Monolingual Editing in CAT Tools

CAT tools are primarily designed for translating between two languages. But can they also be used to edit a document in just one language?

In this blog post, I explore which CAT tools support monolingual editing and provide a step-by-step guide for achieving this in memoQ.

Why Opt for Monolingual Editing in a CAT Tool?

Besides translation work, I sometimes edit lengthy, complex texts with specialized terminology and strict formatting requirements. Since the interval between jobs can be quite long, I frequently find myself revisiting old projects to check how I previously spelled certain terms or applied specific formatting rules. This can be very time-consuming.

Ideally, I would have a streamlined system to store and quickly retrieve texts, terminology, and style rules – similar to the way CAT tools work. Since most translators already use a CAT tool, why not repurpose it for monolingual editing?

Features Required for Monolingual Editing

For monolingual editing, I need the ability to configure both the source and target languages as Dutch and ensure that my changes are tracked and visible in my client's word processor. To achieve this, a CAT tool must fulfill two specific criteria that are not standard features in most CAT tools:

Support for configuring a language pair with the same language.
A built-in Track Changes feature to record edits.

Of the three leading standalone CAT tools – Trados Studio, memoQ, and Wordfast – only memoQ meets both requirements.* Consequently, I will focus on this tool for the remainder of this article.

* Trados Studio includes a Track Changes feature but does not support same-language source and target pairs. Wordfast allows monolingual configuration but lacks an integrated Track Changes function by the time of writing in 2025.

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Configuring a Language Pair in memoQ

As a translation tool, memoQ is designed for bilingual projects with source and target languages. For monolingual editing, however, only one language is used. So, can memoQ still be used for this purpose?

While this might initially seem unfeasible, it turns out memoQ allows you to treat language variants as distinct languages. For instance, selecting English (British) as the source language and English (General) as the target language, will create a language pair within the same language, enabling monolingual editing.

The same applies to other languages. Essentially, any language with a locale variant can be used for this workaround.

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Step-by-Step Guide for Monolingual Editing in memoQ

Once you've configured your language pair, follow these steps to prepare and edit your document:

Open your document in the memoQ editor.
Go to the Edit tab and choose Select/Select All Segments (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+A) to select all segments.
On the Edit tab, choose Clipboard/Copy to Target/Copy Source (Ctrl+Shift+S) to copy the source text into the target column. Ensure the segments remain selected.
Go to the Translation tab and click Confirm (Ctrl+Enter) to store all segments in the TM.
From here, you’re ready to edit the text.

Tracking Changes

To ensure edits are recorded and visible, enable memoQ’s Track Changes feature. To do so, go to the Review tab and enable the feature via Tracking/Track Changes. Any changes you make in the target column will now be marked and immediately visible. Once you've edited a segment, save your changes with Ctrl+Enter, ensuring they are written to the TM.

Monolingual editing

Exporting the Corrected Document

After completing the editing process, export the document as usual via Documents/Documents/Export. The final file will include all tracked edits, which are visible in MS Word.

Note: since you've been working outside the source document, it's easy to overlook text within embedded images. I recommend reviewing the final file to ensure nothing has been missed.

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Leveraging Past Projects with LiveDocs

So now you have your system set up to edit monolingual texts. However, it won't reach its full potential without sufficient data. If you still have the source and target files from previous projects with this client, you can put them to good use! LiveDocs in memoQ is a valuable feature that lets you import these files and leverage their data.

How to Set up LiveDocs

Go to Project home and select LiveDocs.
Click Create/Use New to create a new corpus.
Enter a name and any relevant metadata for this corpus in the appropriate fields, then click OK.
On the ribbon, under LiveDocs, go to the LiveAlign tab and click on Add Alignment Pairs.
In the dialog window that opens, add your source document(s) on the left side and your target document(s) on the right of the screen, and click OK.

Once completed, memoQ will align the documents, index their content, and make them available for future use, maximizing the value of your past work.

Leveraging Data Through Concordance Search and Term Bases

Now, if you need to recall how you previously spelled a term or phrase, use memoQ’s Concordance search via Search/Concordance (Ctrl+K).

You can also store frequently used tricky terminology in a Term Base to make future searches faster and ensure consistency in your edits, just as you would for regular translation projects.

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Conclusion

For monolingual editing, memoQ stands out as one of the few CAT tools that support both same-language configurations and tracking changes. It provides a practical solution for translators or editors who work with complex texts, specialized terminology, or need to efficiently manage client preferences. By leveraging memoQ's LiveDocs, Concordance Search and Term Base functionality, editors can streamline their workflow and ensure greater accuracy and consistency in their edits.

Erwin van Wouw (1973) is a native Dutch technician turned translator based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. With over 18 years of experience as a professional Dutch translator and proofreader, he assists businesses in transforming their texts into impeccably written and smoothly flowing Dutch documents.