In the midst of high-power features like LiveAlign, regex searches, template automation and all the rest, it’s easy to forget this little guy. It has been with memoQ almost from the start, and we tend to notice it only when something goes wrong.
Ironically, the live preview began as technology’s answer to a problem created by technology itself. If you translate a Word document in Word, then you see exactly what goes where, what is a title, what is a caption, what’s a footnote etc. But memoQ’s premise is that you work in memoQ, not Word, and translate, segment by segment, in a grid. The problem is, this kind of editor is just a bit too egalitarian: every segment looks like the next one. It’s easy to lose track of context. And what is a translator without context?
Live preview is memoQ’s remedy to this self-inflicted wound. We dedicate a part of the screen to show the segments as they appear in the actual document. Well, not precisely how they will appear, because the preview is only as good as a Word file’s HTML approximation. But it’s good enough to know where you are in the context of the full document. If you click around in either the preview or the editor, the other one jumps to the right spot and highlights it.
Those were preview’s humble beginnings, and boy, are we surprised how far it has come! First, translators found a use case we didn’t anticipate. The preview is awesome for reviewing your own work! Apparently if you look at the same text in a slightly different form, you are able to spot tiny mistakes that hide in plain sight in the layout where you first wrote the text.
Then our users became so prosperous (in part, no doubt, thanks to memoQ) that they started investing in second monitors. We got the subtle hint and quickly built a function that allows you to undock the preview into a separate window. By dragging this window onto the extra screen you can see more context while you also have more room to breathe in the editor. The investment into that second monitor is thereby fully justified.
Over the years memoQ implemented live preview for a host of other formats too, including Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, XML and more. With a feature so popular, we inevitably ran into ugly limitations. If the Word file was large, then the browser embedded into memoQ choked, and the whole tool froze. We had to set a limit on the preview’s size. Better a working tool with no preview than a tool that freezes up on you altogether. Somewhat similarly, a few years ago HTML disappeared from PowerPoint as a “Save As” option, and that left memoQ without preview for PPT and PPTX files.
These two problems are now gone with the release of memoQ 8.1. We did a bit of the black magic that developers do. No matter how big the Word file, memoQ can now handle the preview. We also circumvented Office’s limitation, and preview is back in its full glory for PowerPoint.
Over the years the preview evolved in other ways too. Through our free InDesign converter (which we offer through Language Terminal), you also get live, HTML-based preview for INDD and IDML files, and you can even generate a final PDF with a single click, straight from memoQ. If your content is XML and you have a corresponding XSLT file, memoQ doesn’t show the kind of nerdy stuff that looks like “View Page Source” in a browser, but instead you get a nicely formatted layout meant for humans.
Talking about file formats – memoQ’s specially formatted live preview for multilingual Excel files triggered yet another use case we didn’t originally anticipate. That is searching within the preview itself, via the embedded browser’s search function that pops up if you press Ctrl+F within this panel. This turned out to be useful because the preview includes comments and context IDs too. Here we made a blunder that we still regret: in a move to confine that embedded browser we removed this (unintended) sneaky search function. That’s one bad decision that we are reverting now with memoQ 8.1. You can search away to your heart’s delight again!
Recently we integrated with Easyling, an innovative, proxy-based solution for website translation. Typically, the content shown in websites comes from obscure places and in some mysterious order. There’s no way to know what’s an item in a drop-down list, what’s a top-level menu, and what’s the text of a popup that only shows if you click on the animated GIF of a monkey eating a banana. With Easyling you see all these texts directly in the website’s context, and with the memoQ integration, you see the website in memoQ’s own preview area.
Talking about the web… memoQ’s web-based editor is no less powerful than the desktop tool. If you’re translating a Word document in Chrome on your Linux or Mac, you get the exact same preview as your colleagues working in memoQ on Windows. It goes without saying that you can also see each other’s translations in real time.
So, that’s my ode to memoQ’s unsung hero, the live preview. For a modest function with such an inconspicuous name, it adds a whole lot of value for translators.
Gábor Ugray
Head of Innovation at memoQ
