About this blog Translator's Shack is a collection of links, news, reviews and opinions about translation technologies. It's edited and updated by Roberto Savelli, an English to Italian translator, project manager and company owner of Albatros Soluzioni Linguistiche, a team of English-Italian translators, which hosts and supports this blog.
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Kilgray’s progress report – some notes
I’m posting a few notes about the technical aspects that were mentioned during this presentation by Balázs Kis and Peter Reynolds.
Version 4.2 will be released during the memoQfest, probably today or tomorrow. Some significant new features are included, like the two-column export format (allowing reviewers to work on bilingual files without using a translation tool).
TM Repository is approaching its release date.
qTerm online terminology management system will be released later this year.
Interestingly, the concept of “empathy” was used to describe the approach to product support.
memoQ term bases
After the lunch break, the structure of memoQ term base entries was discussed. Angelika explained the import mappings for CSV files.
One trick for importing term bases in the fastest way possible: if you work frequently with one language pair and always use the same term base structure, export a sample term base from memoQ and delete all the content except the rows containing the headings. Then use this CSV template every time by pasting your contents under the column headings. When you have to import the resulting term base into memoQ, you will not need to do any mapping, because the column headings will be correctly accepted and configured by memoQ.
In the current version of memoQ, only 5-6 hard-coded fields are available. While this is probably enough for most translators, organizations that have terminology management systems feel the limitation of this setup. That’s why Kilgray will introduce a brand-new terminology system that will contain custom fields and complex structures.
Terminology plug-ins
memoQ 4.2 offers terminology plug-ins. One example is the EuroTermBank: if you start a term lookup (ctrl-P) , you can type a term search and specify to search the term not only in the normal memoQ term bases, but also in the online EuroTermBank database. Kilgray is part of the EuroTermBank consortium and can offer this feature to all its users for free. Needless to say, you need to be online in order to use this plug-in.
Two-column RTF export
Balázs Kis then proceeded to show the brand-new functionality called two-column RTF export. In the presentation, Balázs added a couple of comments to some segments, created a view that only included commented segments, and proceeded to export the view as a two-column RTF file. He then opened the resulting file in Word. The resulting file is a multi-column, editable file that a reviewer can use even if she does not have memoQ. The third column contains a color-coded value of the segment status. The general comment in the room was “this is better implemented than in Déja Vu”, “great!”. There was even some applause! You could really tell that this was a long-awaited feature.
CSV import of a TM
Use Olifant to open a TMX file, copy all rows (this is actually a great tip for converting a TMX file to a columnar format with just a couple of clicks) and paste to Excel. You can change column headings in Excel. From Excel you have to export as unicode .txt file if you want the procedure to work.
Advanced HTML import procedures
Balázs Kis from Kilgray explains how the standard HTML filter in memoQ will not make some HTML attributes editable (e.g. IMG titles). As a workaround, you can use Import file as… and use the XML import file to specify how every single tag should be treated, so any tag attribute can be made editable. Interestingly, the XML files is always used, behind the scenes, when you import an HTML file using the standard settings.
Bilingual formats managed by memoQ
.MBD
.DOC
.TTX (you need to pre-segment TTX files before importing them into memoQ. Unless the file is pre-processed this way, there’s no guarantee that it will work when opening the file in TagEditor). Here’s where the option is located in Trados:
.XLIFF
.SDLXLIFF, containing lots of Trados-specific metadata. You can process this type of file in memoQ, but some metadata (like segment status) will not be preserved.
.RTF multi-columnar export, allowing to use other tools or a word processor for reviewing the translation.
.Transit
Handoff packages
This feature allows the project manager to create an offline project and send handoff packages (containing all the resources needed for carrying out the project, i.e. term bases, translation memories, non-translatables, etc.). If you assign different files to different users, memoQ will create as many packages as the number of translators, and include the translator’s name in its file name. The packages can contain TMX files if the translators have to work offline, or a .TMI file, which is a reference to the server TM, for server-based projects.
TMX
A short comparison between the contents of TMX data coming from different translation tools (Trados 2007, Studio, memoQ).
TMX can contain tool-specific information (additional fields, segment status, segment context, alignment penalty, etc.) that’s not easily imported into other tools.
If a TMX import does not work, look at the language identifiers first.
A memoQ TMX file contains TM-level (project. client, etc.) and segment-level (project etc., but also changeID, client, corrected, aligned, context)metadata.
The information entered into the User and meta-information fields is case-sensitive, so this can lead to data duplication.
For the moment, the meta-information fields for each new project is limited to username, project ID, domain, client, subject.
Since the user ID is overwritten when a new user changes a field, a workaround is to use the “subject” (or another) field to specify the name of the original translator.
Trados has both creation ID and change ID fields. memoQ only has the change ID field, so when you import from Trados, the change ID from Trados will be imported and the creation ID will be lost.
Trados Studio includes context information in its TMX exports, but these are in form of hashes (a long string of digits), and do not contain the actual context strings like memoQ does. As a consequence, context information cannot be imported into memoQ from Trados.
The memoQ TM import settings
The field Process TRADOS TMX for best results in memoQ should be used if both the TM and the translatable files are in Trados format.
Import <ut> as memoQ tag: this allows support for legacy TMs. “UT” means “Unknown tag” here.
For Trados versions up to 2007, it’s very important to apply the penalties. Otherwise the statistics will treat segments that are almost identical except for punctuation, tags, and formatting, as identical.
If Use context is selected, you should not use Allow multiple translations. Two identical segments with different context will both be saved to the TM.
Olifant
Angelika showed us some quick methods for doing maintenance on TMX files using Olifant. Delete duplicate and inconsistent segments.
It’s probably best to re-create a TM from scratch after the edits, rather to import back into the original memoQ TM.
Import of a Trados TM into memoQ
In order to map the Trados fields to the corresponding memoQ fields, a search & replace is done in the TMX file, using a text editor. The values contained between quotes in the <prop type> fields are replaced by the corresponding hardcoded field names for memoQ.
If the search&replace is too complex, it’s probably better to export from CSV in Olifant and import the CSV into memoQ, where fields mappings can be set up during the pre-import procedure.
Based on the participants’ inputs, here are some of the issues that users face when migrating their resources to memoQ from other tools.
- Loss of metadata
- Loss of tags
- TM files too big for import
- Moving TMs from one server to another
Moving term bases
 TMbuilder is a small tool that makes building up TM export/import files as straight-forward as possible. You can use it to batch-import several files in Excel (2003 or 2007) or tab-delimited format and build a Trados-compatible or TMX 1.4b TMX file with a couple of mouse clicks. Here are some more details about the features:
- Accepts two input formats: tab-delimited text files and MS Excel spreadsheets
– Creates output files in two file formats: Translator’s Workbench 7.x/8.x (TXT) and the Translation Memory eXchange (TMX)
– Works on multiple input files and offers a merging feature – there might be just one import file
– Allows the user to specify standard TM fields, like: source and target ISO flags, segment descriptions and author name
– Removes additional quotes often created by MS Excel when saving the file to the Text form
– Works with standard encodings: Unicode and UTF-8
– Rapid file creation: milliseconds for .txt and seconds for .xls input files
The application is free for non-commercial use and can be distributed as a standalone executable program. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.
TMbuilder – the easiest Translation Memory export creator
 There are some recurring terms in software localization which do not seem to have a well-established Italian translation, even if their meaning is very clear and they should be treated as 1-to-1 correspondences.
One of them is “system tray”, a commonly-used term that refers to a “portion of the taskbar that displays icons for system and program features (…)”, according to Wikipedia.
On the same Wikipedia page, we learn that
The notification area is commonly referred to as the system tray, which Microsoft states is wrong, although the term is sometimes used in Microsoft documentation, articles, and software descriptions.
What this means is that the term “system tray” should be avoided in English documentation that refers to Microsoft operating systems. If found while translating, you may want to warn the author to change it to “notification area”.
If we take a look at Microsoft’s own glossaries, here are the results for system tray. The term is not displayed in the blue “Microsoft Terminology Database” area, indicating that it may not be an official Microsoft term. The in-context results displayed in the orange area contain several inconsistencies. The Italian translation that seems to be used in the newest products (Windows 7, Vista, Server 2008) seems to be “area di notifica”.
A quick search for notification area reveals that this term is also translated as “area di notifica” and that this is an official Microsoft term (contained in the Microsoft Terminology Database).
Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
 XLIFF Translator is a free (MIT license) Windows desktop application for translating XLIFF files. XLIFF is a standard XML format for translation.
Changelog for this version:
- Support for opening single XLIFF files
- Wide range of XLIFF files passing test suite
- Japanese localization finished.
From: Felix Blog
Wordfast Pro 2.3 is out. It’s available for Windows only for the moment. Here’s the changelog:
New Features:
- Wordfast Aligner™ BETA**
- MIF, PDF, and TTX support
- Machine Translation Integration
- MS Office Spellchecker option
- TM Administration Module**
- User-Defined Segmentation
Improvements:
- Autopropagation now has orange color coding
- Added placeable shortcuts
- Allow for full connection string to be entered when defining a Remote TM connection
- Added Concordance search on Target
- Added shortcut for Confirm/Unconfirm Segment
- Copy source / target glossary terms options added
- Memory used by Wordfast can now be adjusted for opening larger files
- Ability to confirm and unconfirm multiple segments has been added
- Added Norwegian Bokmal support and spellcheckers
- Added Toggle between capitalization option and shortcut
- Added Ctrl+H in addition to Crtl+F as a find/replace shortcut
- Removed marking segments as unconfirmed when clicking on another segment
- Pressing Ctrl+Tab copies individual word from source to target
- Warning added when user copies all source to target
- Right-click in editor options updated
**Feature is not present in the free demo version.Available with the purchase of a license only
Wordfast Pro website
Yesterday Kilgray released version 4.0 of their translation environment memoQ. To download and test it, you can use this link (update: see below for new link). Here are some links and snippets containing some further information about the new version:
memoQ 4: Interview with István Lengyel on the Localization, Localisation blog.
The following are edited excerpts from the memoQ mailing list on Yahoo Groups. I’m sure the users who submitted them originally won’t mind if I publish them here:
- Brand new editor, with smaller inline tags display, view hidden spaces, drag & drop.
- The new editor fixes the scrolling issue existing on 64 bits Windows editions for 3.x
- Named undo list (like in Microsoft Word)
- Real-time spellchecking (errors underlined with red squiggle like in Word/Firefox/Thunderbird)
- Unified "Resource console" to manage all resources
- On top of TM/TB, autotranslatables, ignore lists, etc. (basically all project settings) are now also treated as resources
- All resources can be shared and/or imported/exported
- Easy multilingual project management thanks to a handful of new features (handoff export/import, new stats available, etc.)
- Handoff import/export relies on open standards for better interoperability
- Improved QA with less "noise" (false positives)
- Revamped interface – referred to as the Dashboard, new icons and more modern feel
- Resolve QA errors – different interface allowing you to hide warnings/errors
- External view similar to the one found Déjà Vu will not appear in 4.0 but will be ready in 2nd quarter of 2010
- Post-translation analysis feature, which Kilgray considers this a major breakthrough
- If you bought the software between 1 Sept 2008 and 1 Feb 2009, you need to pay an upgrade fee to be eligible for memoQ 4. This relates both to freelancers and corporate users.
Regarding the Server version, it will be available in about two weeks. The developers are ironing out some details in the installer.
2009-02-05 UPDATE:
A new 4.0 build is now available at http://kilgray.com/memoq/memoQSetup.4.0.16.exe. In this build we have fixed about 30 issues, focusing on the more annoying problems you have been reporting since Monday. In particular, there are improvements in the following areas:
– Migration of legacy settings
– Pre-translation
– memoQ 3.6 an 4.0 in parallel
– Extra tags in DOC/RTF import
– Stability while working in the editor
– Joining and splitting
This version also has the AutoUpdate module enabled again, which means that memoQ will be able to update automatically from this build to the next one, 4.0.17, when that is out. Download and enjoy!
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