Tips 'n' Tools for Translators

ABBYY, the software company behind FineReader, arguably the best OCR software package in town at the moment, is currently offering two of its products, FineReader 12 and PDF Transformer+, at a 25% discount until 31 December.



FineReader scans paper documents and images and turns them into digital files, which you can save in one of various Windows or Mac formats. Its optical character recognition ('OCR') is highly accurate and can be used on a host of source languages.



PDF Transformer+ is an easy-to-use program for editing PDF files and converting them into editable file formats like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Open Office Writer. It also lets you scan paper documents and create editable PDF files.



Both of these programs help translators transform documents that customers send them on paper or as PDFs into digital files that can be processed in common word-processing packages and then translated with CAT tools, for example.



To find out more about this offer, click here to go to ABBYY's website. You can watch short videos there that show you what the programs can do and download a trial version of each program as well if you want to try them out before buying them.



This special offer has been running for a while now and is only valid until 31 December, so be quick! (I bought PDF Transformer+ recently and thoroughly recommend it; it does its job well, is easy to use and is great value for money in my opinion.)



Regards



Carl

This post is rather technical and will only be of real interest to other users of memoQ, which is the main computer-assisted translation tool I use. Software bugs can be minor annoyances, but from time to time, a major one appears in a new software build that can play havoc with your workflow and productivity. So much for CAT tools saving you time! Don't believe everything you read on the glossy pages of CAT-tool websites!



Over the last week or so (middle/end of March), a serious bug has appeared in memoQ 2014 (build 71) and R2 (build 58) that has been causing many users headaches, it seems (including me). It stops you from exporting your translation back to the original .docx file format – you get a puzzling error message like this:



..............

TYPE:

System.InvalidOperationException



MESSAGE:

Die Sequenz enthält kein übereinstimmendes Element.



SOURCE:

MemoQ.Project



CALL STACK:

   bei MemoQ.Project.TranslationDocImportExport.LocalExportController.<DoJob>b__12(ExportUnitBase eu)



..............



[The equivalent English version is this, apparently:





TYPE:

System.InvalidOperationException



MESSAGE:

Sequence contains no matching element



SOURCE:

MemoQ.Project



CALL STACK:

   at MemoQ.Project.TranslationDocImportExport.LocalExportController.<DoJob>b__12(ExportUnitBase eu)]



.............

... and can't get your translation out of memoQ! There is a simple way of dealing with the issue, however – if you happen to know how.



First of all, don't panic, as your translation is safe and sound inside memoQ; nothing has been lost. One way of getting your translation back into the original file format (only Word files are affected) is to re-import the source file, pre-translate it – in which case everything will be inserted automatically if the segmenting has been done the same way – and then simply export the file as usual. Voilà! And it's all done in a matter of minutes.



So why does this work if the export didn't work before? Well, it's because your original translation will have contained comments, apparently. (Comments can be inserted deliberately, but they are also added by memoQ by default if you happen to mark a word or phrase to highlight it and return to it later.)



To get things working smoothly again until the bug has been fixed (which will probably be the case shortly in the next build), change the settings to export .docx files without any comments:



- go to 'Options' in R2 (use the icon in the top menu bar)(or go to 'Tools' > 'Options' in memoQ 2014) and select the 'Miscellaneous' category. 



There are five options in the middle that you can set to define which type of comment you want to export (e.g. 'Export information-level comments to final file'):

- uncheck all of them, click on 'OK' to save the setting and then try to export your documents again. It ought to work now.



Thanks to Technical Support at Kilgray for this advice, which I am passing on here to spread the word faster. (Once the bug has been fixed, you will need to go back to these settings and tick them again to re-activate them if you want comments to be exported, otherwise they won't.)



Last but not least, despite all the enhancements that Kilgray's developers keep on adding to memoQ, which, like any piece of user software, is a work in progress, it's always worth remembering you can re-install a previous, stable build of memoQ and work with that until the major bugs in the latest build have been rectified. Just double-click on the installation file and it will get installed 'on top of' the current installation. That will also save you a few headaches.



It's a wise idea to keep the last few builds on your computer for this reason rather than deleting them soon after installing them – that way, you will always be able to access them, no matter where you are and what your internet access is like (sometimes it can be poor or even non-existent, especially if you're travelling somewhere and trying to work at the same time). Alternatively, you can just ask Kilgray's Support team for a particular build and they will send it to you.



Hope these pointers prove helpful.



Carl

 

Useful links and addresses



E-mail Kilgray's Technical Support team at support [@] kilgray [dot] com



The thread about this particular issue on the memoQ user group at Yahoo! Groups, where memoQ users can discuss issues they are having with memoQ and sometimes resolve them with each other's help (you will need to have a Yahoo! account to be able to access this).

 

Proz, the international translators' portal, is going to run a series of free webinars for registered users in March.

According to the programme of events now available here, the sessions will mainly be covering computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools:

• Wordfast Pro 3.3
  
   


• memoQ 2013 R2
  
   


• SDL Trados Studio 2014
  
   


• Déjà Vu X3 (aka "DVX3")
  
   


• Fluency
  
   


• and Wordbee Freelancer.

In addition, you will also be able to learn more about utilities like WordFinder, a web-based dictionary suite, and Translation Office 3000, a package for managing your translation and proof-reading assignments, your customers and your accounting. Several of these programs are now available in brand new versions with fresh interfaces.

There are also going to be two sessions on getting in touch with potential customers via Proz's own web platform. At the time of writing this post, places were still available for the session on 20 March.

To participate in any of these events, all you have to do is register to attend them. If you aren't a registered user yet, sign up for free or take out a paid subscription, depending on what features you would like to use.

Proz.com regularly stages training events for translators and interpreters, not just giving them an opportunity to learn about the latest software tools, but also to improve their knowledge of subject areas they work with such as legal contracts, interpreting in court or for the police, medical translation, tourism and travel, software localisation and audio subtitling, to mention just a few examples.

Some of the events are recorded and can be viewed any time, albeit at a small cost. These are known as "on-demand courses".

The training Proz offers isn't just in English, but that does seem to be the main lingua franca used. Sometimes presentations are held in other languages; some of the events in March are going to take place in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian or Chinese, for instance.

Quality-wise, the free webinars and "virtual conferences" I have attended so far have generally been reasonable to good. Not brilliant, but generally interesting. Some were a bit too commercial for my taste, but still, you learn to pick out the cherries after a while...

Why not take a look at the events lined up in March and see if there are any that interest you?

Regards,

Carl

images: screen shots taken from Proz.com

As I mentioned at the end of last month, the Hungarian CAT-tool maker Kilgray recently released a new version of its main product for freelance translators, memoQ, called "memoQ 2013 R2" (the "R" stands for "release", apparently). I've been using this version of memoQ ever since then and have found it to be robust and very convenient thanks to various enhancements to existing features and several brand new features it comes with.

To find out more about this particular release, you can now sign up to attend a free, one-hour webinar by Kilgray on the tool's new features, which is going to be staged later this week: on 14 November at 4 p.m. GMT (= 5 p.m. CET). Click here to sign up.

In Kilgray's own words on the event, the features to be discussed include "monolingual review (to update your translation memory by importing reviewed monolingual documents), PDF file import with full formatting (imported PDF files will keep the layout of the original file and texts can be translated as .doc or .docx files), a start-up wizard (to make configuration easier) and a couple of Microsoft Office Word integration enhancements".

The last point is a very modest description of some major achievements in memoQ: "Use Microsoft Word dictionaries for spell-checking; change fonts automatically in .docx files according to the most widespread fonts when you translate between European and Asian languages (CCJK); comments added to your source document will appear as comments or translatable content in the translation grid, depending on your preference; and comments added during translation can be exported into a Word file", as Kilgray says. (The above outline is just a small part of a more comprehensive summary available on the CAT-tool maker's website – click here to view the whole page.)

Reading about features is a good start, but watching a webinar will give you a lot of visual information as well as being more informative in general. You can also ask questions that may be answered straightaway, so it's a good way of finding out about key aspects of the program quickly. After which you should give it a spin yourself. Download a free user's guide from Kilgray's website and find out how the tool works – and most of all, how (like all CAT tools) it can help you improve your productivity and make sure you use the right terminology consistently as you translate. (More about the benefits of using translation software in a later post...)

See you at the webinar.

Regards,

Carl

image: logo courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies and my own screen shot from Citrix webinar software

Closely related posts: Promising new features in memoQ 2013 R2

MemoQ (pronounced "memo kyu") is a CAT tool that has become very popular among translators, partly because it offers a lot of convenient features and is relatively easy to use; beginners can learn how to set up a project and translate and export texts with the tool in just 1-2 hours. Plus it can process a wide range of file formats smoothly, including Trados 2007's bilingual RTF and SDL Trados Studio 2009/2011 files in XLIFF format. Last but not least, I personally think it's good value for money, especially if you buy it as part of a promotion or group purchase!

A new version of memoQ called memoQ 2013 was released at the end of May and includes lots of enhancements and several new features, including an integrated online dictionary search facility that you can configure yourself using as many of your favourite Web resources as you like. (This is in addition to the Eurotermbank plug-in that memoQ comes with.)

Release 2 of memoQ 2013 is now just about to be launched, and this promises to be a great leap forward in terms of user convenience. For one thing, it has a feature called monolingual review that translators will love! It saves you a great deal of time updating translation memories (TM) when a customer or reviewer sends you the final version of a translation you've done. In most CAT tools, updating a TM to include the latest changes is a laborious manual process, but memoQ 2013 R2 has automated the step for Word® and other documents, employing a re-alignment procedure to update the segments stored in your TM.

Fig. 1: When you import the final version, memoQ opens an alignment window. The green lines mark the segments that have been changed.

Another enhancement is the ability to import term bases straight from SDL's terminology tool MultiTerm®. This is useful if a customer sends you a document to translate using specific terms they work with and have stored in that format. More specifically, memoQ 2013 now enables you to import MultiTerm XML or TBX files, extract the terms and include them in a term base of its own, which you select yourself. This gives you faster leverage of the customer's resources.

Fig. 2: To import a MultiTerm XML file (term base), click on "Import terminology" and then select the format.

There are a number of other improvements as well, some of which concern the DOCX filter for importing and exporting Word® documents. Exporting comments made in memoQ along with a translation has now been implemented. (This has been possible in other CAT tools such as Déjà Vu X and X2 for ages, but not in memoQ, and saves you a lot of time inserting comments into your translation manually after exporting it.)

But to find out more about it, why not attend Kilgray's introductory webinar on the new release? It's going to be held from 5-6 pm CET (4-5 pm GMT) on Monday 28 October. It's free – all you have to do is register in advance. Click here to go to the registration page.

Have fun trying out the program! (You'll be able to download it shortly and can try it out for free for 45 days.)

Best,

Carl

memoQ logo: courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies; screen shots: my own.

P.S. (written on 13 Nov. 2013) A free recording of the webinar is now available on the internet – click here to access it.

Well, the build-up to its appearance on the translation stage was big, as you might expect from SDL Trados! Have you heard the news yet? If you're also a translator and use translation software to help you with your daily work, then you may already be aware that the largest maker of computer-assisted translation (CAT) software tools recently launched the latest version of its key product (on 30 September).

It almost seems to have been a little early in arriving on the market, actually, as it's known as "Studio 2014" ... but then again, I expect they wanted to get a competitive edge over one of their main competitors, the Hungarian firm Kilgray (the makers of memoQ 2013 and other state-of-the-art tools for translators, translation agencies and terminologists).

The previous version of SDL Trados's tool, Studio 2011, has been around for a while and become widely used among freelance translators and agencies alike, partly because it supports bilingual file formats created by its much earlier predecessor, Trados 2007, which many agencies once invested in and weren't prepared to drop when Studio first came out.

Studio 2014 is based on the 2011 version, but the interface has been enhanced to make it easier to use. One of the main changes you'll notice is that a ribbon-based interface has now been adopted, organising related functions in tabs in a similar way to the programs that come with Microsoft Office 2007/2010. So if you're used to working with the latter, you ought to find it relatively easy to get to grips with Studio 2014. In addition to that, new areas have been added to the interface for training purposes – you can now access training videos directly from the program, for example – and you can access additional "apps" for Studio from here, too, by following an internal link to SDL's OpenExchange platform rather than having to call up the page separately in your web browser. So users can get information faster and more conveniently, which is great.

Apart from this, the sales people at SDL Trados have been listening to user feedback and passing it on to the developers, who have consequently come up with a number of "new" features such as AutoSave (to save your work automatically), Track Changes, Real-time Preview, a fast alignment tool (to replace WinAlign), QuickMerge (for combining individual files to speed up translation) and a customisable editing environment with user-defined short cuts for specific functions. (These are certainly enhancements in Studio, but they have actually been around in memoQ for a while.)

A few of the new features really are novel, however:

• enhanced concordance search, i.e. terms are looked up automatically in your translation memory (TM) if a search at segment level fails to find anything there, and partial matches are shown, which can help you come up with an appropriate translation
  
   


• InQuote, which is a new OpenExchange app that can be installed in Studio 2014 to generate quotations from project statistics. These stats can be output in Word or Excel or copied into another application or e-mail from your Clipboard to send to a customer, for example.

Well, that's the rundown so far. I'll learn more about it once I've tried it out myself. Hope it's not too buggy, being a new release...

To find out about the software suite yourself, you can watch various short videos that SDL Trados has produced. Click here, for instance: SDL Trados Product Tutorial Video. (N.B.: there's no sound in the video.)

The presentation below is also informative and it's spoken at a reasonable speed (unlike various other videos they've made, which are too short to be of much value and are narrated much too fast for non-English speakers):

• Studio 2014 - Getting started; a quick tour, by Daniel Brockmann, SDL Trados (lasts approx. 15 mins.).

This video is actually one of those that are accessible from the training tab in Studio 2014. Dominique Pivard has been kind enough to provide the individual links on his own blog, CATguru's vlog, so anyone can watch them in a browser and get an idea about using the CAT tool that way.

In sum, I'd say Studio 2014 looks like a very promising, mature tool, even if many of its new features aren't pioneering ones. That said, I'm keen to see what the forthcoming version of memoQ 2013 ("R2" aka "6.8") will be like, which is due out at the end of October and is said to include several new features that will make our work more convenient – like the ability to incorporate final changes made to translations into your translation memory once the texts have been exported (e.g. customer changes). Studio can already do this to a degree if the translation is converted from SDLXLIFF to Word beforehand, but this new solution may go much further. And be a real time-saver!

Best,

Carl

images: spotlights © Rainer Sturm/pixelio.de, memoQ logo © Kilgray Translation Technologies, Studio 2014 logo © SDL plc

• Related posts: Useful extensions for Studio on SDL OpenExchange
  
   


• multifarious, SDL's blog on its CAT products, written by Paul Filken. Click here to view a recent post on customising Studio 2014 using OpenExchange apps
  
   


• Emma Goldsmith's blog post on features of Studio 2014 for "beginners" (she was a beta tester)
  
   


• To sign up for a free 30-day trial of Studio 2014, go to the online form here. (Update: although the form's available online now, I've just been told by a sales rep here in Germany that the trial version hasn't come out yet [it's 15 October now!], so we'll just have to wait for it a bit longer, I guess. Maybe until 2014 after all...!)

If you are the kind of translator who likes reading about the latest news from the translation industry, picking up tips about using your computer, learning about programs that can help you in your work and hearing an expert's opinions on new product developments, then you ought to have a look at Jost Zetzsche's "Tool Box" newsletter.

It comes in two editions: a basic one that contains several short articles and a teaser from a longer one, which is free of charge, and a "premium" version, which features all the articles in their entirety and a few more to boot, plus access to the archives, and is available at an annual subscription fee of $25. To get a copy, all you need to do is sign up for it, pick the edition you want and say which e-mail address it should be sent to, then it will land in your inbox on a regular basis.

The basic version of the current issue, no. 225, contains a piece on SDL Trados Studio 2014 and MultiTerm 2014, which are due out around the end of September this year. Jost discusses the revamped interface of Studio 2014, which – like Microsoft Office 2007 and later versions – includes a ribbon instead of drop-down menus. He also mentions Studio's new alignment tool, which has been integrated into the program for the first time and replaces the separate WinAlign application that was needed in earlier versions.

Apart from taking a look at SDL Trados's latest innovations, Jost also addresses the topic of machine translation (MT), looking at what offerings are currently available to freelance translators rather than large translation companies and corporate users, which have tended to be the focus of MT service providers up until now (the full version of that interesting article is in the premium edition).

What else is in the newsletter? Well, the basic version starts with a lengthy, descriptive piece on João Rodrigues, a Portuguese interpreter who lived in Japan in the 16th century, then it jumps to the fate of QuarkXPress, the DTP software that lost much of its market share to Adobe's InDesign, and goes on to mention CopyFlow, a tool that enables you to work on such DTP files. It ends with an announcement about an event to be held by an American translators' and interpreters' association in September where Peter Schmitt (University of Leipzig, Germany) will be talking about "new trends and risks at the translator's workbench".

One of the advantages of getting the premium edition is that Jost also discusses features of personal computers that can help you get more out of your own PC. So as you can see, the newsletter's a mixed bag of subjects with something of interest for everyone.

Hope you enjoy the read and find it helpful as well.

Regards

Carl

image: courtesy of Jost Zetzsche, International Writers' Group

If you are a translator who uses one of SDL's computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools (e.g. Trados® 2007 or one of the newer versions of Trados® Studio (2009 or 2011), you will probably already have heard about the firm's relatively new software-development platform SDL OpenExchange.

OpenExchange is an interesting idea as it is a way of enhancing the functionality of SDL's products by harnessing the intellectual power of 3rd-party developers. In the words of SDL:

"By offering a range of plug-ins and associated applications that will extend and augment the product feature set, we aim to see our users achieve a greater return on their SDL investment, while offering developers a stage to showcase themselves before the industry’s largest translation professional community." (quoted from their website)

In addition to this, SDL is using the platform to seek suggestions from users of its products regarding further potential enhancements. In this respect, it currently seems to be ahead of the competition, although other CAT-tool manufacturers such as Kilgray in Hungary (the maker of memoQ) have also started creating user platforms that can partly be employed to exchange software resources (see Kilgray's new Language Terminal, which can be accessed directly from memoQ 6.2 and memoQ 2013).

SDL's 3rd-party development platform currently contains around 80 enhancements in the form of plug-ins and apps. Some of these cost money (quite a lot in some cases), while others are free. Among other things, they include:

• Auto-Suggest dictionaries in a variety of language pairs
  
   


• conversion software (e.g. SDLTM to XLIFF for proof-reading in a different tool)
  
   


• file-type definitions so that Studio can process further file types (such as PO files or DTP formats like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign)
  
   


• glossary converters (e.g. for converting an Excel glossary to a Studio or MultiTerm term base)
  
   


• Microsoft terminology collections in various languages (converted for use in MultiTerm)
  
   


• machine-translation plug-ins
  
   


• and even instruction manuals for Studio 2011 in various languages.

To find out more about these and the other apps, check out the OpenExchange site. I would also recommend you to read a recent blog post by another translator, Tuomas Kostiainen, a Studio user and trainer who has taken a closer look at five of the products available there.

As an aside, I noticed that some of these optional plug-ins are actually included in memoQ's functionality; they are there if you want to use them and just have to be activated by ticking a check box - there's no need to download and install them, let alone pay for them. Instruction manuals for memoQ and other CAT tools made by Kilgray are available from Kilgray's own website for free and are also in a range of languages.

Still, a number of the Studio and MultiTerm plug-ins and apps do look interesting and provide enhancements that are still lacking in memoQ. In the course of time, however, memoQ users may find that a growing number of these are being offered on the Language Terminal. Let's wait and see how it evolves...

Carl

images: Kilgray's logo and Language Terminal courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies. SDL OpenExchange: my own screen shot