technology

Tech Tip: Converting Smart Punctuation to Straight Punctuation in MS Word

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Welcome to MS Office tech tips: quotes and apostrophes edition!

As this blog has discussed before, different clients have different document formatting and commenting requirements. Most of us probably have some clients who require all “smart” punctuation and others who require all “straight” punctuation.

So, what do you do if you don’t want to turn Word’s auto-formatting on and off every time you switch projects?

Well, it can be tricky. But if you’re struggling, I hope you can use the solution I’ve found to make life easier.

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Tech Tip: Changing the Commenter Name for Comments You Already Made

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Many of us translators work with clients who have very specific privacy requirements. If we don’t start our projects exactly right for those requirements, it can be quite time-consuming to fix everything individually later. But I’m happy to report that I’ve found a great solution for changing commenter names, so I’d like to share it … Read more

memoQ Light Resources, and a Freebie

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Apologies for the delay in the next installment of the emergency series–I have not forgotten about it, I promise! It just turns out tech-related emergency planning takes a lot of research. But, speaking of technology and emergencies, here’s a Tech Emergency Quickie for memoQ users!

Do you have all your term bases and all the little hacks to your TEnT tools/CAT tools backed up? (And your invoices? See Backing Up Your Records in TO3000 Version 10; the first half of that post also applies to Version 11.) I’ve gotten pretty good about backups, but there are always a few little things that I miss for my memoQ setup. Term bases? Check. TMs? Check. Light resources? …Well, shoot, I didn’t think of that!

Luckily, others can learn from my mistakes. If you, too, hate having to figure out complicated “memoQ Web Search” settings and whatnot for each new computer, read on. These are more complicated to back up than you might think, but it can be done!

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Life Happens

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I’d planned to end the week with a tiny update of miscellanea on emergency planning. I’m still doing that, but originally it was going to be upbeat, and it hasn’t quite turned out that way. Still, here’s your emergency planning quickie: 1. And lo, planning works! Almost a year ago, I had a hard drive … Read more

memoQ & OmegaT Shortcut Unification

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**Note 10/2/2023: There is a bug in OmegaT 6.0.0 that causes a loss of functionality if you edit the gotoNextUntranslatedMenuItem shortcut. The ability to go to the next untranslated segment will be lost until you reinstall, even if you revert to the default. Therefore, I recommend against modifying gotoNextUntranslatedMenuItem in 6.0.0.

Like a lot of translators, I use more than one CAT tool (TEnT tool) in my work, deciding which one to use based on the type of project I’m translating. In my case, it’s memoQ and OmegaT.

I don’t know about other translation tool combinations, but the one thing that drives me CRAZY switching between these two is that the important shortcuts are completely different. But after some digging around and experimentation, I have achieved shortcut paradise.

All I wanted was for the “go to next untranslated segment” and the “add term to glossary/term base” shortcuts to match so that I wouldn’t keep using the wrong one in the wrong program, but memoQ only allows certain shortcut customizations, so I couldn’t get its shortcuts to match OmegaT’s. Happily, if you’re willing to venture into the bowels of your file system, you can get your OmegaT shortcuts to match memoQ’s. Here’s how.

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Backing Up Your Records in TO3000 Version 10

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Image of a CHKDSK scan result showing that an unspecified error occurred.

Most of us translators realize that one of the worst things that could happen to our businesses is a hardware failure, theft, or other event that wipes out all our data. We’ve all been told, “Back everything up, because you never know.” We know we need backups for our business security and our own peace of mind. Some of us are even paranoid enough to have both a physical backup and a cloud backup (of any data not too sensitive for one).1

I’m not a perfect person (ask my family), so when my computer’s hard drive died recently, I didn’t have everything backed up, but I had the essentials: my term bases, my translation memories, my personal photos, my financial records… However, when I got a new hard drive, reinstalled all my programs, and attempted to restore everything, I hit a couple of snags.

Quicken data? Fine. MemoQ resources/projects? Fine, if you know where to put everything. TO3000 Version 10? Tears of blood.

So here’s what I learned about backing up and restoring those records… Because it is a whole world of not-fun to be missing them at tax time.

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