This is a book review of New Beginnings with memoQ which was written by Kevin Lossner and Cátea Caleço Murta.
The introduction describes the book as a sandwich. It is usually the middle section of the sandwich which first attracts your attention so I will deal with this first. This section consists of four in depth tutorials. Interestingly and invitingly these are called your first job, second job etc. Your First Job is a tutorial which shows you how to use memoQ for the first time. You are introduced to the memoQ Project Wizard, statistics, translation memories and term bases. You are shown how to use pseudo translation, how to apply basic QA processes and how to deal with versioning. Each step of the process from creating the project to archiving is explained in detail. At the end of this and the other sections there is a series of exercises to help consolidate your learning.
Every translator has to deal with new versions of the text they are translating and The Second Job deals with this. It explains what X-Translate is and how to use it to update your project. This chapter also show how to deal with documents where there are several languages used in the one file and you only have to translate one of those languages.
The Third Job introduces LiveDocs. Anyone who reads Kevin’s blog will be aware that he sees this as very important and powerful functionality. In this section you are shown how to build up a reference corpus. You are also introduced to Project templates and shown how you can use them to speed up project creation. In addition to these topics, this section also show to use memoQ’s term extraction functionality and how to share your terminology via Language Terminal.
The Fourth Job deals with projects from memoQ server as well as using memoQ for translation projects created in other tools. There are some very useful tips and tricks for dealing with memoQ server projects. This section also explains how to deal with packages from STAR Transit, Trados Studio and SDL WorldServer.
These four ‘jobs’ comprise the middle bit of the sandwich. The first part shows you how to navigate memoQ’s user interface. It is a very well explained introduction to where to find the memoQ functionality which you will want.
The final section of the book is a treasure trove of useful tips. It is simply called This and That but it contains some very useful information from a memoQ glossary to ideas on optimizing the tool. This final section covers almost half the book and there is something useful on every page.
New Beginnings with memoQ is a brilliant resource for any translator. I suspect the only complaint about it will be from experienced memoQ users and the complaint will be “Why wasn’t this available when I was starting with memoQ?”. Information on where the book is available can be found on this link to Kevin’s blog.
