Seba Translation Log 01:

On Friday morning I woke up at 7:58am, ready to start working on my part of the translation. It was fun, I had never worked with a text like this, so I was delighted to have a chance to work with it. 

A few hours passed and things were going okay; I was finding the right translations and I was satisfied with what I was doing. I decided to take a break and I wanted to count how many words I had already translated.

As a team, we decided to use memoQ to work on this project and I had never used the software, so I was still learning the ropes and I discovered things as I went along. Well, since I didn’t know how to count the words exactly, I just thought it would be a good idea to highlight the source text on all the segments I had already translated and then just hit Control+C to put them on Word and see how many words they were. Now, I don’t know what I pressed, I don’t know if this is what happens every time you do what I did, but after doing that, all the segments I had translated were replaced with the source text. So I had a small heart attack, but I told myself “hey, it’s fine, just Control+Z and it’ll be fine.” Well, Control+Z didn’t work. My heart started racing. Then I thought “Maybe if I close memoQ it could return to a previous state or something?” “No, you saw the server get updated, you have effectively killed your translation. 

Time to Google. 

And so I did. It said to check out the Row History and replace the segment there. I tried that and the history did not include my translation. I thought “but I confirmed each segment, what happened?!” Now I was truly panicking and my team was all asleep, since they live in South America and I live in Europe, there is a seven hour difference between us. So I couldn’t ask them. I kept googling; I found a post someone made on a forum where she lost 1500 segments in the same way, and they all told her she could not recover them. I felt like crying.

Then, I pressed on a segment and I realized that the translation memory lit up and I had 101% match for that segment. So my translation was still there. I started replacing all segments and fixed my nightmare. Everything was okay in the world again. Crisis averted. After that, I refused to copy anything from the source text again and just finished the rest of the work by hand.