memoQ on your own terms!
Free public workshops in February for terminology mastery in translation
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There will be a third workshop sometime in late March for terminology applications in memoQ with regular expression resources. Time and date to be announced.
Update: recordings of the first and second workshops here:
A typical lesson on terminology use with translation environment tools goes something like this:
“Here’s how you make a term base.” Click, click, click.
“Now we’re going to learn how to add words to it!” Click, click, click.
Later, you might wonder why things often don’t work as expected. Entries you know are in the glossary just don’t show up in your translation results matches, though they can be seen in the term bases themselves.
Or when you do a QA run to check for errors in the use of terms, you encounter an overwhelming number of false positives and don’t know what to do about that.
Maybe you’re a new memoQ user, and you wonder about weird terminology suggestions in the Translation results pane, which often don’t make much sense.
Or your customer sends you “the terminology” in the form of a translation memory export and demands that you comply with it, but you notice that important expressions for that customer’s product or service are translated many different ways in that resource, and it’s not clear which of the myriad translations you should use.
Or maybe you are looking for better ways to share a glossary with your customer or work team for various purposes.
The slides from my ITA talk hinted at some of the specific features that are relevant to different aspects of terminology work in memoQ. But the topic is even greater than those suggest, as I did for that workshop, in the next two sessions I’ll provide links and resources for further exploration of topics that may be of personal interest for your work which are discussed superficially or perhaps are outside the scope of the three hours of planned instruction.
The nice thing about memoQ is that you can accomplish a lot by knowing just a little, and I do try to emphasize those few features and steps that will handle most issues likely to be encountered.
But unlike many alternative platforms, memoQ has a depth of possibilities for more complex, even exceptional cases that can shock and awe even seasoned translation veterans. They key to mastering memoQ is not to memorize all 500 kazillion features and commands without context or priority, but to understand well the minimum needed to get your jobs done. That may change with time, but with a solid, minimalist foundation you’ll be better prepared for those deeper dives you may need to take someday.
I have many hours of recorded video tutorials and webinars on terminology matters, as well as many thousands of written words in articles on various platforms. The slides from the ITA talk reference some of these. But software evolves, and our understanding of processes and good practice evolve as well, so presentations from a few years ago may no longer describe how things work in current versions or reflect new possibilities with newer technology.
So I’ll be going over some old ground, and some very old ground, and breaking a few new trails for some of you. For me too, maybe.
If you have personal challenges related to terminology in memoQ that you would like to see addressed in the February talk, you’re welcome to send these to me (with clear examples if possible) by direct message on any of the platforms where I maintain a presence (not Xitter!!! Substack, LinkedIn, Facebook, Bluesky or Mastodon are best).