The reason why I personally love translating is that it is the best way to understand what we could do better.
And I am not only talking about memoQ’s design here, but also our internal processes. Translating our software gives me a lot of ideas because I see the mistakes we make on the interface and in the documentation, and it makes me think a lot how I would need to forward my feedback to the right person and how I could ensure that all my feedbacks are considered.
Yes, dear Reader, I, the poor schizophrenic CEO-translator, am dreaming about a query management system, something that many companies, lacking a real collaboration platform, have built for themselves. The problem is that these are very distinct systems and do not integrate well enough with any translation environment. So we had a wild idea: let’s design something that offers the right information to the right people.
As the first requirement, we decided that all discussions, all queries should be initiated straight from what they concern, and all queries should contain pointers to the related topic or topics. Many things can be wrong: the source segment, a specific term or concept, an entire document, an entire term base, a translation or the reviewer’s changes to that translation. Second, we realized that when it comes to texts, there are many stakeholders: sometimes you need a developer to fix the resizing of a dialog, sometimes you need the technical writers to improve on the source, and sometimes it is the marketing manager who needs to acknowledge and correct certain issues. Third, we identified that the most typical communication happens between translators, reviewers and project managers, and this communication may involve rating.
memoQ 2013’s most impressive feature set – especially on the server and memoQweb side – involves the most tightly integrated discussion and linguistic quality assurance. This new functionality is replacing the old forums with a much more sophisticated technology. Now anyone can start discussions on any topic – a term, a segment, a document, a term base, etc. –, from memoQ, webTrans and qTerm as well, and assign the discussions to users. Users get email notifications and can log in to comment on, or resolve issues. All discussions have a status, and the initiating user can check the status of all topics they initiated, but also others with the right permissions are able to monitor issues.
The project manager can also set up a human quality assurance model with an error typology, and the reviewer can mark and categorize every error – however, if the translator does not agree, they can start a discussion on it. So nothing goes undiscussed and unresolved. We have taken inspiration from some of our best internal systems, and took the whole functionality to the next level.
I bet that we will use discussions a lot in Kilgray. It really boosts the value of our browser-based systems: now it is really easy to involve your customer, whether that is a colleague or a paying customer, in your thinking processes. I am very proud of our democratic approach: once again, we give functionality that was only available in 100k+ euro TMS installations for a fraction of the price. The linguistic quality assurance is even part of memoQ translator pro.
