4. First Translation - Typing the translations
Open your document for translation
memoQ displays your job in a place called Project home. In Project home, there is a page called Translations, which has a list of the documents you need to translate. This page opens immediately after memoQ prepares the project:
To start translating a document, double-click its name. Or, click the name, and then, on the ribbon, click the Translate icon.
The document opens in a tabbed window
memoQ opens a new tabbed window for the document. The text will appear in two columns. The left column has the source-language text. You can type – or insert – your translation on the right. There are cells in both columns. memoQ divides the text into segments, and displays each segment in a new cell:
This layout with the columns and the cells is called the translation grid.
Translate the first segment
Type the translation of the first segment in the cell next to the source text. When you finish, press Ctrl+Enter. This will save your translation to the translation memory; mark the segment as confirmed (note the green tick mark); and jump to the next segment. When you press Ctrl+Enter, you confirm the segment.
Note that 'Charing Cross' is set in bold, both in the source cell and in the translation. It wasn’t automatic. Before you confirm the segment, you need to select that part, and press Ctrl+B, just like in Microsoft Word.
You can go back to previous segments whenever you need to, and change them, even after they were confirmed. When you make changes, don’t forget to confirm the segment again.
No need to save: memoQ stores your job in a database. Every change you make is automatically saved in a few seconds. When you close the document, the project, or memoQ itself, your changes are automatically saved, too.
Look down: at the bottom of the memoQ window, you get a preview of what your translation will look like. When you confirm a segment, the source text is replaced with its translation. Note the screenshot: in the preview – it’s called the View pane –, the first sentence is in German, but the rest remains in English.
Translate the next segment – and mind the tags
In the next segment, ‘Line 26’ is between two strange-looking labels. These are called inline tags, and they stand for formatting that memoQ cannot display in the grid itself. If you look down, you will see that ‘Line 26’ is red in the original text:
Type the translation of the segment:
Don’t confirm the segment yet. Find the translation of the “tagged” part. In our case, it will be ’Bus Nummer 26’. Place the cursor right before ‘Bus’, and press F9. Then place the cursor next to ‘26’, and press F9 again. Note the tags that appear in the translated text. Now confirm the segment. Here is the result in the grid and in the preview:
The tags are properly in place: whatever is red in the source, it becomes red in the translation, too.
Good to know: If the tags appear in pairs like in the example, you can select the text (‘Bus Nummer 26’), and press F9 just once. memoQ will place the two tags around the expression you selected.
There’s a lot more about writing and editing translations: See the documentation about the translation editor and its parts.
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