Dieser Eintrag ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar.

memoQ has a handy little feature as part of its QA check which warns you whenever you double up a word in the target language. I’ve had it catch numerous little and ands and to tos which slip into my work on occasion. However certain combinations of doubled up words are fairly commonplace, which can lead to this feature producing lots of unnecessary false errors. A classic example in English might be two hads in a sentence like ‘I had had enough,’ but that pales in comparison to a language like French, which sees plenty of doubled up words in pronominal verbs (nous nous lavons, vous vous souvenez etc.)

One way to fix this is to make use of the relatively new regex feature built into the QA check. Untick the option to check for duplicate words in the target under the Consistency tab. Then under the Regex tab we can replicate this functionality, while including our own exception to the rule. Add a new rule of the type Forbidden regex match in target, give it a relevant description, and then add this target regex:

(?i)(?![nv]ous\b)(\b\S+\b)\s+\b\1\b

When active, this rule will continue to highlight any duplicate words in the translation, including all the usual punctuation marks, but ignores any occurrences of nous nous or vous vous. Obviously these exceptions at the front can be replaced with whatever is required in the target language. The rule isn’t by any means flawless, and will for example also complain about repeated sequences of numbers, but it can help to reduce the number of false positives without having to abandon the check altogether.

[Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash]