Tips

Mary Norris, a copy editor for The New Yorker, shares her thoughts on whether it is necessary to add the possessive case ending ’s to English nouns ending in s or whether adding an apostrophe is enough. Should one write Hercules’ or Hercules’s? Descartes’ or Descartes’s?

This is no idle issue for Mary. She is not only a linguist; by some quirk of fate, her own last name ends in s. Norris’ or Norris’s?

In English, the situation with generally accepted standards is complicated. Thus, every major publishing company has to develop its own regulations or follow any of the already existing style guides.

At The New Yorker, this burden lies with Mary Norris. She works there since as far back as 1978. Due to her thoroughness and diligence, she has been dignified with the title of the Comma Queen. There is even a separate article about her on Wikipedia.

Mary Norris has her own playlist on the YouTube channel of The New Yorker with an obvious name—Comma Queen. It contains 2–3-minute videos where she explains the most amusing aspects of English, such their as a singular pronoun, Oxford commas, who/whom, etc.

Recently, a new memoQ version has been released—9.4. Key changes:

• If any grammar issue is detected in the segment, then the specific section with the error gets underlined instead of the whole segment. Similarly to Word, grammar issues in memoQ are underlined in blue.
• Direct import of Trados Studio translation memories has been added. Previously, you would need to export an SDLTM file into an exchange TMX format first (translation memory exchange) and then import it into memoQ. Starting from version 9.4, memoQ allows importing SDLTM files instantly, without any intermediate conversions.
• Integration with Protemos has been implemented. From now on, a single click is enough to create a memoQ project out of a Protemos project or, vice versa, immediately create a symmetric Protemos project for an existing memoQ project.
• Numerous changes and improvements concerning the use of machine translation plugins.

And a lot of other stuff has been added.

Another post about Trados Studio errors. The symptoms of the disease are as follows: one fine day you start Trados Studio, and it displays the “An error occurred whilst trying to determine the file version” message:

You press the OK button (there is nothing else to press here anyway). Trados Studio starts as usual, but the list of projects in the Projects section is pristine: there is not a single project. Trados Studio itself works great though, even your custom shortcuts are still there.

The error can be caused by several reasons. SDL described them in this article. Most likely, Trados Studio is not to blame. A general reason is that something has happened to the project files that were already imported into Trados Studio. When starting, it tried to download them but failed due to some reason.

A list containing possible reasons is provided below, from the easy to the complicated.

1. The easiest thing that could have happened: you’d deleted, renamed, or replaced the folder containing the project files. It’s no wonder that Trados Studio failed to download them—it just couldn’t find them in the accustomed place.

Solution: close Trados Studio, bring the files back to the folder where they were (if they’re not lost for good), and then start Trados Studio again. After that, you’ll have to go down the files of all the projects you need and click the files with the SDLPROJ extension in each of them. These are files with settings storing information on what files belong to the project and where they are—Trados Studio will catch them and “get its memory back.”

2. Another possible reason: something has blocked the access to the files: they are where they have to be, but Trados Studio can’t reach them. Oftentimes, it turns out to be a cold-blooded antivirus program that had found the project files suspicious by mistake.

The solution is obvious: “comfort” your antivirus or discover which program had blocked access to the files.

3. The third reason: the project files are physically damaged. This case is the most difficult one as this issue has nothing to do with software but comes from hardware.

Solution: bring your disk “back to life.”

Object reference not set to an instance of an object is one of the most unpleasant error messages in Trados Studio. Actually, it seems to be coming not from Trados Studio itself but somewhere from .NET. It may appear in other programs, too.

It has a hundred possible reasons, and that what makes it so unpleasant. We’ve just discovered one of those: the message appears when you try to open in Trados Studio an SDLXLIFF file containing segments with a pilcrow.

As a matter of fact, pilcrows are not supposed to be inside segments in the first place, only between them—we should give credit to Studio for that. When it is necessary to split a line right inside the segment, one usually inserts a line break with the help of SHIFT + ENTER. However, as practice shows, anything may happen during the import of files created in other programs into Studio.

In this particular case, no countermeasures can remove the error because the pilcrows can’t be removed. Theoretically, editing of the source text might help, but it is the last refuge of the enthusiast as it may cause problems during further manipulations with the files. By default, the source text is not to be touched.

And how to get rid of this error under “normal” circumstances we’ll tell you later. There is one universal method...

The same goes for Smartcat. It has become complicated these days to write a post without mentioning the name of this ill-fated virus.

Taking into account the numerous texts about the coronavirus, epidemics, etc. being hastily translated in all language directions, Smartcat decided to do a good deed collecting them in a translation memory open to general use—CovidTM, and invites all translation companies to participate in its filling. Once the appropriate materials appear, it will be uploaded as an open access multilingual TMX file. Smartcat promises to fill it with new translations regularly.

Detailed information can be found here.

Starting from April 1 and version 9.3.5, QA Distiller (also known as QAD), a semi-automated translation quality assessment program, has become free. No, it’s not a joke.

QAD is a competitor of Xbench, Verifika, and other similar programs. It has been offered in three versions so far: Freelance, Professional, and Enterprise. Now, there is only one left—Professional,—and you don’t have to pay for it anymore.

Yamagata, the developer of QAD, informs in its blog that from now on the program becomes completely free of charge and urges everyone to make donations to Translators without Borders (TBW) and help fight COVID-19.

You can download the installer here.