The reason why the acronym RTFM is so commonly used is few of us read the manual. It is worse. Most of us, well at least me, imagine that people who read manuals get played in movies by a very twitchy, neurotic Dustin Hoffman who stares at you for longer periods than appropriate and makes even your fat and lazy cat give up the seat by the fire because she is too nervous to be in the same room.
Of course the manuals for memoQ are really well written and relatively easy to use but there may be easier ways to get yourself trained than even our manuals. Kevin Lossner has provided us with an educational, enjoyable and useful reference book, ‘memoQ 6 in Quick Steps’, which he has just published on the Lulu website: http://www.lulu.com/shop/kevin-lossner/memoq-6-in-quick-steps/ebook/product-20503773.html.
The book presumes you know something of memoQ but it provides enough information to be of use to any level of reader. It is a common mistake of reference books on software to let features and functionality decide the contents. This book takes the much more user friendly and productive way of having each chapter deal with issues which the user will actually want to do. Most of the chapters in the book have the feel of tutorials which Kevin has already tried on real users and has improved them after listening carefully to their feedback.
Kevin is a very experienced translator who also trains and does consulting work for translation customers and translation companies. He seems to know the really simple issues which would make their lives easier and this book is full of good advice which can do just that. The section on organizing your work strikes me as a great example of this. There is advice on organizing projects, translation memories and term bases. There is a wonderful screenshot at the beginning of the book which shows what can happen when you do not think about how to organize your work at an early stage.
One of the most powerful technologies introduced into memoQ in the last two years has been LiveDocs Corpora. Many people who use this seem to use it as a safety net when something goes wrong with their TMs they use the automated alignment functionality to recreate them. While this is obviously useful it is like buying a Porsche and using it only for visiting the local shops. Kevin shows how you can get more power from LiveDocs. The sections on Adding Monolingual References and Adding Media Files to LiveDocs are particularly useful.
This book is a value to anyone who uses memoQ. Kevin has informed us that he will be keeping it updated and will be sending out these updates to registered purchasers. Readers of his, Translation Tribulations blog, http://www.translationtribulations.com/, will already how prolific and useful are Kevin’s writings on memoQ. He is to be congratulated on a well written and very valuable book.
