Most of our projects are in memoQ and while it is mostly practical to run QA and spellchecking internally in memoQ, there may be reasons to consider other alternatives:
- memoQ internal spellchecker can be very slow and doesn't loop
- memoQ internal QA can be slow too and has rather limited functionality
- Some clients might require QA reports from other tools
In these cases, it is good to be aware of the different alternatives available.
QA
You can carry out QA in memoQ or run an Xbench check on exported memoQ files. See below for details to help you decide which approach is more suitable for your project.
memoQ internal QA
You can run QA in memoQ and proceed to address the flagged issues and export a QA report. However, memoQ QA can be time-consuming and inflexible on certain features.
See this page for general info on running the QA.
Here you can find information on how to edit the QA settings and a brief outline on which checks are available.
Xbench
If you need to do the QA using Xbench but the work has been done in memoQ, you need to first export files from memoQ as bilingual Trados-compatible DOC (for Xbench 2.9) or bilingual memoQ MQXLZ files (for Xbench 3.0).
Xbench checks may be required by the client, but as it is a fast, simple to use but still very advanced tool, it can be useful to run QA in Xbench instead of memoQ. You can for example set up custom checklists to spot common errors or mistranslations in your recurrent work. Consult with LT if you wish to investigate custom QA arrangements in Xbench.
QA Distiller
Some clients require us to use QA Distiller. When this is not a requirement, it is recommended to use other QA alternatives.
CheckMate
CheckMate is part of the Okapi framework. There is no proper installer but you can copy the whole folder \\stpgroup.file.core.windows.net\TechInfo\Installers\Okapi to a location on your computer. It is a basic QA program that handles some basic file formats. One very nice feature in CheckMate is the ability to look for leading/trailing spaces, something which is not possible in memoQ internal QA or Xbench.
Spellchecking
memoQ internal spellcheck
The spell checker in memoQ uses either Microsoft Office or Hunspell dictionaries. You need to configure your spell checker settings correctly to make the best use of it. See for instructions on how to do that here.
Hunspell does not work for Finnish, which is why we use Office for Finnish target jobs, but for all other target languages using Hunspell is the preferred setting.
Running a memoQ spell check is straightforward because you don't need to export any files, but it is notoriously slow. With large volume jobs, running the spell check outside memoQ is recommended. The below two options are available for you if you need to do that.
Xbench
You can use Xbench for spellchecking memoQ projects if you export the files in the same way as for QA. Translations from other tools can also be spellchecked in Xbench. The interface is very clever and it is integrated with the QA, so you can kill two birds with one stone and spellcheck while running QA in Xbench. See
ApSIC Xbench for information on how to set up spellchecking in Xbench.
However, Xbench spellchecking dictionaries are Hunspell based, so there is no Finnish support here.
Microsoft Word
You can also choose to do spell check in Microsoft Word. To do this, you need to export your files as bilingual RTF, then delete all other text in the file apart from the target column and run spell check. We have experienced that the spell check in Word can be considerably faster than waiting for memoQ spell check to finish, despite the extra steps it requires to export and prep the files.