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Emma Goldsmith's avatar

Thanks for the Trados memoQ comparison of paragraph segmentation, Kevin. Interesting that you used this segmentation in the past for poorly written texts that need significant restructuring but don't appear to do so now. Why's that? I found big chunks harder to process visually, which is why I don't use it, but agree that it solves major restructuring that can't be achieved through quick segment merges across two or three sentences.

By the way, I recommend the "applyTM Template" app in Trados. With a language resource template, you can then apply any or all of your custom rules to any or all of your TMs, achieving precisely the convenient and "carefree switching" that you said you missed in Trados. 😉

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Kevin Lossner's avatar

Thank you so much for that tip, Emma! I'll have a look at the app (v2022 compatible, I assume) before I do the follow-up posts in some weeks. Last autumn I spent hours learning to reproduce some of the sophisticated segmentation developed by me in memoQ for the particular challenges one might encounter in German legal texts, and it was positively depressing to think what would be involved for someone else to do all that, even if given full instructions. Maybe your recommendation can fix that issue.

As for the "why" of not using paragraph segmentation much anymore, it has a lot to do with winding things down commercially since my move to Portugal years ago. My wife retired from surgery 7 years ago, and living with her in a tiny country house on our farm, the 24/7 translation service lifestyle I led since 2000 or so isn't really compatible anymore with the life I want. So on her birthday last year (exactly one year ago tomorrow), I retired from routine translation and mostly teach, write and do process consulting when we aren't traveling or chasing the goats and dogs around our place. My interface with translation these days is mostly sorting out other people's messes in whatever language combinations they deal with.

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Emma Goldsmith's avatar

Ah, a smart work-life move, Kevin. ¡Felicidades to your wife!

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Nicholas Crenshaw's avatar

Great article!

I appreciate your response to my comment on YouTube the other day and introducing your blog.

I'm curious how you managed to use a "string" in the Segment End area on MemoQ.

In the past I've tried to use a string of characters (went back and tried it again just now with the one in your example) and when I close the dialogue and reopen it, it seems that memoQ automatically separates each character so they are individualized. In addition, repeated characters in that string are removed, so in the example you had I it shows up as this: * € &

This would end up giving me a new segment every time any of these characters is used individually, which is definitely not what I want!

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Kevin Lossner's avatar

Nicholas, what version are you using? I just finished that coffee and realized that I misread your comment slightly, but I find the result you report a bit odd. Check the Advanced Settings of your rules and the content of the #end# list to be sure that your string is a single entry. If not, fix things there.

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Kevin Lossner's avatar

I’m only on my second coffee this morning, so pardon me if I misunderstand.

I put a string into that #end# list to replace the end-of-segment punctuation, because if I don’t do that, in all “recent” versions of memoQ, the segmentation rules will break. The string itself does nothing or is supposed to do nothing. (The alternative is to delete all the rules to get paragraph segmentation.)

If you WANT to segment on some particular sequence, I have a tiny bit of regex in my Regex Assistant library that I keep on hand for that. I don’t remember if I published it anywhere on the blog, but I’ll do so anyway soon as a small tip on the memoQuickies Substack. I’m sharing related sets of regexes, so I’ll just put out a set of examples for segmentation.

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Nicholas Crenshaw's avatar

I appreciate the fast reply!

Afraid I can't explain it more succinctly than that, so if you'd be willing to watch a 20 second clip I took of the issue you can understand what I was trying to say.

I'm using MemoQ 11 by the way, but this was happening on versions going back to 10.3 (the first version I had used)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqpwPyfk2N8

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Kevin Lossner's avatar

I see what your problem is. DON'T make that change in the simple view. Edit in the Advanced view, putting your string in as the sole entry in the #end# group. I can't paste the graphic for that into a comment but I'll amend the article to show what I mean as soon as I finish cutting up some frozen fish for lunch.....

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Nicholas Crenshaw's avatar

That makes more sense!

I edited it in the Advanced view and it worked!

Still seems odd to me that you have to go into the Advanced view in order to enter a string there.

I had just been accepting that you could only use single characters for segmenting rules in this setup, which was not a big deal for me because there was a character I thought I would never come across in my source text. Until I did.....

So when I came across this post I was very interested to see how you got that to work. Appreciate the article!

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