| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | Your experience with MemoQ Thread poster: Ken Fagan (X)
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| try the new PPTX support then | May 9, 2009 |
Dear Rod,
(edited: a small correction)
Rod Walters wrote:
I'm checking out MemoQ now for Japanese, and here, people go hogwild with their colours and bold in Powerpoint. Japanese has a completely different sentence structure from English, so that would pose a problem for me.
MemoQ 3.5 introduced a new filter for PPTX, the XML based format of PowerPoint 2007. With this filter, you get reorderable XML like tags instead of the old {} tags. If you receive your PowerPoint documents in PPTX format for translation, you don't even need Office on your computer to translate them with MemoQ.
If you have Office 2007 installed, you can have MemoQ import PPT files as PPTX. (It will basically have Office convert the file to PPTX before import.) And with Office 2007 installed you also get a real-time preview even for the PPTX filter.
If you have an older version of Office but would like to work with PPTX files, consider installing the Office 2007 compatibility pack.
Regards,
Gergely Vandor
Kilgray Support
[Edited at 2009-05-09 12:26 GMT]
| | | | Rod Walters 
Japan
Local time: 14:30
Japanese to English
Thanks Gergely, that was a very fast response. That looks to be a workable solution.
Do you have any idea how many people are using MemoQ with Japanese at present?
| | | | | I don't have access to such sales data... | May 9, 2009 |
...but Japan is a significant market for us. For example, we provide Japanese localization for the GUI. I'm not an expert on the features/information specific to Japanese myself, but if you write to our support@ address, we will answer any questions.
Best regards,
Gergely
| | | | | MemoQ & Japanese | May 11, 2009 |
Rod Walters wrote:
Do any Proz users have any experience with MemoQ and Japanese? Or know of any forum where this is discussed?
I think Loek van Kooten is doing some testing. He mentioned that the substring concordancing works with Japanese. Take a look at this thread.
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Rod Walters
Japan
Local time: 14:30
Japanese to English
| Are those tests actually with Japanese? | May 11, 2009 |
Thanks for the pointer Kevin.
I was actually following that topic, but I wasn't sure if that actually involved Japanese.
Loek, can you confirm that? Thanks.
| | | | XX789 (X)
Netherlands
Local time: 07:30
English to Dutch
+ ...
Hi Rod,
Most of the tests were done with English, but I did test a few Japanese documents too. The concordance worked flawlessly.
| | | | Rod Walters
Japan
Local time: 14:30
Japanese to English
| Do tags in Word present the same issue as in DVX? | May 11, 2009 |
Thanks for the clarification Loek.
I've installed MemoQ and I'm trying it out on a Word document converted from a PDF using the very cool www.pdftoword.com tool.
The document appears to be full of meaningless tags. I figured I could just ignore them and sort out the formatting later if necessary. But it seems I have to apply myself to correcting each error at the moment. This looks like... See more Thanks for the clarification Loek.
I've installed MemoQ and I'm trying it out on a Word document converted from a PDF using the very cool www.pdftoword.com tool.
The document appears to be full of meaningless tags. I figured I could just ignore them and sort out the formatting later if necessary. But it seems I have to apply myself to correcting each error at the moment. This looks like an absolute productivity killer to me, used as I am to some very sloppy habits in Trados. Am I jumping to early conclusions here, or can I just set something to ignore all the tags in Word files where it really doesn't matter? The matter of formatting was what put me off DVX.
Incidentally, MQ bugged out then crashed when I was adding terms.
Loek, when you use MQ with Japanese, does MQ keep changing to Japanese input every time you move the cursor out of the current box? This has already got really annoying... ▲ Collapse
| | | | XX789 (X)
Netherlands
Local time: 07:30
English to Dutch
+ ...
| Always a problem | May 11, 2009 |
The tags are not caused by your translaton software, but by your PDF conversion system. Yomitori Kakumei will give much cleaner results, I think!
I didn't have any problems with the input system in MemoQ, but maybe I should try harder.
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| tags and documents from PDFs | May 11, 2009 |
You are right: you can't leave out the {} tags. This is not because MemoQ wants to force you to work this way, but it's a technical neccessity: the tag can stand for something that is absolutely needed by MemoQ to be able to correctly export the translated document. If you really want to work the "sloppy" way, considering tags only a nuisance, you could simply place the tags at the end of the segments by pressing F9 a couple of times.
In my experience, with average, sanely formatted... See more You are right: you can't leave out the {} tags. This is not because MemoQ wants to force you to work this way, but it's a technical neccessity: the tag can stand for something that is absolutely needed by MemoQ to be able to correctly export the translated document. If you really want to work the "sloppy" way, considering tags only a nuisance, you could simply place the tags at the end of the segments by pressing F9 a couple of times.
In my experience, with average, sanely formatted Word documents, most segments will not have any tags in MemoQ. A minority of them will have one, and it's quite rare to have two or more. MemoQ tends to create less tags than other tools and it is exactly why some users prefer to work with it.
Documents converted from PDF are an entirely different matter. Some pre-processing and post-processing is unavoidable in most cases when working with PDF sourced documents. There are some excellent tools for that, like the CodeZapper macro you may have heard of. But in your case, I would consider converting the PDF to plain text instead of DOC if you dislike working with all the tags, and prefer to do the formattings afterwards. If you still prefer DOC, playing with the settings of the converter tool or trying another converter may give you better results, with cleaner, lighter and more unified formatting, instead of trying to recreate all the bells and whistles of the original PDF. (In many cases, the prettier and more "PDF-like" the conversion result is, the uglier the underlining structure and styling will be, resulting in the tag soup you experienced.)
Last, the DOCX format will soon be supported, which will give you XML like inline tags that you can reorder or even leave out in most cases.
About the error you mentioned: if you suspect that an error you receive is caused by a bug in MemoQ, please write to support. Most bugs are resolved very quickly. It is highly unlikely that there is some fundamental problem with the term base functionality, it must be something peculiar causing the errors on your end.
Best regards,
Gergely Vandor
Kilgray ▲ Collapse
| | | | Rod Walters
Japan
Local time: 14:30
Japanese to English
| Testing testing | May 11, 2009 |
Loek, are you using a Japanese OS or some other language? I'm using Japanese, and I figure that MQ keeps defaulting back to the OS standard input setting.
Gergely, thanks for the clarifications. I am actually aware of most of the points that you mentioned because a while back, I evaluated DVX with Loek's gracious guidance. But I found that for my style of work, which typically involves lots of 2 or 3 page Word files, the pre- or postprocessing required, however minimal, cancelled ou... See more Loek, are you using a Japanese OS or some other language? I'm using Japanese, and I figure that MQ keeps defaulting back to the OS standard input setting.
Gergely, thanks for the clarifications. I am actually aware of most of the points that you mentioned because a while back, I evaluated DVX with Loek's gracious guidance. But I found that for my style of work, which typically involves lots of 2 or 3 page Word files, the pre- or postprocessing required, however minimal, cancelled out any efficiency gains from the software (which in fact, I couldn't discover anyway. I actually found DVX highly resistant to my typical 'frobbing' approach to learning).
However, thanks to Kevin's qualified evangelism on his blog and elsewhere, I was tempted to try MemoQ. In fact it's easy to get started, and the export/imports from Trados went very smoothly with little need to read any documentation. I deliberately chose to start with a Web-converted PDF because I know that Trados handles that sort of thing relatively well directly in Word, without recourse to tags. And that's actually how I work anyway, so I wanted to see if I can get by without changing that.
The business with the tags was just too horrible, so I eventually tried with .txt, and apart from tabs, there are now no tags (obviously). So far, I haven't encountered the problem with entering terms either (which I suspect may have resulted from trying to enter a term split by an errant tag).
Now my two main problems are;
How to apply the memory from the .txt file to the .doc file. I could copy each block of text manually. Or maybe Pretranslate would work in some form? I'll frob it today and see.
What to do about the input method. As I say, it keeps reverting to Japanese, requiring me to reset it to English. Have you not heard about this issue before from other Japanese users? This problem alone will deter me from continuing for very long, so I hope you can suggest some solution. I've done a quick search online concerning input in general, but could find nothing relevant.
Thanks everybody! ▲ Collapse
| | | | XX789 (X)
Netherlands
Local time: 07:30
English to Dutch
+ ...
Loek, are you using a Japanese OS or some other language?
I'm using a Dutch OS.
| | | | | your two problems | May 12, 2009 |
Do you get the input language switching every time you leave a cell in the translation grid? Like clicking into another cell? Or could you please describe the problem more exactly, step by step? If this problem is in fact limited to Japanese Windows, we might need some help catching it, since we don't have Japanese Windos at hand.
As for applying the memory to the DOC file, yes, you can do that. For example, you can pretranslate the DOC file with the same translation memory after yo... See more Do you get the input language switching every time you leave a cell in the translation grid? Like clicking into another cell? Or could you please describe the problem more exactly, step by step? If this problem is in fact limited to Japanese Windows, we might need some help catching it, since we don't have Japanese Windos at hand.
As for applying the memory to the DOC file, yes, you can do that. For example, you can pretranslate the DOC file with the same translation memory after you translated the TXT. But you'll end up with the same problem: lots of tags will need to be placed. And even the segmentation might be different at some places, so you might have to do some more editing. And there's not much guarantee that after all this, the resulting translated DOC file will look as good as the original did if the stucture and stlying was very messy. Translating DOCs converted from PDF really is a black art, and I don't think it's a very good choice for getting familiar with any translation environment.
Personally, I very much disagree with you on the ease of use of Word + Trados Workbench for complex documents. In a tagged format (in DVX, MemoQ, or TagEditor, etc.), at least the problem is limited to tags. In Word, you need to pay attention to and recreate all kinds of funky formattings directly, not to mention fields, index markers, etc. There are unlimited opportunities for mistakes there. Also, it is quite easy to completely mess up the document in Word by overwriting the Trados segmentation codes for example. The way I see it, Word is in fact a very-very complex program, and every translation tool is simpler and safer than that.
Gergely ▲ Collapse
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Ken Fagan (X)
Local time: 07:30
French to English
TOPIC STARTER | I want to stop receiving this thread | May 12, 2009 |
Hello,
I'm no longer interested in this thread: could someone pls tell me what to do to stop getting updates on it?
Thanks
| | | | Rod Walters
Japan
Local time: 14:30
Japanese to English
| Input problem and new warning problem | May 12, 2009 |
Gergely Vandor wrote:
Do you get the input language switching every time you leave a cell in the translation grid? Like clicking into another cell? Or could you please describe the problem more exactly, step by step? If this problem is in fact limited to Japanese Windows, we might need some help catching it, since we don't have Japanese Windos at hand.
When the program starts, the input is Japanese by default. I then click in a cell and press the keyboard button for switching the input to English. As soon as I hit Ctrl + Enter, input flips back to Japanese. Or if I click the Insert Tag button on the toolbar, it flips back. Or if I click to choose a term from the panel on the right, it flips back. At least once, I believe it flipped back when I paused to scratch my head.
Another weird thing happened when I tried to export the .txt file. I got a huge list of warnings saying that I had omitted this or that Japanese word (I didn't look closely this time as I was distracted by something else, but it appeared to be nearly every word in the translation.) Also, I got a warning about all the numbers being wrong. Clearly, MQ isn't making the connection between single byte and double byte numbers. Fortunately I was able to override these warnings and export anyway, but meaningless warnings don't help with quality control.
If you'd like to discuss establishing some sort of beta testing arrangement with me, I'll be happy to document everything carefully.
Thanks.
| | | | | Feedback mechanism | May 12, 2009 |
Rod Walters wrote:
If you'd like to discuss establishing some sort of beta testing arrangement with me, I'll be happy to document everything carefully.
This reminds me of something I asked elsewhere and am still hoping to find out: is there on online feedback form or some sort of standardized form/tool for bug reporting? That would be useful to me and might make it easier to provide the context to Kilgray's support for troubleshooting.
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