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.