Five things we love in memoQ 8.2

At first sight, the new things in memoQ 8.2 look like the finishing touches on a very long saga – a new plot line here, a rewritten paragraph there, a word or two deleted for clarity. However, this is not doing justice to the work that went into this new release; neither is it doing justice to the benefits you get from the improvements.
There is a story behind every new feature. I have a story for most of them, in fact – I have shared those in a webinar last week. But this post shouldn’t be about me.

Here’s a list of the five new features that are the most important in this new release – according to a number of my colleagues who were either working on the new functionality, or already had the chance to talk to customers about them.

The list is a result of the votes of ten members of the Kilgray team. Some of these new things work best for individual translators; others may do wonders for organizations and their project managers.

1 The winner by far: New ways to deal with machine translation – multiple settings, MatchPatch, tags, and MT concordance

Yes, you heard it right: there are so many ways machine translation can be used sensibly – and I think we are right to be happy that memoQ finally makes this happen.

First, if you’re a translation provider (individual or organization, doesn’t matter) who runs machine translation for clients: You can now set up machine translation in the online project, and you can use a different configuration in each of your projects. Machine translation settings are now resources like segmentation rules or ignore lists. Practically, you can set up a project template that has the right machine translation settings for each client. “I think the biggest thing is that it's now a breeze to set up MT for a team, while it used to be a nightmare, because every team member had to configure it locally one by one”, says design team lead Gergely Vándor.

Why this is important: An organization must use customized machine translation. If you want the translation post-edited, never use a generic service like Google or Bing – for one, it will never be good enough; for two, your confidentiality agreements probably won’t allow it.

Second, now memoQ knows that machine translation gets better if you ask for just a few words rather than for an entire sentence or an entire document. memoQ can MatchPatch a translation memory match from machine translation if there is no suitable terminology hit – it will look like you get a corrected match from the translation memory. Plus, memoQ will make effort to get the tags right (with certain machine translation services). According to software designer Tamás Rell, “it will eventually spare the individual translator from a lot of mechanical work”.

And there is machine translation concordance. While you’re working on a document, select a few words, and then hit Ctrl+Shift+K. memoQ will ask the machine translation service about them, and show the answer in the Translation results list.

2 A strong second: The WordPress filter

memoQ got better at importing files from WordPress websites – it has a new document filter for that. Tamás Rell says that “previously, the XLIFF coming from WordPress was close to unusable, and it took a lot of time and regex experience before you could translate it normally. Now this mechanical work is all done by the machine.”

However, this new WordPress filter is but the first step on a longer journey – memoQ 8.3 and the releases after it will bring about much closer integration with WordPress and the like.

3  Three: Customer Portal – it can count money now

Customer Portal is actually a big thing for organizations. Translation teams can open up their memoQ servers so that customers can send in work directly. As account executive Ádám Marjai says, “[Customer Portal] makes it ever so easy to submit translation jobs for enterprises”.

In memoQ 8.2, Customer Portal actually includes the price in the quotes, not just the word counts. “The word count of a job is informative for people [who converse about] translation management, but now you can convert it to the universal unit of money too”, says software designer Veronika Pándi.

And hey – Customer Portal is now available on memoQ cloud servers.
For now, you can license and use Customer Portal for free. However, this will not stay like this forever. To learn more, please contact us.

4  Tie in the fourth place, part 1: Open workflows in package projects

This is great for smaller teams who get work from larger players. When a project manager sets up a package, it is always for a certain role (translator, first reviewer, or master reviewer).

Previously, if you wanted to work on that package, you could work in that role only. To do other work (like a translation, then a review), you had to manually export the bilingual documents from the package, and create a new project.

In memoQ 8.2, as Veronika Pándi explains, “vendors who receive a package can now do their regular process regardless of the role setting in the main project”. That saves time for the ever so hurried project manager.

5  Tie in the fourth place, part 2: Reimport multilingual Excel or XML documents

Imagine you are translating a game into, say, twenty target languages. You receive a new version of the source document.

If you are using memoQ 8.1 or earlier, you must make sure everything is in the translation memories; remove the original document. Then you need to import the new document, and pre-translate it. For every target language.

In memoQ 8.2, you simply reimport this document – then memoQ will automatically X-translate and pre-translate it (if your project is based on a template, that is).

This is the kind of improvement I waited for most eagerly – the one that finally begins to tidy up things. Here’s a seemingly unnecessary limitation, which is removed at last. Software QA guru Gusztáv Jánvári thinks “it will spare hours of work with complex files”.

+1  Tie in the fourth place, part 3: Export change-tracked documents anytime

In the past, you could ask memoQ to compare two versions of a translated document. Then you got a view like tracked changes. But you could never export that.

Now you have an “extremely useful and visual report comparing two states of a translation”, which “is now available whenever you need it”, as Veronika Pándi put it.

Open a document that has a history – that is, at least one past version. On the Review tab, click Compare versions. Choose the two versions you need to compare. Then click Compare versions again, and choose Export changes to Word.

Other strong contenders

Choosing just five favorite new features was a close call. I have failed, in fact: I have listed six. There were other strong contenders, and I also have even more personal favorites.

To get a full list of new things in memoQ 8.2, check out this page: https://help.memoq.com/8-2/en/index.html?discover-memoq-8_2.html
 
Finally, let me thank the ten colleagues who helped me with answers. I apologize to everyone I didn’t have the chance to ask – next time I’ll try and do better.