How to fix false or missing warnings about punctuation marks in memoQ's QA module

Description:   Read this if memoQ's QA module reports warnings about brackets/parentheses or quotation marks while you have double checked that the translation contains the required number of the correct punctuation marks. This problem can be fixed with the correct QA settings.

Details:   

memoQ's QA module contains a check to verify the correct usage of parentheses/brackets, apostrophes, and quotation marks. But if you just enable this check and start working with it, you may encounter false positive warnings (warnings while there is no actual mistake in the translation), or you may get missing warnings for actual errors. This is because this check requires careful language-specific configuration.

This QA check first identifies these types of punctuation marks in the source text, and then verifies that the same number of the same types of marks are present in the translation. But to achieve this, the QA check must have information about the language specific punctuation marks for the languages involved, i.e. it must have a list of the correct (acceptable) parentheses and quotation marks for the source and target languages. If any of this information is wrong or missing, the QA check may not work correctly.

You can enter this information in a QA settings resource attached to your project. (How to use custom QA settings, in general, is outside the scope of this article.)

How to enter language-specific punctuation marks:

1. Open the QA settings resource used in the project.
2. Go to the Punctuation tab. See the rectangle around the option that enables the check discussed here.
   
3. In the "Custom punctuation marks for languages" section, select the project source language first.
4. Click the Add button. You get a window where you can define a single punctuation mark and set its type. For example, to add a simple left parenthesis used in English and many other languages, enter the following:
   
   
   Here you can also see that there are settings for the usage of spaces before and after the punctuation mark. These are used by another QA check, and are not in the scope of this article.
5. Follow the same steps until all the punctuation marks are added for source and target languages of your project. If any of them is missing or set up wrong for any of the project languages, the QA check will not work as expected. You do not need to do this manually every time you set up a project, you can reuse the QA settings resource instead.

In the future, memoQ is likely to receive sensible default settings (at least for the most widely used languages) so that you don't need to set punctuation marks manually to make this check work correctly. (Actually, a select few languages, currently only Hungarian and French, already have such defaults in memoQ. This can actually cause confusion when you are doing QA and your current source or target language is Hungarian or French, but the other language is something else, since that way it is likely that memoQ will automatically identify the punctuation marks in one language, but not the other. For example, if you are translating from English to French, and you have pair of parentheses, then memoQ will "see" the pair of parentheses in the French translation (because it has a built-in default defined for French), but not in the English source. Unless you define punctuation marks manually for English, this check will result in false positive warnings in this case.