memoQ 2013 in a single word – Quality

You are busy and have not even got enough time to read a tweet so I will tell you in a single word. Quality! It is as simple as that, memoQ 2013 is all about quality. You can download memoQ 2013 from the  Kilgray website:
 
You will probably already have noticed immediately that Kilgray has jumped 2006.8 versions and gone from memoQ 6.2 to memoQ 2013. I believe this change of name reflects the growing maturity of our approach to software development. When I first joined Kilgray over five years ago, the time period immediately after the release was known as the disaster zone. Prior to memoQ 3 Kilgray relied on our customers to help us find and fix bugs. From 2008 we started improving the quality of our testing and bug fixing process. This was greatly improved in 2011 when as well as our own testers, we employed an external testing team. memoQ 6 was a problem because of the huge changes that resulted from our refactoring the software. At this stage we have very professional software design, development, testing and releases processes in places. We have also been extremely fortunate attracting some very high calibre additions to our development team.
 
Here are some of the new functionality in memoQ 2013

Filters
There are several new filters in memoQ 2013 including:
 

•  PO Gettext filter – PO files are very commonly used in developing Open Source and other software and are often used in games development. This filter allows a very effective way for localising PO files.
• xliff:doc – This is a variant of XLIFF that was created by the Interoperability now! group. We have implemented both the xliff:doc and TIPP package which is a container for the translation resources.

 
API
We have published two new APIs: one for X-translate and the other for machine translation. The machine translation API will allow a third party to create an MT plugin in memoQ for their system.

Terminology
We have implemented fuzzy lookup for terminology within memoQ.
In qTerm we have several important new features. These include filtering duplicates, searching and replacing metadata and usability improvements to the ‘pretty print’ functionality.
 
Websearch
The Web search feature is something which I think will have a lot of people asking why was this not there before. You customize your web search to use whichever online dictionaries or other resources you want to use. Then highlight a word in memoQ and press Ctrl+f3 and you will see a dialog with tabs for the pages you are searching on.

 

General
Some other highlights include:
 

• The ability to export online document as html
• Translating concordance
• Fragment assembly improvements, including the translation of numbers-only segments
• memoQ web search
• LiveDocs – find and replace
• LiveDocs – add term, add non-translatable, look up term, concordance search
• Edit distance – This is a way to calculate the difference between two strings which has been used with MT for some time. In memoQ you can now see leverage statistics based on the edit distance

 
Server installation and backup and restore
With memoQ 2013 we greatly improve the ease with which you can install a copy of memoQ server. The screenshot below shows you what you see when you start to install memoQ 2013. It tells you whether or not memoQ Server or memoQweb is installed on your machine and allows you to remove, repair or upgrade memoQ server or memoQ web. In addition this is where backups and restore are done and again this has been rewritten and greatly improved.

 

 

Quality
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the single word you can associate memoQ 2013 is quality. We have had Quality Assurance functionality in memoQ for a long time. However in memoQ 2013 there have been some very significant enhancements. We have been studying how a number of organisations use quality models such as the LISA QA model or JS2450. What we have done is we developed a way of using these LQA (Linguistic Quality Assurance) models, modifying them to suit your purpose or creating your own from scratch.
 

 

You can also see the new Resource Console in this screenshot.
 
The LQA model allows you to categorise errors by what aspect of quality (like accuracy or terminology) is affected, and how bad (e.g. minor, major) the problem is. It is the human reviewer tagging segments or expressions with such errors, simply by pressing Shift+Enter instead of Ctrl+Enter. memoQ will use this data to perform an LQA analysis of the document or project being translated and will present results for each error.
 

 

The LQA model can be used to drill down to issues which occur in a particular segment. In this case there are several problems with spaces in the segment and these are reported in the review pane.
 

 

The addition of the LQA models is a major addition to memoQ but we have not stopped there when it comes to improving quality.
 
Discussions have been greatly improved, as we discussed in this blog post  http://kilgray.blogspot.com/2013/05/query-management-is-not-so-difficult.html.
 
We have also enhanced the functionality for someone revising the document. The changes to how we deal with comments will also greatly improve the revision process. It is now possible to categorise notes and have multiple comments. These can also be audited by the reviser.

 

I hope that you get to use memoQ 2013 and find it improves your translation business. You can download memoQ 2013 from the  Kilgray website.