MemoQ

Users of memoQ may receive TTX and other SDL Trados files formats for translation, so they can gain a lot from being ’Trados compatible’. In order to open SDL Trados documents in memoQ, you have to make sure that the source text is divided into segments the same way in both applications. Not dealing with segmentation before opening the file may lead to compatibility problems since memoQ allows users to split and join segments as they like, while Trados does not.

Pre-segmentation involves the following steps:

To open the same translation in SDL Trados, do the following:

SDL Trados will then export the file and put the content of the segments into the translation memory.  This will result in perfect compatibility, with even the formatting tags preserved as they are, unlike in TMX, where XML tags, bold, italics, and other formatting features get lost sometimes.

Apart from enabling the import of TTX files, memoQ also supports the earlier bilingual DOC format so it is 100% compatible with any version of SDL Trados.

If you receive a file created in memoQ, it is advisable to translate it entirely within memoQ and export the result. If you choose instead to use SDL Trados to edit memoQ bilingual files, do the following in order to have SDL Trados accept the filters set in memoQ:

Transferring from memoQ into SDL Trados Studio 2009 is quite simple – once you have exported the document from memoQ as an XLIFF file, you can easily open it in SDL Trados Studio 2009.

The other direction, using memoQ to work on a file created in SDL Trados Studio 2009 is somewhat more complex as you can only save the file in SDLXLIFF format, which is not recognized by memoQ. However, you can always click Add document as… in the Project home of memoQ and set the type of files to be displayed to All files. The SDLXLIFF file will now appear in the list and you can add it to your project just as if it was an XLIFF file. Pre-segmentation is not a requirement here.

Translation memories have three possible formats in Trados – TMW and TXT, which cannot be processed by memoQ, and TMX, which can be made compatible with memoQ translation memories. memoQ is able to convert XML tags in the TMX file into memoQ tags if you add the TMX file to your memoQ translation memory using the Import from CSV/TMX command in the Resource console. A large amount of extra information is retrieved from TMX files during the conversion, even some that would not be prescribed by the TMX standard. There are no standards for server-based translation memory access, therefore memoQ is not compatible with SDL Trados TM Server. Otherwise, basically all translation memories created in Trados can be processed by memoQ, and vice versa – TMs created in memoQ can be leveraged in Trados too, but given that formatting can get lost, it’s better to go through bilingual documents such as XLIFF or TTX .