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Yves Champollion was born 1956 in Paris, France. He is related to the early nineteenth-century French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, whose contributions to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics were instrumental to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.

Yves freelanced as a translator between 1982 and 1995, when he translated and published the French versions of several popular science books that were bestsellers in the US, including Darwin On Trial by P.E. Johnson. From 1996 to 1999, he was a project manager and consultant for large translation projects at world-class translation agencies (Translatel, Linguex), which led to his involvement in projects for SAP R/3 & R/4, Siemens, Alcatel, Microsoft, IBM, ABB and Ford, to name a few.

Widely travelled, in addition to French, Classical Latin, German, English, Russian and some Japanese, Yves has also had time to get acquainted with Shangana, a language spoken in Mozambique, where he sponsors a secondary school. Lastly, he is an enthusiastic conference speaker, having delivered countless keynote addresses and lectures throughout his career, and particularly since he launched the Wordfast line of products for the translation industry.

Personal website: http://www.champollion.net

Yves Champollion Yves Champollion was born 1956 in Paris, France. He is related to the early 19-century French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, famous for his work on the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Yves was a freelance translator in the 1980's, a Project Manager for large translation projects in the 1990's, and the translator of science books. Yves developed the Wordfast suite of Computer-Assisted Translation tools (www.wordfast.com), widely used in the translation industry with over 95,000 licenses. He now runs Wordfast LLC, a leading provider of translation technology.

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Nobody ever looks at all the options and checkboxes in a dialog, right? This is why we sometimes might miss a useful feature.

Join me in exploring some details that are easily missed, but could save you some time and effort.

Angelika Zerfass - (Trainer | zaac) Angelika is located in Germany and has been a trainer for translation tools since 1997. She has a degree in translation (Chinese/Japanese, 1995) from the University of Bonn, Germany, but moved into the more technical side of translation when she joined Trados in 1997. In 2000 she went freelance as a trainer and added memoQ to her portfolio when it came to marked around 2006. She loves technical challenges and nowadays spends much of her time with XML, regular expressions and finding workarounds with memoQ for the more tricky questions in translation processes.

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Regex for solving text problems in translation is too often taught as arcane syntax that everyone "must" master, and few do in fact, which can be confusing and discouraging for most people.

In this presentation, I don't want to explain how to write regular expressions or what each character means, but I want to demonstrate how everyone can make helpful use of regex in memoQ.

At LinguaeMundi, we used RegEx to clean up our translation memories which were created over many years and therefore had a lot of unnecessary information, and to create better QA profiles to fit each client's style guide and the company's quality standards.

I will be presenting how we did it and sharing what we learned, to help other LSPs or freelancers who may be experiencing the same problem.

Inês Lucas - Quality Manager and Language Department Manager | LinguaeMundi Inês Lucas is a graduate of Universidade Nova de Lisboa with a second degree in translation and is currently the manager of the Quality and Language departments at Linguaemundi (Peso da Régua, Portugal). She develops and conducts regular staff training and skills reviews for basic and advanced use of memoQ desktop editions and memoQ TMS, creating more efficient processes and producing extensive documents, videos, and other training resources to support her colleagues' professional growth. In her free time, she herds cats and makes regular sacrifices of difficult customers to the goddess Isis, who is her feared patron.

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Do you have a client with very specific needs? Keeping memoQ in the centre of your workflows combined with some creativity and thinking outside of the box can make your life easier, all while ensuring quality remains at the forefront of the service you deliver. We will present some case studies where we’ve found creative ways of addressing complex client needs whilst staying within the memoQ environment.

Speakers

Alice Gallanagh | Translation Innovation Specialist, Context

Alice Gallanagh began working with Context in 2018 and holds the position of Translation Project Manager. Alice is passionate about languages and holds an honours degree in European Studies, Russian and French from Trinity College Dublin. Alice has a keen understanding of customer requirements, and enjoys the challenge of navigating complex client needs with creative workflow solutions.

Damian Killeen | Chief Translation Operations and Technology Manager, Context

Damian Killeen, has been employed by Context as IT Manager for over fifteen years and has over twenty-five years of experience in the translation and software industry. He has expertise in IT consultancy, technical support, software development, localisation and translation workflow design. He designed and maintains the in-house service delivery platform, and its memoQ integration.

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Today, many systems produce XLIFF files, but it seems that some developers at these tool providers did not really read or understand the XLIFF specification. They do things with XLIFF that XLIFF was not meant to do, like embedding HTML or adding length limitation information.

But memoQ would not be memoQ if there was no way of dealing with such files through its powerful file filter settings.

Angelika Zerfass - Trainer | zaac Angelika is located in Germany and has been a trainer for translation tools since 1997. She has a degree in translation (Chinese/Japanese, 1995) from the University of Bonn, Germany, but moved into the more technical side of translation when she joined Trados in 1997. In 2000 she went freelance as a trainer and added memoQ to her portfolio when it came to marked around 2006. She loves technical challenges and nowadays spends much of her time with XML, regular expressions and finding workarounds with memoQ for the more tricky questions in translation processes.

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The localization industry is uniquely vulnerable to digital distraction and employee burnout due the nature of our work which requires the use of various apps and devices, working across international time zones, and the continual presences of urgent deadlines. These pressures can create a gravitational force that pulls apart our ability to concentrate and focus and can lead to a gnawing sense of under-performance and fatigue.

In this mini-workshop attendees and Dominika Olszewska will discuss some of the latest trends and techniques used by individuals and teams to reduce distraction, improve concentration and focus, and ultimately improve workplace morale and productivity. Topics will include monotasking, digital wellbeing, the importance of a healthy diet, and plenty of tips, tricks, and suggestions on how to work and live in a more-focused, present, engaged, and vibrant manner.

Dominika Olszewska - Head of Hub CEE & Nordics | memoQ Dominika has worked in the localization industry for 10 years and currently leads a cross-functional sales team dedicated to the CEE, Nordics, and Asia markets at memoQ. She values community building and empowering others, so for several years she volunteered as the Poland Chapter Manager and then EMEIA Manager at Women in Localization. Dominika is a Certified Digital Wellbeing Coach. She helps people and companies create a healthier and more balanced relationship with technology and is a proponent of humanizing leadership and highlighting the role of mental health in the workplace. She has recently decided to follow her life-long dream and enrolled into a master’s program in psychology. Outside of work, Dominika is a cat lover, a sewing enthusiast, and a yoga and mindfulness fan.

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XML: either you love it or you hate it. There’s no compromise.

An XML file may seem the stuff of nightmares to an untrained translator, but is this always the case? A lack of knowledge means you may have to turn down a job, and this is exactly what translators and LSPs want to avoid, especially if there are hundreds of thousands of words to be translated in that job.

Our presentation will show how we were able to complete the translation of an entire website for a museum containing more than 200 documents within the deadline agreed with our client, using memoQ’s regex text filter in combination with regular expressions and a set of light resources to speed up the process. The presentation will illustrate the project’s features, the rationale behind the use of the regex text filter and some of the knowledge gaps we had to bridge to deliver the project on time.

Francesco Torello - Revisers' coordinator | Arkadia Translations S.r.l. Former trainee at the Council of the EU, translator and reviser. Francesco is the head the team of internal linguists at Arkadia Translations in Milan. He is interested in translation technologies, automation and CAT tools. Francesco attended memoQfest for the first time in 2019 and he was one of the speakers of last year's edition with a presentation on a case study involving MT, light resources and regular expressions.

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We use translation memories to re-use what has already been translated. TM entries are considered safe since they come from previously approved translations. Without a TM, we must translate from scratch, even with the help of Machine Translation that requires specific editing.

So, we use TMs wherever possible. And if we don't have a TM, we leverage existing translations through alignment.Alignment is a time-consuming process that requires both a source and a target version of the document with identical structure.You may have target documents that contain approved translations with the correct style and terminology. But without a source to align to, you can only use them in a corpus for reference or concordance.The solution I will present converts target documents into a TM to deliver approved translations from your legacy documents.

Based on "reverse machine alignment,” it can also be used for hard-to-align documents such as alpha-sorted, broken PDF, complex layouts, etc.

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At Amazon Games, memoQ powers our localization pipeline - and Amazon Web Services is what powers memoQ.

We built our pipeline to be "cloud-first" and leveraged existing AWS technologies to automate and scale our pipeline wherever possible. In this presentation, we'll talk about the AWS services we selected to support memoQ when building our end-to-end localization pipeline.

We'll talk about security, network topology, storage, pre- and post-processing steps, workflow automation, and memoQ server configuration.

Penny Fang | Localization Engineer, Amazon Games

Penny Fang is a Localization Engineer at Amazon Games, where she maintains our localization pipeline for multiple MMO-scale titles with millions of source words.. She supports our translation partners around the globe by ensuring our "cloud-first" memoQ deployment remains stable, accessible, and secure.

Andrew Vestal | Head of Localization, Amazon Games

Andrew Vestal is Head of Localization at Amazon Games. Previously, he worked at Blizzard Entertainment and Microsoft on very large-scale localization and localization engineering projects. At Amazon Games, he relies on memoQ and AWS to help his team scale to conquer giant localization challenges.

'Meet the Product Team.' Take a behind-the-scenes tour with the Product Team and learn how product roadmap planning and customer needs are aligned, how user ideas are processed and even turned into memoQ features, and - the most important of all - how our users are involved every step of the way.

Ágnes Varga | CTO, memoQ

Ágnes Varga has been with memoQ for more than 10 years. She worked on memoQ as a software developer, and after 7 years she went to the other side to be a Product Manager for translation memories. Now she is the CTO and leads the Production department where memoQ is created.

Marianna Nagy | Product Manager, memoQ

Marianna’s journey into the language industry started out by earning a degree in German and Latin. Since then, she became a seasoned translation and localization industry professional, and a Certified Localization Project Manager with over 15 years of experience in product, project, and team management.

She joined the memoQ team as a Product Manager in 2021. Beside the unstoppable delight in learning new things, she likes dancing and running.

Zsolt Varga | Product Manager, memoQ

Zsolt earned his MA as a double major of English and History in Hungary, then spent six unforgettable years in Texas, where he earned his PhD in History and taught in secondary and higher education. After his return to Hungary he worked as an ESL teacher and freelance translator, then as translation team leader and linguistic expert for Hungarian LSPs and a college instructor of CAT tools. He joined memoQ in 2016 and is currently one of the proud product managers of our flagship product. His hobbies include swimming, hiking, sim racing and motorsports.

Árpád Figyelmesi | Head of Product, memoQ

Árpád Figyelmesi is an experienced Product Manager and Product Lead with more than 10 years of history of working in the software industry. He is skilled in Professional Software Development, Agile Product Management, Scrum, Research and Development, Localization technology, Cheminformatics and Patinformatics. He received his MSc degree in Chemical Engineering from Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 2008 and completed his postgraduate diploma in IT Management from Corvinus University of Budapest in 2015.

Ádám Gaugecz | Product Manager, memoQ

Ádám has studied programming and earned BA in finance and accounting, and MA in sociology. He has started his professional career in India with a startup before the internet bubble burst around the millennia. He has been working mainly with tech vendors serving different verticals and joined the translation & localization industry at memoQ in 2019.

György Bokros | Design Team Lead

György has been leading the UX/UI team at memoQ for three years. Before joining memoQ, he worked at several media and software development companies and has 15 years of experience in digital design.
At memoQ, he and his team’s role is to design easy-to-use UX/UI solutions and conduct usability tests and user interviews in collaboration with product managers. His goal at memoQ is to create a functional, clear, accessible digital experience that people understand and can use easily.

In his private life, György is a passionate home baker and tries to spend as much time as possible on his gravel bike.

Only six years after NMT burst onto the scene with substantially improved fluency over older Machine Translation methods, there's a shiny new toy on the technology landscape, Large Language Models (such as the model at the heart of ChatGPT). These incredibly flexible “generative AI” systems are initially trained to do nothing but predict the next word in a sequence but can be further adapted, through additional training and prompting, to do specific tasks, such as translation. In this talk, we'll cut through the hype and discuss what Large Language Models are, how they differ from NMT, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they will continue to develop and further change the language services industry.

Jay Marciano - Director, MT Outreach & Strategy | Lengoo Jay Marciano, Director of MT Outreach & Strategy at Lengoo, has spent 25 years at the forefront of developing and applying MT. He has held senior positions at SDL (2001-2010) and Lionbridge (2010-2020), where he was responsible for the global strategy of using MT to increase translation efficiency. He is president of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) and presents widely on MT, AI, and the future of the translation industry. Jay is a leading figure in building understanding among language professionals of the power and potential of MT and other AI-driven technologies.

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The UNICORN-AMP system allows for a bi-directional integration with memoQ, meaning projects created in memoQ can be synchronized back to the TMS provided the job number matches.

Resources are automatically assigned and TM/TB management is automatic based on file naming conventions. Leverage, pre-translation and Working/Master TM activity is all automated so the PM can focus on managing the work, not the mechanics of memoQ.

Creation of content filters for Excel file imports is also a large part of the capability, allowing for standardization within a client site or corporate entity, and to have unique settings for each type of request, either pre-assigned or selectable from a drop-down list.

The ability during a review to reject segments, enter a comment with the reason for rejection, then go to the Review Status screen and click on the letter "R", automatically exports the RTF file with the comments for only the rejected segments and sends it to the linguist. The file is then marked appropriately and when the linguist sends the response back, the reviewer sees a reply exists and is able to complete the QC review and deliver the file.

Upon archiving a project, the working TM updates the Master TM for that client. Data is separated by client, but there is a provision for an Admin Global type of TM or TB that would apply to all clients and all subject domains for things like general terminology or non-proprietary critical items.

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Procurement professionals often use a model like the Kraljic Matrix (1983) to quantitatively measure supply risk Vs the impact on profits. Suppliers who are perceived as providing a service not being strategically important to them will be treated like a commodity (lowest price wins the deal). You can often tell which box you’ve been put in by the seniority of procurement professionals you deal with and the type of conversations you have (sales people being eternal optimists assume they’re in the strategic supplier box but very few actually are).

Your client facing teams need to counter this by being the messengers of value. The concept of value in B2B Sales can be thought of as being the impact on the customer’s business minus total cost of ownership. This needs to be calculated and presented in a format the customer can understand. Its not up to the customer to work this out and tell you, you have to tell them. To solve this conundrum the customer’s world needs to be analysed, understood and then shown how your service will impact upon it in a positive way (bonus marks for using financial calculations here).

This helps you have a much broader conversation. A place where innovation happens and one that moves you away from being focused on the lowest cost provider in the marketplace.

Richard Brooks

This presentation will examine memoQ's accessibility journey from realization to redemption-in-progress. Our erroneous assumption that translation tools were only used by sighted users was revealed and we were dismayed to hear JAWS (screen reading software) read our documentation and some of our UI. Furthermore, our interviews with visually impaired translators showed us how memoQ speaks to them or ruins their experience. Since then, we have redoubled efforts to make the product more accessible and inclusive. We'll talk about how we approach development on a daily basis and how discovering and working on accessibility has changed us individually and collectively.

Monika Skoneczna | Technical Communication Specialist, memoQ

Hi, I'm Monika, and I work as a Technical Communication Specialist, which means I do both - technical and UX writing. I also volunteer as a Marketing Manager at the Women in Localization Poland Chapter. It is not only great fun but also a huge opportunity to create a community and empower others. In life after work, I watch Star Wars, read bizarre books, and learn about information architecture. I also adore spaghetti.

Gergely Garai | Technical Communication Team Lead, memoQ

After 20 years in the translation industry, 5 (and counting) in tech comm at memoQ. Striving father of two, bike commuter.

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If you are thinking about going global, you should consider digitalizing your sales team! Digital assistants can serve many different and creative functions. The time is past when digital assistants only answered a basic list of pre-determined questions.

Digital assistants can serve as an attractive new sales channel to draw in clients, digital assistants can help you manage client relationships, answer ever more complex questions and solve sophisticated client issues, and navigate your product features.

When you go global you will probably also want to present your services to clients in their language. The newest generation of digital assistants are fully multi lingual, which means that they cover the full range of duties in all the languages that they are trained to use.

We will share our journey with hiring and training digital assistants and illustrate the costs and benefits of using digital assistants. The newest generation of digital assistants are multilingual, they speak, they understand speech and writing and they can process information from multiple date bases. Instead of single answers to multiple questions, these digital assistants can process multiple answers to to each question.

Assistants can be developed with personalities to fit their responsibilities and can be customized to detect and respond to emotions.

Indra Sāmīte - Member of the Board | Tilde Tilde develops cutting edge machine translation, text to speech and speech recognition, and multi-lingual chatbot technologies. In our fast moving and competitive global environment technological advances in language technologies need to move swiftly from research to implementation. As Board member and the head of Tilde Localization for almost 15 years, my focus is on profitability and customer satisfaction. It is my mission to evaluate and drive the integration of advanced language technologies such as machine translation and workflow automation into the translation work cycle.

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Talking about translating subtitles is in a way pointless, like talking about translating Word documents. There are however some considerations that should apply to any translation task involving subtitles, irrespective of the content – whether it is for a Hollywood Blockbuster, an advert for a coffee machine or a corporate training video.

Steen Kesmodel - Operations Research Manager | Alpha CRC Steen spent 15 years as an in-house translator at LSP Alpha CRC and for the past 12 years he's been heading the Operations team. As a native Dane, Steen grew up watching subtitled TV programmes and foreign films and has probably read over 328.500.000 subtitled words.

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memoQ is implementing NFA in its TMS. This revolutionary feature created by SYSTRAN called Neural Fuzzy Adaptation enables to make use of mid-level fuzzy matches as an input to feed the machine translation engine. This feature has several advantages such as improving Machine Translation quality, maintaining a consistent brand voice or improving productivity by reducing post-edition.

Floriane Garde | Pre-Sales and Delivery Consultant, Systran

Floriane holds a Master's degree in Project Management followed by 7 years of experience in the SAAS industry. She joined SYSTRAN in 2022 as a Pre-Sales and Delivery Consultant, to support MT users in their journey to making the most of the technology.

Pascale Le Blevennec | Senior Account Manager, Systran

Senior Account Manager in charge of Language Service Providers, Banking and Consulting at SYSTRAN, Pascale Le Blévennec has a deep understanding of LSP’s needs and challenges in regards to translation technologies. With a strong background in project & sales cycle management and 20 years of experience bringing value to clients through Machine Translation projects, Pascale is focusing on building long-term relationships to help customers maximize the benefits drawn from their MT solution.

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Text strings that contain tags protected in memoQ are difficult to handle by MT. A sentence segment, with tags inside, is divided into sub-strings around the tags and each sub-string is translated as a separate sentence so that the output translation is typically grammatically incorrect. This is a very common problem with XML and HTML files.

To help with it, I developed scripts that pre-process source files by replacing tags with generated keys. Those keys are not protected in memoQ, and they are ignored by MT so that a sentence containing them translates properly - as one, whole sentence. After machine translating such pre-processed source and exporting the files, I run a post-processing script that replaces keys with original tags.

In my presentation, I will discuss the technical details of this approach and how it can improve the quality of MT output for tag heavy source and reduce the need for post-editing. I will also talk about our experience with training custom NMT models and their positive impact on quality and accuracy of the MT output.

Krzysztof Jozefowicz - Globalization Architect | JMP Krzysztof has worked in the localization field for 24 years. He started as an L10N engineer at Microsoft and later joined SAS Institute where he first worked as an L10N and I18N tech support consultant, L10N PM, L10N technology manager to eventually become the director of the SAS European Localization Center in 2013. He and his team were responsible for translating SAS software and documentation into 23 European, Middle Eastern and Latin American languages. Since January 2023 Krzysztof is working as a Globalization Architect at JMP. In his spare time Krzysztof enjoys cycling, swimming, and reading.

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It has been an age-old dream of the translation industry to find the holy grail of measuring the quality of translations. Nowadays, with the emergence of neural Machine Translation, large language models, and AI, the demand is higher than ever. The hunger for automated quality measurement of human and machine translated content is growing.

Although there is an increasing number of new metrics and tools and their accuracy is improving over time, we have not yet reached a plateau. In this presentation, participants will get an overview of the different automated translation quality measurement options. They will learn how they work, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Finally, participants will get a glimpse into the future and see that there is still hope for human translators.

Gábor Bessenyei - Founder | Globalese I have always been enthusiastic about the combination of languages and computers – two totally different worlds. One is human and always escapes from the trappings of rules, the other is very formalized and is driven by rules. I started my career in 1994 as a translator for SAP software. Between 1997 and 2001, I was IT manager, translation coordinator, and member of the board at SAP Hungary. Since 2001, I have been the founding managing partner and CEO of MorphoLogic Localisation, a language service provider. I am co-founder of Globalese, a Neural MT system focusing on custom MT engines.