Add document vs. Import bilingual

In the Documents pane of the Project home tab, you can use two commands to add new documents to your project: Add document (Add document as…) and Import/update bilingual.

· Use Add document or Add document as… if you want to add documents that you receive from people using other translation tools. Always use Add document as… to add Trados bilingual Word (DOC) files. To put it simply, if a document was exported from another translation tool, you always import it using Add document… or Add document as…
· Use Import/update bilingual if you want to add documents prepared in memoQ, or if you want to update your project from files that were originally exported by yourself. To put it simply, if a document was exported from memoQ using the Export bilingual command in the Documents pane, you always import it using Import/update bilingual.
 

There are document formats that require more explanation: XLIFF, DOC and RTF.

· If an XLIFF file comes from Trados or any other XLIFF-compliant tool, use Add document or Add document as… to add it to your project. memoQ will fail to import these files if you use Import/update bilingual. Note that you might lose information in these files that belongs to XLIFF extensions used in the other tool.
· If an XLIFF file comes from another copy of memoQ, use Import/update bilingual. You can also use Add document…, but then memoQ will not treat the document as a full-featured memoQ bilingual document.
· If a bilingual DOC file comes from Trados or another compatible tool, use Add dcoument as…
· If a bilingual DOC file comes from another copy of memoQ, use Import/update bilingual. This is especially true for documents exported with ‘simple formatting’. memoQ creates such documents from other document formats such as HTML, XML, MIF etc.
· If you get an RTF file that contains a table from another memoQ copy, always use Import/update bilingual to add it.
· Always use Add document… to add TTX files to your project.

See also

Bilingual file formats

Bilingual DOC/RTF

XLIFF

Multi-column RTF tables

Exchanging information between memoQ users

Document import settings dialog

The Documents pane in Project home

 

Add document vs. Import bilingual