Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Automatic "translation" of numbers in MemoQ

Question about automatic "translation" of numbers.
If a separate segment contains only digits (and punctuation characters), Wordfast (for example) will skip it and I don't need to translate it at all. MemoQ consider numbers as a segment that should be translated. I understood how to deal with it by autotranslatables, but in this case I have to manually select translation from the box to insert it into the target segment.
But I want MemoQ to skip segments with digits and punctuation characters automatically. I guess I should work with Non-translatables, but couldn't get any results.

Answer:

If you don't want to deal with numbers, you can skip them pretty easily.
1. Enter the appropriate auto-translatable rules. (This can help: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/CAT-Tools/MemoQ/Tips_and_Tricks#Using_auto-translatables_for_number_format_conversion)
2. Pre-translate the document using fragment assembly. This will include the numbers.
3. If you don't like the fact that the program copied not only numbers-only segments, sort the whole document by segment length using the filtering and sorting toolbar, and remove the translations in the longer segments.
4. If you want, lock the pre-translated segments using Lock special. And if you absolutely want to do so, go to Goto next settings and set the cursor so that it jumps over locked segments.