Just as so many people "can" English, there are many who claim they "can" memoQ auto-translation rules. Many useful rules are quite simple and do in fact require little expertise to write and implement. However, as increasingly sophisticated problems are solved in memoQ with the help of auto-translation rules, the need for discipline and organized workflows to create, maintain and deploy the rulesets becomes increasingly apparent. That's really what this unit is about. Best practices. It's all very simple in the beginning, but without attention to a few simple matters, things do tend to get out of hand.

What do you do if there is a small fire in your home? Well, you might grab a fire extinguisher if you had the foresight to buy one. Or maybe a blanket to smother the fire. As you fight that fire, you generally need not think of the chemical composition of the foam you spray on the blaze. Other things like how to release the extinguisher's trigger and where to aim take precedent. Likewise, you don't give a lot of thought to the color and weave of the blanket with which you smother the threat. In a similar way, you need not worry a lot about the "scary regular expressions" involved when you deploy a numbers ruleset for translation, review or QA of your texts. You just select the right rules for the target language and get to work.

This course will supply a lot of ready-to-go, high quality auto-translation rules that you can safely treat as "black boxes" to help you in your work. No coding needed at all if the output meets your project needs. And if small changes are needed, perhaps adaptations for a particular clients or projects, then we'll talk about efficient ways to accomplish this or how to give clear instructions to an "expert" to do the work for you. What matters here is that you know what form you need for the translation output, not that you master any geeky stuff.

All this information will be added a few bits at a time, in a somewhat sensible sequence, to give you the opportunity to absorb the ideas with minimal stress and confusion, to avoid "overload" and try these new things at an easy pace. And ask lots of questions. At every stage, questions, feedback, suggestions and requests are very welcome.

Private communication with me can ensue in my social exchange languages: English (my native language), German (close enough to native that the difference doesn't matter), Spanish (I get by, B1 or B2 maybe) and Portuguese (I live in Portugal and am fine with written communication and spoken exchanges are fine if you speak as slowly as the donkeys in Alentejo).