Hi Paul,

I must admit that I’d be happy with a similar option!

Back in 2009, I decided against Trados Studio at a new employer’s place who hadn’t owned any CAT tool previously because of the fact that we would not have been able to use easily the hundreds of available translated document pairs (12-15 years of in-house translations).
The Studio Align tool is ok when only a bunch of files have to be processed, as documents with headers, footers, embedded tables and boxes lead to alignment errors, and adjusting the alignment is time consuming .
At the time, and for this obvious reason, we decided to go for MultiTrans.
We used it for concordance searches worked freely in Word, as our documents were quite seldom repetitive.

Today, I’m working as a freelancer. With Studio 2017. I really like what Studio has become over the past years. Great job!
BUT: I still have plenty of unaligned document pairs, which I’d love to use in an accurate way.

MemoQ LiveDocs makes it possible to align these documents and to use them as a whole during the translation process, as so called Corpus source. Although the documents are divided into segments by the LiveDocs alignment tool, these segments can be used without having to be imported in a TM, i.e. without having to be verified and adjusted. The adjustment can be done on-the-fly when needed while translating, when encountering a possible match.
But I’m sure you know all this. :-)

Fact is: all the documents I own are a great source of terminology and matches which I can’t make use of inside Studio, as they require alignment. And it would take me at least several weeks to ensure a good alignment job.
You have to fairly admit that MemoQ developers did a great job in order to respond to this specific problematic.

I’m really happy with Studio 2017, as it’s a powerful, intuitive and stable tool, with increased flexibility compared to previous versions (merging "hard broken segments" for example).
But the described LiveDocs feature is something that makes me considering purchasing also MemoQ. And maybe use it as a main CAT tool in the future...

I’m convinced many translators or even companies still have, like I do, unused resource material which would reveal itself extremely useful if it was to be imported easily into Studio.
A similar feature to this LiveDocs one would also help Studio to fill this specific gap with MemoQ.

Cheers,
Nicolas

P.S.: adding a monolingual file as reference is also possible in LiveDocs, but I’ve yet to find out how this could be really useful to me...