LiveDocs corpora: attach your own to server-based client projects
Better practice for best results
In a recent discussion among friends who teach translation support technologies, the topic of “basics” came up, and as I expected, there was little agreement at first and much confusion about what these actually are. I’ve learned to be on my guard when someone says they “know memoQ”, as this can mean many things too many people. In recent years, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard people ask for help, and then see a great disconnect between the experienced users providing advice based on their work on local projects with memoQ desktop versions and the confused question asker who only knows the webslave interface or, if they do use memoQ desktop editions, they don’t have a license of their own and do not understand how to make, maintain and apply their own local resources in memoQ.
And surprisingly, even some users with long experience working on server-based projects using their own licenses are unaware of how much control they can actually take over the configuration of the memoQ project and how their own, better data can be used in these online projects without giving the data away to a remote project manager or revealing their own proprietary resources.
When the desktop copy of memoQ you are using has an active license (this could be a CAL license which is only active while your project is open, or it could be a permanent license of the Translator Pro or Project Manager edition), you are able to
attach useful server resources to a local project if you have authorized access to a remote memoQ TMS server or
attach (as well as create and then attach) local resources to be used in server-based projects. These local resources are invisible to the server operator but are at your disposal to help you work better with familiar tools and data.
The ability to create and use local resources in a server-based project applies to LiveDocs too.
In the desktop editions, you have dynamic control of your working configuration. Even if you don’t have your own permanent license or don’t have a right to take a concurrent access license (CAL) when you start memoQ, and you rely on a CAL available only when a particular project is open, you have full control over local software features like any user with a permanent license.
For LiveDocs this means you can:
create your own local corpora and attach them to the project;
disconnect any server-based corpora you find unhelpful;
do your own alignments and put them in a local corpus
import TMX or other bilingual data (like XLIFF files) to your own local corpora, and
export local corpus content to a local TM you create and then use that TM as an alternative master or working TM — local TMs also respond faster and can be quite helpful when there is a lot of lag accessing server-based data (ensuring that project synchronization is set to manual also helps a lot with performance in these cases).
Of course, all this is only possible if you are working with a memoQ desktop edition. However, if you have a memoQ license but are forced for some reason to work in the web browser interface of the memoQ TMS server (oh horror!) or in a different browser-based tool for a different translation management system, then you can still use your LiveDocs content by exporting it to a memoQ TM and using the TM search tool as described in the articles referenced above in embedded links.
Taking control of the resources you use in your work even when the project is on somebody else’s server isn’t one of those things usually taught in a basics class, but it ought to be. As professionals, we should be responsible for the quality of our output to the extent this is reasonable, and structuring your own project workspace to best suit your personal needs and apply the best resources available is part of this responsibility.