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Unlike machine translation, computer-assisted translation increases the consistency of human translations, resulting in what is perceived as better quality by the readers.
memoQ helps the translator quickly find all translations of any expression ever used. The translation memory becomes the translator’s primary reference, together with the term base. The translation memory stores sentences, the term base stores expressions.
memoQ increases the quality through a variety of features:
memoQ enables you to standardize the corporate terminology and extend it beyond the capabilities of human memory. Through its sophisticated file filters it enables translators to process a wide variety of file formats without damaging the original layout.
Corporate terminology is key to brand awareness. memoQ allows the management of multilingual corporate terminology and offers you tools to ensure the correct use of terminology.
Terminology facilitates communication. memoQ facilitates the use and creation of terminology.
Everything else is ready. You’re just waiting for the translation.
In the traditional model, translation occurs after the original documents are signed off for translation, it is done by a single person, and it’s followed by a careful review. If you start translation before the documents are final, change management is an issue. If it’s done by several translators, consistency is less than ideal. If there is no review, there is nobody to fine-tune the translation and resolve translation mistakes. And review cannot start before the translation ends because the reviewer needs the files.
In the traditional model, the translator goes through the text, researches all terminology, and translates each and every sentence one by one.
Using memoQ you can cut a lot of the waiting time. When the translator is working, all reference information is available at her fingertips. Similar sentences and terminology candidates are automatically identified and displayed, repetitive parts of the text and sentences that have been translated before are automatically translated, and potential conflicts can be quickly identified and resolved. Unlike the other frequently used TMS systems, memoQ can even automatically leverage previous translation files that haven’t been aligned, so you can eliminate the time and money traditionally spent on a pre-translation alignment.
If the source text changes, the already translated parts can be automatically inserted using a single command. The magnitude of change can be easily estimated.
If the translator works in a team, consistency does not get hurt. One translator may be able to see what the others have translated and translate in accordance with the others’ suggestions. Only one translator researches terminology - the others can just use it. If you don’t have the time to wait until a single translator translates a long user manual, deploy a memoQ server and have it translated in a fraction of the time by a team of translators.
Translation and review can also happen at the same time on the same set of documents. Reviewers may be able to see what the translators have translated and suggest changes.
Using memoQ, there is no need to stick with the traditional model of translation. Everything can happen simultaneously. It may cost you a little more if you have to pay for translations that don’t get into the final document, but in many cases it’s nothing compared to the opportunity cost of shipping a product only a few days later.
You would like to cut the time to deliver your products to another market. You probably work with one source language and multiple target countries. memoQ can speed this process up very significantly, but before you rely on memoQ, make sure your product is ready for the international market:
memoQ can’t help you with internationalization, but once the product is internationalized, getting it localized is a breeze. If you need internationalization advice, turn to our experts.
With memoQ you can do localization while you’re still working on the documents. Due to memoQ’s principle of reproducibility, you can enable continuous workflows in many languages simultaneously.
memoQ supports translation teams to an extent never seen before, enabling several people dispersed at different locations to translate as if they were just one person, by providing them access to the others’ work in real time. It also supports simultaneous translation and review, effectively making it possible to translate thousands of pages in good quality within a day.
memoQ also makes multilingual project management easy. Using its simple concepts of online projects or handoff/delivery packages, you have full control over what has been sent out for translation, what’s the progress and what has been delivered.
Using the reports you have full control over time and costs and you can easily identify threats to the success of your project. Using memoQ technology, Compuware has reduced the release time of their localized Changepoint documentation by six weeks.
Translation is traditionally seen as a one-person endeavor. The use of words, the style is unique to each and every translator. Good translators, however, can impersonate the style of other translators, and can be very good team players. Incorporating the latest developments in translation research and top-notch server technology, memoQ provides the world’s best environment for collaborative translation.
Collaborative translation - also known as team translation - is a process where several people work on the same document or set of documents at the same time. The trick is that these people are usually not sitting in one room. Knowing what to communicate and what not to communicate is the real challenge. memoQ, as a collaborative environment, takes over the burden of this communication and provides translators with all reference materials that enable them to work as if they were working together in the same room, seeing each other’s monitors. Every sentence the translators translate, every expression they add to the term base becomes available for the others in the team in real time. Using the built-in instant messenger and knowledge bases they can talk to each other without having to leave memoQ. Certain people may have more rights than the others: terminologists may be able to approve certain term suggestions before they become visible to the others. memoQ’s collaborative features also encompass simultaneous review.
Collaborative translation can cut delivery times very significantly and enables the quick translation of large amounts of text without sacrificing quality. Projects like Jaguar Land Rover’s entire website have been translated within a week using memoQ technology, in top quality.
You can cut your translation costs significantly. Are you sending out all your translations to translators or translation companies, paying full price for every document, no matter that’s an update or not? You can save a significant amount of money by not having the same sentences translated twice.
Translation memories store your translated sentences and their target language counterparts. If you maintain translation memories, you can automatically apply the already translated content to your new documents. In an organization, content reuse is a very common phenomenon. You don’t write all your materials from scratch, you take a document and amend it. And this is why translation memory saves you translation costs. You simply don’t need to pay for what you don’t need to translate.
memoQ, just like any other translation tool, offers you to quantify the savings. If you have a translation memory and a set of document, memoQ can tell you how much you save. The amount of similarity between an already translated sentence and a sentence to be translated is expressed in a percentage, also known as the match rate.
memoQ’s ContexTM (101%) matches never need to be checked, unless the translation was wrong. Unfortunately no translation tool can do anything against mistranslations. And be careful, all translation tools replicate these mistranslations. Therefore you probably need a careful review. It is sure that a ContexTM match is the correct translation in the given context because you only get a ContexTM match if not only the sentences in the source document and the translation memory are the same but also the contexts of these sentences. It’s a common practice not to pay for ContexTM matches - and with updated documents, the majority of your sentences will be ContexTM matches.
100% matches are matches where the sentence is the same as what has been translated before but the context isn’t identical. It may be worth checking these matches whether they are the right translations in the right context. Translation companies and translators often give you a large discount on this. 95-99% matches are sentences with minor differences: formatting, numbers, spaces or punctuation marks. These are also easy to change, so you can expect a discount.
Anything below 95% is a so-called fuzzy match, where the words may differ: there may be insertions, deletions, or changes to the text. Companies and translators differ in their approach here. Some give you a discount, others not. Optimize for a balance between price and quality.
memoQ also exhibits a special feature called homogeneity. With homogeneity you can understand how repetitive is a document. It gives you an indication of what matches your translators will get only translating the document in memoQ, without a translation memory. If you need to translate three similar manuals, for example, you may not want to pay full price for each and every word. In this case, homogeneity can be a good basis to argue. Please do not abuse homogeneity - it’s still the translator producing the translations you don’t want them to charge for.
Another area that can give you better rates is a well-defined term base that you develop and provide your translation vendors with. If you specify the terms to use, terminology research time shrinks and productivity grows.
In reality, your translation budget depends more on how you optimize your processes than how much you pay for a word. If you have regularly updated contents, optimizing your translation workflow and translation memory maintenance may also be a good idea. You can read more about this in our collaterals.
Whenever you think about translation budgets, think about the big picture and the following items:
There are certain basic elements like content reuse that everyone managing a translation budget should be aware of, but with careful planning you can cut your translation costs very significantly.
If you are working for a big company where the responsibility for translations lies with several departments and people, think about cross-leveraging. Centralizing your translation memories is a good idea, and this can be reached using a memoQ server. But if you want to have even more control over your translation memories and you cannot force other departments to follow your advice and convert to memoQ, consider implementing the TM Repository. Kilgray’s TM Repository is a unique tool for facilitating translation management, increasing leverage and providing tools-agnostic workflows. It’s one level above the server technologies of different vendors, feeding the individual translation memory servers or clients with the most relevant data.
You work for a company with international presence and need to deliver content in many languages at once. Certain content goes into one language but does not go into another. You have different workflows for the different content types. And you can also have different types of vendors, some that take your technology advice, others that don’t.
memoQ is the world’s most interoperable tool, meaning that you can take control without forcing any solution on your vendors. Control does not have to be strict and restricting. It can be gentle - your translation vendors are not companies and people who work against you. They work for you. Still, they can make mistakes and you want to know about these mistakes on time.
memoQ allows for several translation scenarios. In all scenarios you can prepare packages for your vendors and keep track of these packages. All your activities can be reflected in the up-to-date reports.
The online translation scenario provides you with the most control. You can see the progress of translation and review in real time. You can reassign documents with a single click. You can see who’s behind the deadline and who has not started working at any point in time. Online translation scenarios, however, require your vendors to work in memoQ. Use this scenario with those vendors that enjoy the benefits of working together. They can use their own memoQ licenses or you can lend them your memoQ licenses.
The offline translation scenario enables your vendors to work in memoQ, other translation tools or even in Microsoft Word. You can send them handoff packages and they send you back delivery packages. Handoffs and deliveries are automatically tracked, if there are changes in the project setup, memoQ warns you to create the packages. You receive packages from your vendors and you are up-to-date with all deliveries. You don’t have to keep track of the packages you receive, just feed them into memoQ, it does the job for you. After every translation stage (translation, review stages, etc.) you get a package so you always see what documents are in what stage. You can ask your vendors to send you packages more often, with partial deliveries or single files too. In these cases you can keep track of partial deliveries and spot out those vendors who do not send you anything - maybe they haven’t even started working?
memoQ provides you with a number of detailed progress reports, and it is the only tool to include post-translation analysis, a feature that enables you to understand how much the individual translators have translated in reality if they worked on a collaborative project. memoQ’s post-translation analysis is the industry’s de facto business model of collaborative translation. Without post-translation analysis, you can either choose speed or savings. With post-translation analysis, you can choose both.
You can also configure memoQ to send automatic notification e-mails to you and everybody else in the project when needed.
You are working in the field of translation and localization and perform lots of repetitive tasks. You would like to automate tasks as repetitive tasks are not very inspiring.
memoQ operates with the concept of projects, and whatever operation you can perform on a document, you can perform on the entire project too. The project can consist of as many documents as you want, and using the powerful concept of views, for the purpose of translation you can merge documents together, split them into pieces, take the repeated parts out into another document or just extract certain segments that comply with your pre-configured criteria. So if this automation means that you would like to perform operations on several documents at a time, you can do that very easily from even the cheapest edition of memoQ. One of the most frequently performed operations is a global find and replace.
If this is not enough and you want to automate tasks programmatically, memoQ’s enterprise edition is the right choice for you. In the enterprise edition, you can also perform all operations programmatically. You can take files and create an online project for them. You can pre-translate, perform statistics, export and import bilingual files and query the progress. This can be very useful if you have a continuous workflow with many small files.
Using memoQ enterprise, you can also connect to commercially available project management tools such as Beetext Flow, Plunet Business Manager or XTRF.
Leverage is the amount of information you can extract from your translation resources such as translation memories, term bases and so on. You are probably a user of another translation tool and would like to increase the leverage you get from that.
memoQ contains the following tools that increase leverage:
All these algorithms increase the amount of information you leverage using memoQ. memoQ’s leveraging capabilities are equal or better to other translation tools. All memoQ’s leverage-increasing features are available in local and online translation as well.
You use a number of systems and you would like translation to be integrated to one or more of these. Or you would like to introduce a system for project management and integrate it with memoQ.
memoQ enterprise offers a well-documented software development kit (Web Service API) that you can use to integrate memoQ with your systems. SNL Financial integrated memoQ with their standard document workflow solution, Languagewire and Translate Media linked memoQ to their project management tools.
In the enterprise edition, you can also perform all operations in memoQ programmatically. You can take files and create an online project for them. You can pre-translate, perform statistics, export and import bilingual files and query the progress. You can manage users, translation memories, term bases. You can integrate the machine translation engine of your choice. memoQ’s SDK is based on web service APIs.
Using memoQ enterprise, you can also connect to commercially available project management tools such as Plunet Business Manager or XTRF, or commercially available machine translation tools such as Google MT, Asia Online, Microsoft Translator, SYSTRAN Enterprise Server, iTranslate4.eu, and LetsMT.
You have a website that you would like to translate into multiple languages. Can memoQ do that for you?
It can, but not out of the box - there is no translation tool that can do this for you out of the box. Your localization success depends on internationalization.
Modern websites are not plain HTML anymore. They contain embedded program code in multiple languages such as Javascript or PHP. Many websites are driven by commercial, open-source or custom-made content management systems that make content publishing easier. Certain websites are easy to translate, others are hard. There are a couple of questions to ask before you embark on localization:
As you can see, website localization is a complex task and requires careful planning. If you need assistance, talk to our experts.
Once your website is translatable, memoQ will support the translation process.
Absolutely. memoQ has been acclaimed by many translating professionals due to its ease of use.
We at Kilgray work hard to make your user experience seamless. Already in the specification phase of new versions, we deliver user manuals and create the controls. We monitor feedback from users and try to make complex things simple. We pay attention to the entire user experience and make sure that we don’t overcomplicate the task with unnecessary features.
Kilgray’s software design concepts are all there to avoid creeping featurism. First, we never implement features that take more than three sentences to explain to a user who knows memoQ. Second, when we listen to our users, we don’t just listen to their feature requests - we ask about the business problems. Often there is already a solution to a problem, and it’s a matter of documentation to highlight it. Third, we attempt to use self-explaining texts on the screen. Fourth, if a potential buyer has a need expressed in a feature request, we only incorporate that into the tool if it fits our philosophy and adds value for other users. In all cases where this relates to the fact that they are using legacy systems, we provide a solution through the memoQ enterprise SDK.
Kilgray’s translation tools minimize the need for technical knowledge - we don’t expect you to be experts in the different file formats -, eliminate unnecessary clicks, provide support for accessibility features and leverage the power of the team: they allow power users to help novice users. We are always working to expand functionality in a consistent way. For example, memoQ 4 introduces the concept of resources, but all resources are managed the same way as translation memories are. You only have to learn the process once.
Freelance translators report that they can translate their first document after learning memoQ for less than an hour. A good understanding of the tool requires one or two days of training. The amount of time it takes to start using memoQ does not depend on whether you have previous experience with other translation tools. Quick start guide and training videos are available from this website.
Language service providers and enterprises report that their project managers get up and running in about three hours, and their translators need up to 45 minutes of training to start translating a document. Using the memoQ server you can set up the projects for your translators and they can retrieve the project (documents, translation memories, term bases and other resources) using a single command, eliminating the need to learn project configuration.
Former users of other translation tools report that they reach the same level of productivity with memoQ within a week. memoQ provides a lot of help during the migration process, and you don’t have to re-learn keyboard shortcuts either.
To start using the tool, the best place to begin with is the quick start guide, a training video or a free beginner’s webinar. To advance your knowledge about memoQ, look for ways how you could improve your translation experience and find the solutions in the help, or join an advanced webinar or a memoQ training. If you have questions, you can ask our support services or the community support.
There are two specialized types of translation tools: user assistance and user interface localization tools. User assistance localization tools help you in the translation of documents, manuals, help files, etc. User interface localization tools are very specialized tools developed to facilitate the shipment of multilingual software. User interface localization tools are not really translation-oriented and require a good deal of specialist knowledge. memoQ is primarily a user assistance localization tool but offers solutions for simple software localization as well.
Due to its customizability, memoQ is ideal for translating XML-based or Excel data. It can bind the context to XML attributes such as resource names, retrieving the right translation for each and every occurrence of the same string. If your software localization process includes the translation of XML-based data, memoQ is the right tool for you.
memoQ also features a visual editor for RESX tools. You see the strings where they appear. Though suitable for translation, the RESX localization plugin does not remember the resizing of text boxes. If you need visual localization and your software product is complex, a visual user interface localization tool may be better for you for this task. If your software strings are stored in a text file with some sort of a tagging (such as ‘string name’=’string text’), you need to use a parser to specify what to translate and what not to translate. Tagger tools such as Preptags do this job for you, and you can import and translate the tagged files in memoQ.
memoQ’s quality assurance functionality provides great support during software localization. You can make sure that you use the right encoding, that you translate terms consistently, that you don’t translate the same string differently unless there’s a need for that, and that you don’t exceed a certain character limit.
memoQ does not check the uniqueness of hotkeys. If you need checks like these, you need to use a user interface localization tool. You also need to use user interface localization tools if you want to localize EXE, DLL, RC or other binary files.
Bear in mind that user interface localization tools cannot handle translation of documentation efficiently. Given the different objectives of UA and UI localization tools, user interface localization has an engineering approach, whereas user assistance localization tools like memoQ support efficient translation processes. User interface localization tools get the technical aspects of localization right. They don’t usually support collaboration and are complicated for translators at first sight. They usually support the TMX standard so you can import the translatable strings into memoQ, translate them in memoQ and export them back into the user interface localization tool.
memoQ itself is localized into all languages using memoQ enterprise edition. Progress can be monitored real-time, and translators can automatically retrieve the changed strings. In an environment where new builds are out very frequently, with only very few strings changed, such an environment can save a lot of project management time.
memoQ is an ideal tool for translating software help and documentation. Help and documentation is either written in plain text or HTML form or using a help authoring tool. Help authoring tools usually store the information in XML format, and memoQ can perfectly handle these files using its highly configurable XML filter.
memoQ is known to work well with Help and Manual, AuthorIT, Adobe Robohelp, Madcap Flare and other help authoring tool files. memoQ can also process HHK and HHC files (table of content and index files) included in CHM help files. Before translating a CHM file, you need to extract the contents using Windows’ built-in tools such as hh.exe. For more information please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_help. Given that several employees of Kilgray worked on software localization prior to working with Kilgray, memoQ offers significant enhancements over other tools when it comes to software help and manual localization.
You’re working in an environment where on-time delivery of translated content is crucial. You would like to get progress reports in real time. You would like to identify potential threats to the success of your project and prevent these from happening. You would like to eliminate bottlenecks.
memoQ is a full-featured translation management system that spans the linguistic workflow from document importing to document exporting. It can provide real-time information on project progress in the translation or review phases and easy-to-understand reports on the actual delivery quantity. It does not encompass content authoring or post-production once the text is final (such as DTP or web design). memoQ does track the delivery of your vendors and gives all information to prepare quotes and cost calculations, but does not keep track of financial information. We believe that instead of trying to be everything to everybody, we have to get things right. Too many monolithic TMS systems have failed in the past. We need to deliver a system that works and that can be integrated with other tools to offer the same functionality. memoQ enterprise is an extensible system. There are a number of project and financial management systems out there that provide great functionality in the business area, and quite a few of them are integrated with memoQ. If you are looking for a complete translation management system, look into the integrations with Plunet Business Manager, Beetext Flow or XTRF. If you want to have full control over your deliveries, you can use the online projects offered by the memoQ server technology. Using the online project you can set up a single project for all your translators and reviewers, with one or more target languages, keep track of the progress in real time and get email notifications on workflow steps. Translators work in the environment and every single segment they confirm will be updated on your server too. No matter what happens, you always have the latest version of the project at hand. With proper backup procedures you never have to be afraid of data loss, it cannot happen that they translate the wrong documents or use the wrong translation memories or term bases, and you can see if they haven’t started working and this threatens on-time project delivery. In emergency situations you can reassign documents to other vendors. If your translators prefer not to be connected to the internet all the time, you can use synchronization to exchange updates.
You don’t need to work with translators directly. memoQ is one of the very few translation management systems that allow your language service providers to manage their part of the workflow but leaves you in control. You can set up offline workflows for certain languages where your vendors don’t translate your documents on your server but rather send you delivery packages. If you give up a bit of control - the ability to see the progress in absolutely real time -, they can continue using their own established workflows and you can continue working with them. They can send you delivery packages that contain partial deliveries too, so if you need to update the progress report every day, just ask them to send you a partial delivery every day and import it into your project - seamlessly.
memoQ is the only translation tool in the market that supports complete tool interoperability. We built the tool bottom-up. Translators will be happy with the tool as they get the industry’s best functionality and best performance for server-based working. But you don’t have to get rid of a translator if she does not want to work with memoQ. Likewise, most translation companies will be happy to adopt the memoQ workflow because it’s a flexible tool. However, you don’t have to force them into buying and using expensive systems. It’s their choice what tool they use to produce the packages for you. With memoQ it is easier, of course, but it’s also quite straightforward with other tools. Vendors that consider you an important client will take your technology advice. If you find yourself in a situation that you depend on a vendor more than the vendor depends on you, and you cannot get them to use your technology, you still can work with them and stay in control.
memoQ is the only translation tool in the market that supports complete tool interoperability. We built the tool bottom-up. Translators will be happy with the tool as they get the industry’s best functionality and best performance for server-based working. But you don’t have to get rid of a translator if she does not want to work with memoQ. Likewise, most translation companies will be happy to adopt the memoQ workflow because it’s a flexible tool. However, you don’t have to force them into buying and using expensive systems. It’s their choice what tool they use to produce the packages for you.
In the offline workflows, memoQ works with handoff and delivery packages that allow you to prepare the project for your translation vendors using memoQ’s advanced technology and send them out for translation. As these translation packages are zipped containers of open standard resources, your translators and translation vendors can deliver the translated delivery packages without having to use memoQ. The documents are stored in XLIFF format - an OASIS standard that all modern translation tools support (in the case of older versions of SDL Trados, you may need to copy the source to the target before sending the packages out) -, the translation memories are in TMX, and the term bases are in CSV. The light resources such as auto-translatables, QA settings, etc. are stored in memoQ’s own XML-based resource format, as there are no standards for these - however, these are linguistically trivial items and the quality of the translation does not suffer without them.
If your vendor uses memoQ, they can import the package with a single command, and memoQ sets up the environment for them just the way you wanted. If they subcontract work to other vendors, they can also create handoff packages if they use memoQ project management edition which is a part of the memoQ server packages. Delivery happens with a click of a button. If your vendor doesn’t use memoQ, they can translate the XLIFF file using the TMX translation memory and the CSV term base after unzipping the package. Delivery is easy - they can reconstruct the delivery package manually following the appropriate guide.
No matter what XLIFF-compliant tool your vendors used, your deliveries will appear in the memoQ project as if they would come from memoQ. memoQ can also create incremental hand-off packages when your initial configuration changes. Such packages are created when new files are assigned to vendors, when documents are taken away from vendors, or when the document assignment changes. The incremental packages follow the same format as the initial packages and can be imported into memoQ or can be translated outside memoQ.
memoQ is also a champion of open bilingual document formats, one of them being the bilingual DOC/RTF format, a de facto industry standard introduced but no longer supported by SDL Trados. This is crucial if you want to work with translators who don’t want to work in a translation tool, or if you would like efficient client review in Microsoft Word. You can export any document (yes, HTML, FrameMaker, XML, etc. included) into bilingual DOC/RTF which consists of segments: the target segments are written in normal text, the source segments are also there in hidden text. Changes made to the bilingual DOC/RTF are automatically reflected in memoQ when you reimport the document. Bilingual DOC/RTF is a sensitive format. Unfortunately Microsoft Word does not preserve the integrity of tags that indicate to memoQ where a segment starts, where the translation starts and where a segment ends. This can be easily compromised in Microsoft Word. If you don’t care about the layout, only the text, you can also export into Microsoft Word using the ‘simple formatting’ option. With simple formatting, every segment is a new line, and therefore the location of the missing tags can be easily spotted even in huge documents. This makes it safe and frustration-free to work with bilingual DOC/RTF.
You work with a translation management system and feel happy about it. At one point you realize that a year ago, in a certain job, one translator translated a lot of nonsense and your review processes did not spot out the mistakes. A long time has passed, and quite a few segments have been reused - and as they have not been paid for, nobody indicated the mistakes to this day. How do you identify the segments that need a review?
You are right, translation memory tools - no matter whether they are called TMSes or just TMs, whether they are server-based or just local tools - don’t provide you with a toolset to carry out this task. This is why you cannot have a single answer to whether it’s better to have all your translations in a single big translation memory or in several smaller translation memories. Smaller translation memories make you lose leverage, and if you use a large TM, translation memory maintenance becomes a pain. Would you go through each and every segment just to take out 300 segments with mistakes?
When you approach this from the point of view of costs, you will find that you lose money on losing leverage (opportunity costs) and you lose money on TM maintenance. You’re trying to balance between leverage outage and maintenance costs. This is one of the problems that Kilgray’s TM Repository technology can address.
The TM Repository gives you full control over your translation memory units - not just the translation memories. It is a single database with enhanced translation management functionality. The TM Repository is not an online translation memory. It is a cost-saving tool that works best if you have millions of TM entries. It increases leverage and cuts maintenance costs. It can be integrated into any translation management system or used through a web interface. The TM Repository is not part of the memoQ solution and it does not compete with any other commercially available solution. It’s a whole new concept to TM management.
The TM Repository offers the following functionality:
At Kilgray, we all have translation experience and we know what deadlines mean. We have worked day and night on translation assignments just to find out that it would not export from the translation tool. We know how you feel when you run overtime because of a software failure. And we want to save you from this.
Software tools inevitably contain bugs. Software tools that build on other software tools can even contain more bugs. And translation tools are like this: the file filters should be good enough to support each and every file created by each and every version of another tool, the spell checking and preview creation works through Microsoft Office - Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, Office 2007, and memoQ runs on many different Windows versions, including XP, Vista, Windows 7 and their server versions. We’re not saying memoQ will never crash on you. But if it does, we are here to help you.
When you send a file to our support that has problems exporting or importing, the first thing we check is how urgent the issue is. If you have translated the file, we try to create the export for you. Very often the method is simple: put every translation into a translation memory, reimport the file in the newest build of memoQ, and pre-translate the file with the contents of this ad hoc translation memory. This happens when the issue got fixed in the meantime but you did not update to the newest build.
If it’s more serious than that, we try to help you by trying an alternative method. DOC files can be saved as DOCX, PPT as PPTX. memoQ has two TTX filters, two HTML filters, and for other file formats we know a lot of tricks that work through memoQ’s interoperability features. It may take a few hours, but we are dedicated to helping you if it’s urgent.
Once you’re out of trouble we analyze and report the issue to our programming team and the file filter gets fixed and the fix gets tested with a couple of files. We don’t like these urgent cases, so we release a new build - with the same functionality but bugs fixed - rather frequently. When you quit memoQ the next time, its auto-update functionality tells you that there is an update available, and if you allow that, updates to the latest build.
We always correct blocking software issues immediately when they are reported, and file filter issues are almost always blocking. If there’s another urgent case, we are also there to help you. The benefit of this approach is illustrated by the fact that during 2009 we have considerably increased our client base but the amount of support requests remained stable.
When you find something annoying but it is not a bug, you can explain your problem to us. We keep track of all the feature requests and go through this list every time we plan a new version.
We don’t guarantee that you can do everything in memoQ that you can think of. It’s not going to make coffee for you. But we do guarantee that it’s a very stable and reliable technology and it remains so.
SDL Trados is one of the more popular translation tools besides memoQ. memoQ provides interoperability with SDL Trados 2007 and SDL Trados Studio 2009.Using memoQ you can accept jobs in SDL Trados Tageditor’s TTX format or SDL Trados Translator’s Workbench’s bilingual DOC/RTF format. SDL Trados 2007 does not accept all segmentation and can crash on files segmented by other translation tools, therefore prior to opening a file it is advised to pre-segment the file using a demo or paid-up version of SDL Trados 2007. You can do this by opening Translator’s Workbench, creating or opening an empty translation memory, clicking Tools/Translate and enabling the Segment unknown sentences checkbox, then running a pre-translation. If you don’t pre-segment the files, memoQ will import an empty file by default. You can click Add document as and select Import unsegmented content, however, be careful with this - we cannot guarantee that SDL Trados will accept the file translated this way. Thousands of translators and companies are using memoQ to process SDL Trados jobs. Many language service providers are using the memoQ server to add teamwork capabilities while translating SDL Trados jobs. This is a reliable solution.
Translation memories from SDL Trados can be imported in TMX format. If you use TMX 1.4b, and your translation memories come from a tagged document such as HTML or XML, memoQ will also perform a tag conversion which goes beyond what’s described in the standard. This tag conversion is specifically targeted at converting SDL Trados tags into memoQ tags.
memoQ, just like SDL Trados Studio 2009, supports XLIFF as a bilingual format, and the two systems are interoperable through XLIFF. You cannot export a memoQ file in SDL Trados Studio 2009 into the underlying format such as Microsoft Word, and you cannot export an SDLXLIFF file in memoQ into Microsoft Word either.
In a server scenario you cannot expect memoQ to connect to an SDL Trados server. Server technologies are, unfortunately, not interoperable. This is, however, a rare scenario and most translation companies are not expected to translate online.
memoQ-prepared projects can also be processed by SDL Trados 2007 and SDL Trados Studio 2009 through XLIFF.
STAR Transit is one of the more popular translation tools besides memoQ. memoQ provides interoperability with both STAR Transit XV and STAR Transit NXT.
memoQ can receive STAR Transit projects in PXF and PPF formats. memoQ cannot process projects in Transit 2.7 compatibility mode which is not in general use anymore.
memoQ creates translation memories from STAR Transit’s reference documents. When you are ready with the translation, you can deliver TXF and TPF packages as if you had used STAR Transit.
For the time being Termstar glossaries are not imported into the project.
XML documents are now the backbone of many content management and other systems. memoQ supports XML documents like no other tool does.
When you start working on an XML document, you need to create an import configuration. This configuration defines what content to translate, what not to translate, what to use as context, what to expect from the translator and how to handle entities. You can create this configuration using a DTD file or, if you don’t have a DTD, you can specify one or more reference files for analysis.
The DTD or the reference files are automatically analyzed by memoQ. memoQ gives you a list of all elements and attributes found in the document and suggests a working configuration importing all content. You can make certain content non-translatable - depending on the name of an element or an attribute value -, others can be structural tags that open new segments in the translation view and you can also use inline tags that appear in the segments - think about inline images or automatically inserted information. For each and every attribute value you can specify whether it’s translatable and whether it is required in the target text. You can fine-tune whitespace handling for every element, and you can also bind the context to element names or attribute values. The context-enabled translation memory can cut translation costs significantly, as it surely puts in the right translation if there is ambiguity. Attribute values can also be imported as comments. If you import an attribute value as comment, and the attribute value only contains a number, you can also perform checks about the length of the target segment - if the segment has more characters than the value here, it will give you a warning.
memoQ can also handle entities very efficiently. Custom entities can be mapped to memoQ tags or specific characters and you can instruct memoQ to convert these characters back to entities when you are exporting the document back into XML.
memoQ can also import several XML documents from a directory structure at once.
You are using another translation tool and want to see if memoQ makes more out of your translation memories. Try memoQ’s advanced functionality such as TM fragment hits or automated concordancing by importing a TMX file from another tool.
memoQ supports TMX 1.1 to TMX 1.4b. TMX stands for Translation Memory eXchange and is the standard format for exchanging translation memories between translation tools. All commercial translation tools provide support for TMX.
Import a memory in TMX and start working straight away. In this article we won’t describe how much you can gain from memoQ’s context-enabled translation memories or term bases - please look into other articles. However, if you have bilingual documents available, you can gain much more information by confirming the segments in bilingual documents such as XLIFF or TTX into a memoQ translation memory than by importing the contents of a translation memory.
memoQ exposes the following functionality for translation memories coming from other tools:
You are a company working with a variety of translation vendors. You don’t want to stipulate what translation workflows the vendors should use, but you would like to take full control over the translation memories that evolve and maximize the gains from leveraging.
One option is to introduce a translation management system. It does the job, with a few shortcomings. For example, all the descriptive information about your translation memory units is easily lost. There are no safeguards built into translation tools that would prevent the loss of metadata. And if you are managing millions of entries, metadata tagging can be crucial to your success.
Tool-agnostic workflows, by definition, stipulate the use of open standards and mean workflows where open standards are leveraged to the maximum and the shortcomings of open standards are addressed. Kilgray’s TM Repository addresses many shortcomings of the most popular standard, TMX, and offers maximum leverage and minimum maintenance costs.
The TM Repository gives you full control over your translation memory units - not just the translation memories. It is a single database with enhanced translation management functionality. The TM Repository is not an online translation memory. It is a cost-saving tool that works best if you have millions of TM entries. It increases leverage and cuts maintenance costs. It can be integrated into any translation management system or used through a web interface. The TM Repository is not part of the memoQ solution and it does not compete with any other commercially available solution. It’s a whole new concept to TM management.
With the TM Repository you can provide your vendors with translation memories that contain the units most specific to your job. You never miss out on reusing a single entry. What’s more, if you localize into several languages (for example English to French and English to Chinese) and have to create a translation memory between two target languages (French to Chinese), you can do that too.
The TM Repository offers the following functionality:
You don’t have to care about what translation tools your vendors are using.
We often joke about memoQ being the world’s most sophisticated find and replace tool but there is some truth in every joke. We know of companies using memoQ only for this, and not for translation.
Why is memoQ the ideal candidate for this? First, the different file filters import the documents into memoQ and extract the text. Then you can perform operations on the text and finally you export the documents from memoQ back into the original locations, with extracted texts.
Find and replace can be an operation performed on the text. You just need to copy source to target (there’s a command to do this) and perform find and replace on the target text. memoQ’s find and replace is quite unique: when you enable the List results checkbox and click Mark all, a new tab will open, listing all the expressions found and eventually replaced. You can perform the find and replace operation on all files at once. If you want, you can open the right document at the right location by just double-clicking on a row that shows a hit. Or you can decide to replace an expression or not.
Though a bit of an overkill for a global find and replace tool, memoQ can be a powerful companion not only to translators but also to document editors.
Machine translation can be useful, though the approach many machine translation companies isn’t really translator-friendly. Many MT (machine translation) vendors see MT as a data-driven process rather than a workflow-driven process, and do not accommodate any feedback cycle. They believe in customer-specific training, then machine translation, then post-editing, but there is no link back from post-editing to training, thus the quality does not improve. If you sympathize with these companies, imagine yourself having to correct the same mistake over and over. We believe that systems that simply don’t consider user feedback miss out on many opportunities for improvement.
Kilgray has a wealth of machine translation experience. Prior to establishing the company, the founders, Balázs, Gábor and István worked for MorphoLogic, a company well-known for its English-Hungarian machine translation software MetaMorpho. Indeed, Gábor was the architect behind the parser of this rule-based system. We see a convergence between machine translation with human assistance and computer-assisted human translation. However, it’s all about the workflow.In an ideal situation, machine translation begins with training, then the trained system is used in production and there is a feedback cycle converting user suggestions into improvements to the rules, no matter whether these rules are statistical or syntactic.
We see the industry moving into this direction and we’d place our bet on one single MT company, but while that happens, we are open to integrate any machine translation product into memoQ. We have a set of documented APIs that allow the integration of an external text-parsing tool into memoQ. memoQ gives out the source segment to a third-party tool and retrieves the output of this tool. It can be commercial machine translation or it can be anything else that you come up with. It’s a plugin architecture and you can even have multiple MT vendors addressed at the same time. memoQ integrates this in the translation grid and the pre-translation process.
If you want a system that integrates with machine translation, contact us to check whether we already have an integration with the vendor of your choice. Or come up with own text manipulation engines and integrate it into memoQ yourself. The options are open. Machine translation is only available in memoQ’s enterprise edition.
You’re working with people who don’t use translation tools and don’t want to use translation tools. You are looking for a way to allow translation review outside memoQ. The problem with writing changes into the exported file is that it needs human efforts to create a translation memory that reflects the changes after the review process.
memoQ offers you two very efficient Word-based formats. The two-column RTF table exports the contents of your memoQ translation grid with all information - source and target segments, segment status and comments - into a table. You can send this to your customer who can edit the information,suggest changes or leave comments. You then import the table back into memoQ and view the changes in the translation grid. Building a translation memory out of this is a single operation. This process can be used for any file type (HTML, Framemaker, XML, etc. too).
The other Word-based format is the bilingual DOC/RTF format that was introduced by SDL Trados. Although no longer supported by SDL, memoQ still supports this widely used but somewhat sensitive format. (For example, if you choose to preserve the formatting, the document cannot be automatically updated after the changes in memoQ. It is often better to use the ‘Simple formatting’ option to export a simplified document structure that can be updated after review. With simple formatting, every segment is a new line, so the location of the missing tags can be easily spotted even in huge documents, making it safer and less frustrating to work with bilingual DOC/RTF.