Let’s look at the client side of the translation market: Clients range from the agile and quick-acting who may be dealing with dozens of language combinations, to niche markets with single language combinations.

Some clients have in-house language services, others refuse to work with agencies. However, they are all looking for similar things from translation and localization providers.

With over 20 years of client-side experience combined with years of freelance translation experience, I’ll share what has worked forus as end clients in different fields, what didn’t work.

We will also review what some of the biggest red flags have been, and how to avoid them.

DeAnn Cougler - Project Management | Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Throughout my career, I’ve worked client-side and as a contractor in the translation and localization industry. I’ve held positions in translation and localization, terminology management and technical writing. This has included team leadership and project consulting. I enjoy developing new processes and finding the best solutions for teams and projects. I get hands on and get out of the office to work with customers on site and directly with people in our industry to find the best solutions to their needs.

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.

This is a fascinating new horizon and we give insights from research and experience into the future of hiring and training digital employees.

Indra Sāmīte - Member of the Board | Tilde 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you prepared to enter the shadowy world of customer-supplied source files and confront the challenges that lie within?

Join the Source File Freak Show where we'll uncover the problems and solutions of dealing with corrupted, misformatted, and broken files. Through presenting case studies and real-life examples, we will explore the best practices for fixing bestial source files leveraging the capabilities of memoQ. Join at your own risk!