📝 Notes from an old notebook of a publishing house editor:

😃 About books

• A book is a great-looking manuscript the editor can finally start working on.
• The more pompous the book, the worse the sales.
• Publishing a book does not mean reading it.
• The force with which a book hits you can be estimated by knowing its mass and acceleration at the moment of impact.

😃 About typographical errors

• There are typographical errors in any book.
• The larger the font of the error, the worse the error.
• The worse the error, the harder it is to notice.
• The worst error will be on the first opened page of the proof copy.

😃 About editors and editing

• A proofreader is an editor of letters.
• An editor is a director of the book.
• A good proofreader must see letters. A good editor must see concepts. A good director must see the editor and the proofreader.
• Editorial office is the department that fights organized writing.
• The universal editing rule: if the text cannot be edited, it must be deleted.
• Editing a book does not mean reading it.
• Any text can be shortened by 15% without harming its meaning.
• Any text can be extended by 15% without harming its meaning.

😃 About publishing houses

• If a publishing house does not publish books, it can still be called a publishing house; if the staff of the publishing house does not drink coffee, it is not a publishing house.
• If a publishing house has no dictionaries, reference books, and encyclopedias, it is not a publishing house.
• A distinctive feature of a publishing house is the absence of business cards.
• A distinctive feature of a good publishing house: its employees are happy to read the books they publish.
• For people not related to book publishing, a publishing house, a printing house, and a bookstore are the same thing.
• A publishing house director is a former editor at best and a future author at worst.
• Distribution of nervous efforts at a regular publishing house:
— 10% are internal conflicts;
— 20% are conflicts with tax authorities;
— 30% are conflicts with book distributors;
— 40% are conflicts with authors.
• The situation at the publishing house after the second bottle is called “No more editing this day.”

😃 About authors

• The most detrimental influence on the book is its author.
• The author thinks differently.
• The most insatiable authors, bringing the manuscript to the publishing house, say: “I just want the book to come out, I don’t need money!”

#translatorhumor #editing #speecherrors

💻 memoQ v10.0, the luxurious version of memoQ with the anniversary number 10, has been released. This is not an update, but an upgrade, there are many changes:

😃 New filter for XLIFF files of Phrase (formerly Memsource).

😃 The mechanism for working with translation memories has been significantly updated. It has been updated so much that it has received a separate name, TM+. It is now more stable, can handle larger TMs, and has improved pre-translation, analysis, and search.

😃 Plugins for working with machine translation by DeepL and Systran have been updated.

😃 Content Connector is now a separate program.

😃 Ability to clone local projects has been added.

😃 Qterm has been updated.

Since each upgrade, along with a lot of new features, usually brings a lot of new bugs, it is advisable to wait for version 10.1, which will fix at least some of these bugs, for practical reasons. However, we must give memoQ its due: the program is very stable, and critical errors are very rare.

#memoq

🖥 Grammarly, a company with Ukrainian roots, is preparing to launch GrammarlyGO, an AI-powered text processing service focused primarily on fast work with emails.

GrammarlyGO can:

😃 Create texts on the topics you need
😃 Suggest replies to emails
😃 Adapt the style and tone of the text to a specific reader
😃 Resize the text (any text can be shortened or extended by 15% without compromising its meaning, remember?)

All this is described in detail on the Grammarly blog. The beta version of GrammarlyGO will be available in April 2023.

* * *
→ Grammarly plugins for Windows, Chrome, iPhone/iPad, and Android (available after you sign in to your account)

#grammarly #textprocessing #artificialintelligence #softwarefortranslators

💻 Microsoft has been everywhere lately, so here’s some linguistic news about its products:

😃 Word 365 has got a shortcut for pasting text without formatting: that is, just text, without italics, color, underlines, etc. This command is invoked by the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + V and is very useful when copying text from a web page into Word.

Users who are well acquainted with Word immediately get worried: wait a minute, but this shortcut has already been assigned to the “apply copied format” command, what happens now? Well, now it goes like this:

—copy format: CTRL + ALT + C
—apply format: CTRL + ALT + V

On Macs, respectively, CMD is used everywhere instead of CTRL.

Actually, pasting text without formatting has been around for a long time in PowerToys.

😃 Having invested a lot of money in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, Microsoft started to implement it everywhere. The most convenient way to communicate with it is via Skype.

To enable ChatGPT in Skype, find there an authorized user with the Bing name, add them to your contacts, and add yourself to the waiting list. You’ll soon be able to chat with them as if they were a regular contact.

😃 Microsoft Translator app for iOS has been updated. The speech identification mechanism has been improved, optical recognition is now online, and you can transcribe the speech of a specific person in a group. The Android app is next to be updated.

In addition, 13 African languages have been added to Microsoft Translator (all of it, not only for iOS).

#softwarefortranslators #microsoft #word #keycombinations

💁‍♂️ ChatGPT drove the whole world crazy. No sooner had OpenAI released version 4, than all AI hell broke loose:

😃 Duolingo introduced Duolingo Max, a subscription option where an AI interlocutor can explain to the user why a particular answer is correct or wrong and just chat with them.

😃 GPT-4 has become available on Bing immediately. As it turned out, it had already been secretly used there earlier.

😃 An AI chatbot will appear even in CrowdIn. The beta version is currently being tested.

😃 Paul Filkin is trying to construct regular expressions using GPT—and on the 5th attempt, AI managed to create a query that adds thousand separators to multi-digit numbers.

* * *
What’s happening now is a hype of the first days of fun with an exciting toy. But it will take some time for this toy to have a powerful impact on our work. Let’s remember Amara’s law:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

#duolingo #crowdin #regularexpressions #microsoft

📤 A quick reference on how to create files of different types in memoQ (the file is assumed to be already translated).

Right-click any file (or several selected files) on the Project home tab in the memoQ interface, then select what you need:

😃 To create an MQXLZ file: Export > Export Bilingual > memoQ XLIFF > check the Save a compressed file box.

😃 To create an MQXLIFF file: Export > Export Bilingual > memoQ XLIFF > uncheck the Save a compressed file box.

😃 To create an MQBACK file: right-click the memoQ file > Deliver/Return. Please note: this command works only in an offline project! In an online one, the command will upload the file to the server and close it in the current role, so don’t take offense.

😃 To convert a memoQ file to the Trados Word format (as if it was translated into Word using Trados 2007): Export > Export Bilingual > Trados DOC/RTF.

😃 To create a clean file: Export > Export (Stored Path).

#memoQ #techtips #tradosstudio #word