handling of ttx files and corresponding ini files in MemoQ Thread poster: Andreas Kobell
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Dear colleagues,
I'm currently thinking about switching from Trados to Deja Vu or memoQ but there is an issue I have not been able to find an answer for. Usually the agencies I work for send me ttx files and often a corresponding ini file to use for the specific project.
If I only had MemoQ available, would it be possible to process the ttx files and import the ini file settings? In case yes, I could spare myself the hassle to install Trados again on my new machine. <... See more Dear colleagues,
I'm currently thinking about switching from Trados to Deja Vu or memoQ but there is an issue I have not been able to find an answer for. Usually the agencies I work for send me ttx files and often a corresponding ini file to use for the specific project.
If I only had MemoQ available, would it be possible to process the ttx files and import the ini file settings? In case yes, I could spare myself the hassle to install Trados again on my new machine.
Many thanks for your help!
Best,
Andreas ▲ Collapse
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This has been discussed many times in the past in these fora, but let me summarise it very quickly indeed:
- You can translate TTX files perfectly in memoQ; memoQ imports and saves these files quickly and flawlessly, and will help you easily pinpoint where you have missing tags, etc.
- You do not need the INI file to be able to work with a TTX file in memoQ
- To ensure 100% compatibility with your Trados customers, you want to keep your Trados installed in ... See more This has been discussed many times in the past in these fora, but let me summarise it very quickly indeed:
- You can translate TTX files perfectly in memoQ; memoQ imports and saves these files quickly and flawlessly, and will help you easily pinpoint where you have missing tags, etc.
- You do not need the INI file to be able to work with a TTX file in memoQ
- To ensure 100% compatibility with your Trados customers, you want to keep your Trados installed in the machine and use it to "pre-segment" your TTX files. In practice, this means using Translator's Workbench to translate the TTX (Tools > Translate), enabling the "Segment unknown sentences" checkbox. In TTX file, memoQ only sees the segments that are already marked by Trados as translated (i.e. with the Trados marks, source on one side, target on the other side). You can import unsegmented contents from TTX files into memoQ, but Kilgray does not guarantee that the resulting segmentation will be identical to that of Trados.
There are two important drawbacks about translating TTX files in memoQ:
1. memoQ will not automatically replace tags that change from one version of a TTX file to the next. Even if the text in a segment is identical to one present in the memory, memoQ only takes from the memory those tags that are identical to those of the current translation. In practice, this means that for some formats, like for instance TTX files made with Trados' S-Tagger, you will end up adding tags which TagEditor used to substitute automatically. This will slow you down if you do big TTX files coming from S-Tagger, for instance.
2. Whereas in Trados you can apply colouring to translated segments (Options > Translated text colours... in the Workbench), memoQ is not prepared to work with this colouring in the TTX files, so any TTX files you process with memoQ will lose any colouring applied by Trados or TagEditor.
As long as you keep these three things in mind (presegmentation, addition of suppressed tags, and lost colouring), memoQ is a very nice tool for TTX files. We use it every day with quite some success.
It would be perfect to have memoQ substitute changed tags if they are of the same kind from one edition of a TTX file to the next. It would save me a lot of work, really. Having discussed this with Kilgray many times, I don't think they are willing to keep investing any time in an obsolete format as TTX. Yes, obsolete, but used by so many companies!! :-/ ▲ Collapse
| | | | | so Trados still rules... | Sep 28, 2011 |
Thanks a lot for your prompt and detailed answer, Tomás!
I had hoped I could do without Trados, but it looks like it still keeps haunting me.
Unfortunately, too many companies stick to the ttx format as this seems to be making their internal workflow easier. Well, fair enough.
Thanks again!
Andreas
| | | | | Trados just 5 minutes every day | Sep 28, 2011 |
Andreas Kobell wrote: I had hoped I could do without Trados, but it looks like it still keeps haunting me.
Well, you can do without Trados, but you will need it to presegment the TTX files. That's all. Over here we keep a single empty memory (one per language pair of course) for presegmentation, and never use Trados for translation.
Yes, indeed presegmenting is something I would love to get rid of, but Trados have never published their specs about presegmentation of TTX files, so other manufacturers can only guess how to segment them.
Apart from the caveats expressed, I would never go back to Trados after translating TTX files with memoQ for two years.
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Selcuk Akyuz 
Türkiye
Local time: 14:46
English to Turkish
+ ...
Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
- You do not need the INI file to be able to work with a TTX file in memoQ
Hi Tomás,
Are you sure that INI file is not required? AFAIK it should be used by Trados to presegment the file. This is what I do before translating TTX files with Déjà Vu X.
Selcuk
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Selcuk Akyuz wrote:
Are you sure that INI file is not required? AFAIK it should be used by Trados to presegment the file. This is what I do before translating TTX files with Déjà Vu X.
Good point. Indeed I should have made it clear that once the TTX file is presegmented, you don't need the INI file. memoQ does not need the INI file, but Trados does of course.
| | | | Jaroslaw Michalak
Poland
Local time: 13:46
Member (2004)
English to Polish
SITE LOCALIZER | Substituting tags | Sep 28, 2011 |
Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
It would be perfect to have memoQ substitute changed tags if they are of the same kind from one edition of a TTX file to the next. It would save me a lot of work, really. Having discussed this with Kilgray many times, I don't think they are willing to keep investing any time in an obsolete format as TTX. Yes, obsolete, but used by so many companies!! :-/
First of all, you are right that calling "obsolete" a format which is still the most commonly used by clients is not appropriate... If they have their reasons for not moving on to the next big thing, one should take that into consideration.
Besides, the tag replacement problem is not limited to ttx by any means - it is enough that the client once imports the file with inline tags and once with {MQ} tags and you get a wildly incompatible TM - even if MQ's internal format is the only one used!
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Jabberwock wrote:
Besides, the tag replacement problem is not limited to ttx by any means - it is enough that the client once imports the file with inline tags and once with {MQ} tags and you get a wildly incompatible TM - even if MQ's internal format is the only one used!
Indeed. This is one thing that, I would say, clearly needs improvement in memoQ. Most of us have no option but to work in intermediate formats (TTX, INX, HTML, XML) with plenty of tags!
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| Correcting myself | May 14, 2012 |
Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:
1. memoQ will not automatically replace tags that change from one version of a TTX file to the next. Even if the text in a segment is identical to one present in the memory, memoQ only takes from the memory those tags that are identical to those of the current translation. In practice, this means that for some formats, like for instance TTX files made with Trados' S-Tagger, you will end up adding tags which TagEditor used to substitute automatically. This will slow you down if you do big TTX files coming from S-Tagger, for instance.
It is May 2012 now, and I just wanted to add a quick note to mention that memoQ 5.0 DOES try to replace the tags, in the spirit of what happened in TagEditor, so there has been a dramatic change to the better in this aspect of memoQ. The information above from my original posting is no longer valid.
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