MemoQ translation memory defaults

memoQ TM creation (properties) dialog with defaults

General tab

When you create a new translation memory (TM) in memoQ, there are some particular parts of the default settings worthy of attention on the General tab of the creation dialog. These are marked with red numbering in the screenshot on the right. This information was last updated for memoQ version 9.10.

1. Location to create the new translation memory database. It is particularly important to pay attention to this if you are connected to a memoQ TMS server. Make sure that the radio button is selected for "My computer" if you want to create a local TM. A new TM can only be created on the server if the login account used has corresponding privileges; otherwise, an error message will be displayed. Users with project manager or administrative privileges can too easily create TMs on a server when their intent was to create a local TM for testing. Local TMs can be published to a memoQ server if the user has the necessary permissions.
2. TM name and languages. Consider the name of a new TM (highlighted text in the screenshot) carefully so that the resource and its purpose can be identified easily later. Naming conventions can be helpful here.

Languages specified are also important to consider in memoQ. Unlike some other platforms, memoQ supports both "generic" and "sublanguage variant" options for many of its resources.

1. Lookup behavior and duplicate non-contextual translations for source text. The default settings here are pretty good and usually should not be changed. Reverse lookup allows a TM to be used as a reference in projects where the source and target languages are reversed from the order specified in point 2. Allowing multiple translations is a bad idea usually. If context matching is enabled in the TM, the same source text in different contexts can have different target language translations even if Allow multiple translations is not enabled. Enabling that setting only makes sense in cases where translation memory data without transferable context information are imported from another system, and the TM thus created will be used as read-only reference data. This avoids the loss of possibly useful translations from the original TM data source. A TM can only be set as read-only once it has been created. This is done in the translation memory Properties dialog in memoQ for the TM, which looks very much like the creation dialog shown here.
2. Meta-information. There are six fields in this section. The Description field should be used to identify anything in particular about the resource which is not apparent from the other fields and which may affect its proper use. Defined conventions for the use of the Project, Client, Domain and Subject fields are useful to avoid multiple entries for the same thing and to allow the data to be filtered or match rates to be weighted using features of the TM settings configuration. The default entry for Name can also be changed if another user or source is to be identified as the TM "creator".

Custom fields

It is possible to define custom fields for a memoQ translation memory. These can also be useful for data selection and match penalties.