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:
- Translation memory. memoQ’s translation memory is context-enabled. memoQ can store several translations to the same segment, but give you a better result - a 101% match - if not only the segment but also its context is the same as what you have stored in the translation memory. By default, the context means the segment before and after the actual segment. In the case of Excel or XML files, you can bind the context to the contents of another column or to a tag or the contents of an attribute. This is especially useful for catalogs or software localization.
- Leveraging translated documents. Instead of creating translation memories, you can directly leverage already translated bilingual documents. This offers you more information on document updates and allows the easier management of translation segments.
- Concordancing. memoQ can find any segment in the translation memory that contains certain words or expressions. You can use wildcards and specify the order of words, or you can use it as a search engine as well.
- Automated concordancing. As Roberto Savelli, a memoQ user has put it when this tool was introduced, “it’s like playing a video game with cheat mode constantly on”. Automated concordancing tells you about all the multi-word expressions that have been translated before, so you don’t have to remember what’s in the translation memory.
- Translation memory fragments. If you translate a short segment and confirm that into the translation memory, then navigate to a longer segment that includes this short segment, memoQ will give you a match that you can insert. For example, if you translated “translation memory fragments” as a heading, you would have a match for this sentence.
- Alignment. Alignment is a way of building translation memories from translated texts that are available in two files - a source language and a target language document. Alignment is traditionally performed before starting translation. In the majority of translation tools, everything is aligned - including segments that will never be used - before the new documents are translated. In memoQ we shifted alignment into the translation grid, eliminating the need for separate pre-translation alignment. Alignment is fully automatic, but there is still opportunity for human intervention as needed to fine-tune the results. Because memoQ learns from your fixes, and because you align only segment pairs that appear in the documents, this saves you perhaps hours of worklets you get started more quickly with the translation. Just identify which files to align and memoQ does the rest for you.
- Term base. memoQ’s term base is easy to use, new terms can be added with a single click, but powerful at the same time. It works well with inflections so it automatically spots terms even if the actual form these terms appear in is different. You can store images, grammatical information, example of use and other data with terms. You can have any number of synonyms and also store forbidden terms.
- Monolingual reference documents. Many translators use search tools to query information in monolingual documents they have compiled. memoQ performs this search automatically on any documents added to your project.
- Auto-translatables. You can specify patterns that memoQ will translate automatically. Typical auto-translatables include dates, number formats, measurement conversions, but you can set up custom auto-translatables too.
- Non-translatables. You can specify expressions that should not be localized. Think about NASA - you probably don’t translate this in most languages.
- Fragment assembly. memoQ can automatically replace terms, auto-translatables and TM fragment hits and offer a completely translated segment. Really useful with catalog-like listings in short segments.
- Translation memory-driven segmentation. You or your translators can freely join and split segments in memoQ local projects to make your translation memory entries meaningful. When you get an update to the document and need to translate it again, the segmentation of the new document is based on the segmentation rules, just like in any other translation tool. However, with memoQ you can perform a pre-translation and based on the segments contained in the translation memory, memoQ will automatically perform the joins and splits you performed before, resulting in the elimination of file preparation - thus higher 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.
