This week in LiveDocs....
a look at what's ahead with memoQ's least understood power toolkit
As mentioned in a recent Substack Note, the mostly annual memoQ Fest will take place in Budapest from June 13-14, 2024, and my esteemed colleague and friend Marek Pawelec will be giving a short (25 minute) talk to raise awareness of the many unique possibilities offered by memoQ LiveDocs and its corpora. You may have heard LiveDocs mentioned more often lately by employees of memoQ Ltd., a good thing after so many years of neglecting one of the most promising and useful developments in the history of the memoQ translation environment. So if you’ll be joining the fun in Hungary this year, don’t miss Marek’s talk, and use my little addenda if you will to absorb his teaching better and to encourage the company to invest more in upgrading LiveDocs and its features.
Several years ago I began putting together and advertising a LiveDocs course on the Teachable platform, but at the time the software was at a more critical junction than I realized, a there was no simple way for users to do things like move content from one document collection (corpus) to another without undocumented workarounds, and one of the most useful features – storing files in their original (or “binary”) format – was so non-intuitive that a lot of users just couldn’t get it. So I put that effort on ice and, together with others, pushed for changes so that the average user wouldn’t have to become a master of funky workarounds to do so much useful stuff. All those friends and colleagues who expressed their confidence in my efforts by investing in that LiveDocs course have received a complimentary full year of access to this Substack blog, so they can finally see LiveDocs from the perspective I had hoped to offer in that half-finished online course. memoQ fixed enough that this is possible, though quirks remain, and I’ll talk about many of them this week and thereafter. The companion Substack, Translation Tribulations (same name as my Google blog) will also cover LiveDocs occasionally, so it might be worth following things there as well.
(Anyone who has read my first post in this Substack will be wondering now what happened to concise, but that is still very much my objective when it comes to the technical explanations ahead. I’m also considering structural reforms to text analogous to summary leads, followed by all the inglorious details for those who need and want them, and to video, with a leading highlight of a key moment akin to what Times Radio and other YouTube channels do with longer interviews. For knowledgeable users, that key moment in a 10 minute video might be 20 seconds long, and if others are a little confused by that, when they see that same moment some time later, it will likely be absorbed better.)
The LiveDocs posts from today until next Saturday will be inspired by discussions and notes exchanged with Marek as he prepared for his talk, as well as by questions that have been asked in recent months or which are posed to me by some convenient channel in the course of the week ahead. Anyone eager to dive deeply now into LiveDocs and its possibilities can consult the many videos on my YouTube channel or posts on my long-standing Translation Tribulations blog. These sources do not, however, reflect many of the recent improvements (like recasting those “binary” files as reference documents), but they cover the essentials, and you’ll get a good foundation for understanding the tricks and quirks in the posts you’ll see this week.
Some places to start:
memoQ LiveDocs: What Good Is It? (video, 1+ hour)
Importing reference files to memoQ LiveDocs (video, 3+ minutes, recent improvement)
Optimizing memoQ LiveDocs for bilingual documents and alignments (video, 10+ minutes)
Importing Multilingual Excel or Text to LiveDocs (video, 4+ minutes)
memoQ Translation Alignments (video, 8+ minutes)
… or have a look at the LiveDocs playlist, where I will be adding a few things in the days ahead.
So what’s on the draft of my LiveDocs “to post” list for the week so far?
“MQXLZ for me and thee”
importing multilingual data
how I learned to love orphans in alignment
segmentation rules in alignment
data on the move!
doing better with PDFs
one repository, many languages and
restoring document order for translation memories
in no particular order. Do you think something’s missing? Send me a message!
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