Showing Your Changes as Tracked Changes

Sometimes a client asks you to change a translation that is already in memoQ – a revised source, a new term, a round of review comments – and wants to see what you changed. Edits made in the grid don’t show up that way, and neither do corrections that an AI assistant stages for Pre-translate.

There is a way round this in memoQ itself. Export the document as a bilingual file, make your changes in that file, and bring it back with Update From Bilingual. On the way in, memoQ can record the differences as tracked changes. Every changed row then shows its old and new text, just as in a reviewed document, and the client can accept or reject each change.

Step by step

1. Export. In Project home → Translations, select the document and choose Documents → Export → Export Bilingual. Pick Two-column RTF, and save the file into a folder of your choice.
2. Make your changes in the target column of the exported file. Change only the text: leave the source column, the segment IDs and the tags as they are. You can do this in Word, or in Supervertaler Workbench, which opens memoQ bilingual files and writes them back in the same format – with its AI translation, terminology and QA to hand.
3. Update the document. Back in memoQ, choose Documents → Import → Update From Bilingual and select the edited file. memoQ recognises which document it belongs to: the Document import options window lists it as Table RTF with the action Update.
4. Turn on tracked changes. At the bottom of that window, under Table RTF update, tick Import edits as tracked changes. Leave Do not update if source segment is different ticked, so a row whose source was changed in the file is skipped rather than overwritten. Click OK.
5. Check. Open the document: the rows you changed show your edits as tracked changes.

Do the round trip in one go

Anything you change in memoQ itself between the export and the update is overwritten by the file. Make all your changes in the exported file, then update.

Where it works

• Local projects: yes.
• memoQ server (online) projects: yes, in your local copy of the project, if the project manager allows it. Two project settings matter: whether users may check out the project (create a local copy), and whether they may export documents. Both are under the online project’s Settings → General → Project options (memoQ’s help on these settings). If Export or Update From Bilingual isn’t available to you, ask the project manager.

See also

• Removing MT Marks – another job done with a bilingual export and import
• memoQ workflow in Supervertaler Workbench