Forum: MemoQ support
Topic: What does MemoQ expect when importing a bilingual review RTF file?
Poster: Samuel Murray
Hello everyone
I often do translation or editing for MemoQ clients whereby they send me a 4-column RTF file to work on. I copy the coumn(s) to a new document, work on it, and then paste the updated text back into the original RTF file. I have over the months discovered some things that cause MemoQ to reject the files (in some cases, MemoQ apparently imports nothing, but doesn't tell the user that nothing was imported, so the user/agency then thinks that there were no edits).
For one, I've found that it is imperative that the tags are in mqInternal style. Often, when I paste content from another MS Word file, the tags in the source column change to one of the styles in the document that I paste from. If I did the actual work in e.g. Wordfast Classic, then when I paste the text, the mqInternal tags in the source column changes to tw4winExternal style, and I have to change them back to mqInternal before sending to the client.
For another, I have found that if I paste large amounts of text into the target column, then often MS Word splits the table at the insertion point, so that the first two rows form a separate table, even though there is no space between the tables. Usually, in MS Word, you can merge two tables if they have identical column widths by simply placing them directly against each other, but this trick does not work with MemoQ RTF tables. And a client's MemoQ does not accept the RFT file if it isn't literally all one table. This is extremely annoying because the way to overcome this is to paste shorter pieces of text at a time into the table.
Today I managed to keep it all one table, through some fancy copy/paste work. I did not touch the first column (where the segment numbering information is). But... the client's MemoQ doesn't import it.
So my question is: what things are required by MemoQ of the RFT file so that MemoQ accepts the RFT file and actually imports stuff from it? If there is a list of such requirements, then translators who use the RTF method can try to ensure that their files conform to the unforgiving CAT tool's specific requirements, and hopefully make life easier for their clients (for happy clients are keepers).
Thanks
Samuel