, if some day Kilgray would enable specific LiveDocs files to be used as the basis of a reference translation, perhaps even scanning a corpus or a set of corpora to identify the best-matching document or documents. It would also be nice if bilinguals stored in LiveDocs could be exported to other formats and perhaps even be updated with something like an exported bilingual RTF. However, those bilinguals can simply be imported directly to a LiveDocs corpus as new documents, and any corrections made to a document in the Translations list can be sent back to LiveDocs using the relevant command in the Translations window.

Translating SDL Trados Studio SDLXLIFF files & more in memoQ!

My latest demonstration video actually covers a number of memoQ features so that I would have an excuse to create this video index:

Time  Description
0:32  Importing the first SDLXLIFF file to memoQ
1:12  Exporting the finished translation
1:27  Viewing the translation in SDL Trados Studio 2009
1:40  Re-importing the edited translation for a TM update
3:24  Saving the translation in a LiveDocs corpus for later reference
3:55  Importing a new version of the text in an SDLXLIFF source file
4:25  Comparing source text versions
5:55  Document-based pretranslation ("X-Translate")
7:11  Examining a "warning" for forgotten tags
7:46  Results of the second translation in SDL Trados Studio

That is the sort of thing I was talking about in a recent blog post about new approaches for online instruction. Many times I have wished for just such an index for long webinars or even much shorter reference videos like this one.

This tutorial was inspired by a Skype chat with a colleague in the US a few days ago. She uses memoQ but works with a number of others who use various versions of SDL Trados Studio, and there were some questions about about how one might deal with TM updates after a translation as well as the inevitable new versions that legal and financial translators often encounter. 

I have also noticed that quite a number of people are not up to date on SDLXLIFF compatibility with memoQ; this video also shows that former issues with preserving segment status have been taken care of, and everything now works well.

What is not obvious in the video is that one can also change the segmentation of the SDLXLIFF in memoQ; this happens only in the memoQ environment to allow better translation and more sensible translation memory content, and when the SDLXLIFF file is exported from memoQ, the original segmentation from Trados is preserved in the Trados environment.

Also not shown in the video is how I imported a third version of the source text, this time as a Microsoft Word file, not an SDLXLIFF. The document-based pre-translation (X-Translate) worked perfectly, and the target file was exported in the proper format (DOCX).

There are, of course, many other ways one could handle a "project" like this, but the procedure shown is not unlike what I sometimes do in projects myself.

********

I apologize for the quirky click animation in this tutorial; Camstudio had some problems I have never encountered before, and I'll have to get to the bottom of that if I keep using that tool. Otherwise, the video quality is probably the best I have achieved so far, and I would like to thank the friend who revealed the "secret" of better quality video for YouTube.