The open office hours announced recently have turned out to be a good thing. For me at least. As I’m working on a few tutorial book projects, I had decided to change the plan for my planned QA and memoQ regex applications course, and instead offer an open Zoom chat Thursday mornings (Lisbon time, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.) and free short consultations for a while in which people can ask me about those topics and get advice, perhaps even some solutions.
The selfish motivation behind all that free time is that I hope to get a wider exposure to current problems that memoQ users and their teams struggle with so that the books, if and when I finish them (the first in three or four months, I hope) will reflect more than the many past problems I’ve encountered in my work or assistance rendered to others. Challenges evolve frequently, and I’m often surprised by some of the things others must deal with, even in areas quite familiar to me.
So it was in an office hours help chat on September 26th. I’ve been helping an English to German medical translation team sort out some of their Qualitätssicherung and workflow issues, and today the team leader dropped in to ask why memoQ was complaining about words that were not in the term bases selected for the QA check:
My favorite is the suggestion that “Titer” ought to be written as “Toter”. I can just see some monkey at a bottom-feeding LSP implement and deliver the translation with such changes.
But what the hell was going on here?! I hadn’t had my fourth coffee of the morning yet, so I was still a little groggy. So I missed the obvious clue.
The team leader screen shared and we had a look at the online project. The special QA term bases were selected, and the general terminology repositories weren’t. Good. The utterly useless EuroTermBank plug-in was disabled. Thank God.
So we started looking through the tabs of the special QA settings profile for that client. Here’s where our personal habits seem to have affected what we were able to see the first time through. And the second time. And the third time. Jeez! I began swearing creatively.
I had noticed that obvious clue in the meantime. Misspelled word. Clearly a spelling check was being performed, but how? I always run spellchecking manually (keyboard shortcut F7
), didn’t even know that was possible in a QA profile (some expert, huh?), and when I looked, I saw nothing. Certainly not on the first tab where I might have expected such a thing.
So I had them export the configuration and open it in a text editor:
Sure enough, there was some kind of spelling check, and the value for it was set to true, so we changed that to false, and the immediate problem was solved after the configuration was re-imported.
They were utterly baffled by all this, because, I was told, spelling checks didn’t work in their installation. And they proceeded to show me how attempts to run a spelling check with F7
or to configure the Options > Spelling and grammar settings just threw errors. A lot of people seem to have problems like that with memoQ, and I suspect that’s due to a mix of possibly incompatible older or corrupted versions of Microsoft Word, a lack of understanding about how Hunspell dictionaries work, or just the common training deficit.
But it is interesting to note that even when you can’t run a spelling check manually, it still seems to work somehow using the QA settings profiles.
We did finally notice where those spelling check settings are:
Surprise, surprise. That setting isn’t selected by the horrible Default configuration that was installed on the computer I’m using now, so I think someone must have done that manually and simply forgot about it. The default settings are cloned every time someone makes a “new” QA settings profile, which is why I substituted completely empty settings as my default profile on my usual working computer and my research server. How to do this was explained in my recent webinar on memoQ’s QA features, for which a recording is available on Patreon or here:
For a specialist team like that bunch of medical translators, a general spelling dictionary is almost guaranteed to be a source of many annoying false positives in both routine manual spelling checks and spelling checks performed via the selected QA settings profile.
So what can be done to fix that? Two things.
First off, you might want to mark that checkbox for ignoring things in your project’s non-translatables lists. These will be found under Project home > Settings.
Secondly, Ignore lists are your friends. But friends are hard to find! So look in the Resource console:
Or on the Ignore these tab of the Spell checking dialog:
When you run a spelling check, if you encounter an unknown word that should be recognized, clicking the Add button on the Spelling tab to write that word into the ignore list chosen for that.
Then the next time a spelling check is performed, that word will not be indicated as a possible error. Note that in the Resource console, it is possible to exchange ignore lists with Microsoft Word (custom dictionaries).