10. Livedocs - Recycling Document Pairs
Translate a new document from the translation of its previous version
Let’s say you need to translate the setup guide for memoQ 8.7. It’s a bit too much for one day – but not if we can work from the guide that was written for memoQ 2015. They are similar enough; the memoQ 8.x guides were made from the memoQ 2015 guides, modifying them just enough to follow up with changes.
Start as usual: drop the new document on memoQ
You need the Dashboard of memoQ for this. If you have a project open, close it by clicking the X on the Project home tab. Or, if memoQ isn’t running, open it.
Drop the new document on memoQ, and then click Start translating:
Set up your project in the same way as described in the Preparations chapter.
Go to Project home, and then to LiveDocs
The place where memoQ helps you collect earlier documents is called LiveDocs. When your project is ready, and memoQ opens the Translations page, don’t open the new document.
Instead, in Project home, click the LiveDocs icon.
Create a LiveDocs corpus
On the LiveDocs ribbon, click Create/Use New. We don’t have the old documents yet: the thing you create here is the container for the documents, called a LiveDocs corpus. It’s just like folding a cardboard sheet into an empty box.
In the New corpus window, it’s enough to fill in the name of the corpus, although we recommend that you complete the rest of the fields, too, so that you will know what client and subject field this corpus belongs to.
Type at least a name for the corpus, and click OK.
Import the two documents
memoQ returns to the LiveDocs page, which has two lists: one at the top and another at the bottom. In the upper list, memoQ shows the corpora. When you select a corpus, memoQ will list the documents it contains in the lower part of the window.
After you create the new corpus, it will be selected, and it will be ready for use in your project, too. All you need to do now is add the pair of documents.
On the LiveDocs ribbon, click Import document. An Open window appears. Find and select the “old” source-language document, then click Open.
The Document import options window opens, where you can control how memoQ will import this document. For now, you need to set the language only. In the Language dropdown box at the bottom of this window, choose the language of the document, then click OK. (memoQ won’t recognize the language of the document this time.)
…
memoQ will import the document, and add it to the list at the bottom of the LiveDocs page.
Then click Import again, and find the target-language document – the translation of the “old” document that you want to recycle. When you open it, memoQ will display the Document import options window again. You need to select the language of the target-language document, then click OK.
Link the documents: make memoQ align them
After both documents are imported, the list in the LiveDocs page looks like this:
Click the first document. Then press and hold down Ctrl, and click the other document, too.
On the LiveDocs ribbon, click Link Documents. The Link Documents window appears. In the upper part of this window, click the source language of the project. In addition, check the Remove source document check box. Then click OK (no need to worry about the other options for now):
memoQ will align the two documents. This means that the documents will be divided into segments, and each segment in the source document will be paired with one or more segments from the target document. On top of that, memoQ will build a database from these segments, so that you will immediately receive matches from the LiveDocs corpus – much the same way as from a translation memory.
After a successful alignment, the LiveDocs pane looks like this:
At this point, memoQ can give you translations from the old document: you are ready to translate.
Translate the new document: open, pre-translate, and review it
In Project home, click the Translations icon on the left. The Translations list returns:
Double-click the name of the new document to start translating it. The familiar translation grid opens.
Don’t begin to type translations. Instead, click the Preparation ribbon tab.
On the Preparation ribbon, click Pre-translate. The Pre-translate and statistics window appears.
Click the Good TM or corpus match radio button, and click OK. You need this setting because from LiveDocs corpora, memoQ will, by default, not return matches that have a higher score than 85%.
memoQ fills in a lot of segments in the translation:
Note that the alignment will not always be perfect: this is inevitable when computers try to work with human language. But most of it will be correct, and – as you can see – you will be saved from doing most of the translation.
Important: You can pre-translate your documents from translation memories, too – not just LiveDocs corpora –, but with translation memories, you would normally choose Exact match or Exact match with context in the Pre-translate and statistics window. This means that you don’t want memoQ to fill in segments where the best match from the translation memory scores lower than 100%. Of course, this depends on the nature of your work.
There is more about LiveDocs and recycling documents: See the documentation about LiveDocs and the LiveDocs page in Project home, and explore the neighboring topics.
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