“One of the disadvantages of LiveDocs,” my friend said, “is that you can’t make a project TM from a corpus.”
Well, he was sort of wrong, but what is a project TM anyway?
When you analyze files in a project in memoQ, there is an option called Create project TM (not selected by default). When it is selected, if matches are found in the analysis, the corresponding translation units can be exported to a memoQ translation memory or a TMX file (possibly for sharing with translators using other translation environments). To export the matching content, simply click the Project TM… button at the right side of the dialog. The following dialog appears:
However, when I examine the TM chosen in the example, I see that nothing was exported to it!
In this particular case, that’s because this particular translation memory is in the new TM+ format, which even more than a year after its introduction is still buggy and not well integrated with many memoQ functions. Unfortunately, since memoQ version 10.5, this is the default format for all new TMs, so you must manually uncheck the TM+ box every time you create a new translation memory. The marketing gurus like to push what’s new, but please ignore them in this case for now (currently memoQ version 10.6.12).
But even if you use the older, perfectly stable TM format, you’ll find that my friend seems to have been right. If you run an analysis in a project with no translation memories selected, just some well-curated LiveDocs corpora full of past translations and good quality alignments, you’ll see the matches, and the button for exporting a project TM will be enabled. But when you do that (as I did in the case of the TMX file shown below), no translation units are exported!
Oh my. What am I to do? Try the following steps, and you’ll succeed.
On the Translation memories project page, create a new, empty TM.
Go to the LiveDocs page.
Select the corpus and the documents in it that you want to use for making the project TM. In the screenshot example above, I’ve selected only four, just to make the point that you can be selective. Keyword filtering might be helpful here. Note also that I am taking the content from an online corpus just to show that is possible.
Use the Export to TM button in the ribbon menu, and select your new empty TM.
Re-run the analysis with the Create project TM checkbox enabled and then export the project TM content. If that intermediate TM is the only one selected, you are guaranteed that the project TM will be drawn exclusively from your LiveDocs content.
Now you have a usable export.
What good is this? Well, the project TM gives the translator relevant match content without giving away or giving access to the entire translation memory. With online projects, most project managers lack the training to keep translators from making local copies of TMs, though to be fair, most translators lack the training to know how to do this. But it’s still something to think about.
Because LiveDocs is a superior reference source that gives you full access to the written context of the the source text and translation, many experienced translators make corpora their repositories of choice for well-curated reference content. Corpora also have the advantage of being able to select a limited number of important documents and copy these to a new reference corpus for a particular project, thus maintaining better control over reference information.
But this project with the intermediate TM might be consider a PITA by many people. So what can we do about that? See my post about the memoQ Ideas Portal, where you can suggest that memoQ developers upgrade LiveDocs and the Project TM function so that
LiveDocs content can be taken directly for a project TM, and of course so
TM+ translation memories will also work for making project TMs!
This will also be useful if you have, say, a regular largish-volume client, and after each translation, you add your pristine translation to LiveDocs, and then follow the above steps. I can see that it will make the Project TM for this client far more robust, with the Translation Results you want more likely to be at the top of the list, and also nearer the top of the Concordance searches. Nice, Kevin!