I’ve learned a lot of interesting technical things in my brief acquaintance with the Substack platform, some of which I’ve discussed on the Translation Tribulations blog I’ve written since 2008. And I’ve found that this medium (not Medium) presents a good way to separate content in useful ways without becoming too fragmented across platforms. So I’m sticking with it for now.
Although the old blog is rather heavy on memoQ-related content and has, according to inside sources in the company, been one of the early and continuing drivers of that TMS being so widely adopted in the corporate world and by individual translators, my intentions with Translation Tribulations on Substack are to make it more general in subject matter, though I’ll certainly talk about memoQ sometimes. Just not all the time.
But as I was preparing today’s post (which was supposed to be on issues involving PDF files), it occurred to me that it might be better to share with the general readership what has been going on with my all-memoQ teaching channel, the memoQuickies Substack, and where I think it might be headed. And some other educational housekeeping.
Last week, memoQ Ltd. hosted another one of those wonderful memoQ Fest conferences, perhaps a bit too corporate and AI-focused for my taste this year, but nonetheless the best opportunity to get to know the creators of what I consider to be the best working platform for managing translation and localization projects at all levels, and to meet friends from around the world who do so many interesting and creative things with the tools. One of those good friends, Marek Pawelec, a literature translator, technical genius and fellow chemist, gave a talk about memoQ LiveDocs on the first day. We are both enthusiastic users of this unique reference management module, but we had a lot of back-and-forth discussions before he left for the conference regarding just how much of the power of LiveDocs to further professionalize one’s projects can be conveyed in less than half an hour and how to overcome the general mindset and misinformation that LiveDocs is somehow all about alignment of legacy translations — because that’s usually all that gets talked about.
So to support his particular effort at education, I decided to make last week “LiveDocs blitz week” and posted the following information and short lessons:
Now why am I unable to find that “short link” formatting for embedding a post like I did in an earlier essay elsewhere? Clearly, I’m still finding my way with the technical features of the Substack universe, but I’m happy so far with what I can do and the promise of what more is possible.
I’ve got about a dozen more drafts about LiveDocs that will appear on the memoQuickies Substack in due course, accomplishing at last what I started to do some years ago on the Teachable platform but suspended because of some data management issues I found too confusing for the average user, which have since been solved by major improvements to the user interface driven by Everyman’s feedback on the memoQ Ideas Portal.
The possibilities for sharing tutorial content in more flexible ways here is intriguing, so for paid subscribers to the memoQuickies channel, I’ll be moving at least some of the archive of course content from the Teachable platform, which has cost me thousands of euros in overhead through the years and where I was often too busy to take full advantage of my expensive annual subscriptions, so that course content will appear here on Substack in updated form.
I originally created that Teachable e-school as an example of what could be done to share with my friends who produce memoQ and who had talked for years about creating a memoQ Academy. They did that eventually, though not really in the user-focused way I had hoped for, and it’s really not clear where all that is headed. With all the corporate roadtrips for marketing around the world and the all-too-typical-these-days fascination with all things “AI”, I’m not sure what will be on offer for human intelligence to help the average person go farther to produce clean, professional translations instead of cleaning algorithmic spew. Vamos ver, as the Portuguese say.
If things work out with moving CPD e-courses in some form to Substack, I’ll do that as well for non-memoQ content, with my guidance on PDF handling and tool interoperability being high on that candidate to-do list. As I experiment, I will be most appreciative of private or public feedback on what works and what doesn’t, and how I can make it all more fit for purpose. That purpose is that you learn what you need to be more satisfied as you confront the technical challenges of producing good work.