An SDL advertisement in 2009 claimed that one person translated over 34,000 words in a 10 hour period using the new SDL Trados product release. The logic in the ad: buying a Trados license is a no-brainer and the expense can be recouped quickly. Many people, however, were upset by that ad and called it false advertising. You can read the discussion here. Close to 100 comments were written until the discussion was closed for further comments.
In another discussion about SDL Trados on LinkedIn (read it here) over 35 comments were received, while more comments keep coming in daily.
The following are some selected responses from these two discussions:
I have been using Trados and/or SDLX since 1996 and nothing comes close.
Franck Abate
A few years ago I was misled by SDL’s sales pitch which was phrased in a way which suggested that Concordance search in Workbench does more or less the same thing as EBMT (example based machine translation) in Dejavu. They misled me once, now I simply don’t believe such exorbitant claims.
Piotr Bienkowski, Poland
I purchased the entire Trados suite in 2006 . . . . and have been using it ever since. I have tried other programmes, but Trados is easier to use and more robust. Now that I have extensive Trados TM’s, I prefer to use it than to try to transfer them to other programmes.
Liz Lyons, CSO, Scientific Translating
I bought Trados many years ago. It’s a mistake I won’t do again…
Giuseppina Gatta, MA USA
No problem, folks. Chuck Norris does it twice in one round-house kick.
Grzegorz Gryc , Poland
This quote is based upon the translator working on a large Excel file that contained many repetitive segments. A large percentage of these segments became Context Matches in the Translation Memory as the translation progressed and because of the additional checks that Studio makes to ensure the accuracy for these types of matches the translator was able to accept them without question as they were automatically confirmed as a result of Auto-Propogation. This means that only a smaller number required attention and as it was possible to add terms to the Termbase on the fly, that were also repetitive, the AutoSuggest feature was able to use these in addition to other strings offered in this way and reduce the amount of typing and as a result complete the work faster.
If any of the users on this thread would like to make more use of these features themselves, or would like to know more about them please feel free to contact me either through this forum or directly (pfilkin@sdl.com) and I will be very happy to help.
Paul Filkin, SDL Trados Technologies
Paul, with that kind of reasoning, I can translate 999.999.999.999.999.999 words in 10 minutes With DéjàVuX Workgroup. Especially because the text had 999.999.999.999.999.998 repetitions. So there you go. DéjàVuX Workgroup is way better than Trados.
Loek van Kooten, Netherlands
I had the same thing once: Excel file with a catalogue, describing thousands of different electronic items with a couple of attributes (colour, shape etc.). The puzzle actually put itself together in no time while I was having a toilet break, only had to give it a brief check. Word count: about 50.000 words, Tool used: Deja Vu 3. That was in 2001. Nuff said.
Wolfgang Jörissen, Belize
Did any of you use Systran tools? They offer a great UI, much like Passolo [and much better than TRADOS, IMO] – yet cost much less.
Oren Evron, Project Manager, HP Software R&D [former MERCURY]
You will find that many CAT tool developers are listening to concerns like yours and developing new types of translation tools. A different breed of tool like XTM, memoQ, Heartsome are cost effective and very powerful. Depending on your requirements there are plenty of alternative options available. The choice is yours. One such option is the XTM Suite of web based translation tools. The suite has Project Management, Translation Memory, Terminology management and a translation workbench (editor). Pricing is also very competitive. Take a look at www.xml-intl.com or contact me on enedas@xml-intl.com for more info.
Elliot Nedas
My opinion on tools I have used:
IBM Translation Manager comes free for those working on IBM jobs, but you can use it for other jobs as well. Very powerful. Excellent markup tables, extremely fast if used in a network, small footprint in memory.
Idiom Desktop Workbench is free for jobs coming out of Idiom WorldServer. Raises your productivity, especially if you use it in a work flow TL, ED, PR.
Across has developed into a great tool for translators receiving jobs from Across-bound customers. Only for Across jobs.
Transit. Still my favorite tool of the oldtimers. Excellent productivity. Buy it once and get the SPs year after year for free. Definitely worth the money, great support. Can be used in a networked environment for small teams.
Heartsome/Araya. Extremely fast system for networked teams, uses SQL database (MySQL, SQLServer, Oracle, others), restricted formats, but the developer makes new filters available in a nutshell. Good value for translators, especially with the terminology extractor from Araya.
Wordfast: Great value for translators, excellent support.
DéjàVu: Translators love it, highest productivity, especially for editing, rather expensive though.
My favorite: MemoQ: It has at least 2 features I really like: “With memoQ 3.6 you can import PDF files for alignment and build a translation memory without difficult conversion processes.” – “Besides the traditional non-interpreted tags, memoQ can now also display TTX tags with inline tags, enabling you to change the order of the tags and to see the meaning of the tags. Thus memoQ becomes an alternative editor to SDL Trados Tageditor.”
Joseph Dengler, Director at NetVenture Europe sarl
We’ve found that MemoQ has more functionalities than Trados, and for less cost (which is especially important for our translators).
Lori Thicke, Co-Founder, Lexcelera Localization
Related posts:
Comments