Smartcat vs. Trados Studio vs. XTM Cloud Translation Management System

ABBY SmartCAT is truly a universal solution that can fit any type of organization from freelancers flying solo, to small team of translators and large translation agencies. Anyone who wants to establish themselves as a professional translator can benefit greatly from the CAT tool that SmartCAT offers absolutely free of charge, while teams will surely appreciate the collaborative features that make it possible to work simultaneously with other translators, proofreaders, editors and QA experts on a single project.

SDL Trados Studio is extremely well suited for expert CAT tool users. More novice users will have trouble getting up to speed. I have an office full of employees that constantly ask questions on how to do specific tasks, mainly because the task sequence is not obvious and is only uncovered by rote repetition of the same things. If you learn and apply the same techniques repeatedly, it becomes easier, but it seems the software was designed by software people, sometimes with little thought to the end users who have to figure it out. I don't know that professional training should be so necessary.

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• Segmentation.
• Translation overall quality.
• Customer service.
• Pricing.

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• Extracting sentences from Word, PowerPoint, and PDF.
• Updating the source document when the client sends an updated source file.
• Comparing sentence by sentence old set of source/target translations made outside of SDL Trados.
• Maintaining a user community base to broadcast knowledge and issues.
• Having an aggressive product update frequency.

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• Performance has been an issue initially. Sometimes it takes longer for some things to load and it can be frustrating.
• UI seems a bit confusing at times. For example, I don't understand why I need to have a translator's profile when I'm clearly a project manager.
• Their support team can take a long time to reply which often crucial for urgent projects.

• I would like it to be faster. When I create a new project, even if it is short, it takes a couple of minutes until I can start using the file.
• I would like it to support more than 5 languages as, for example, I work with 7 different language pairs.
• It does not always accept the files after they were converted with OCR. It would be great if I could use Trados for those files as well.

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Again, the list of functions is impressive but the way it is organized (not process-driven) and the fact that complex tasks should be close to basic tasks make the product suitable to hardcore users that have a lot of time to research the manuals and blogs. By the way, Nora Diaz is one of the most respectable users of this product. Her videos help a lot!

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Support has been fast, precise and thorough. There is support on the web, by chat, by email, from the communities, from the experts, on the product Help section, on YouTube, and other social media. There is also a paid support for companies. This area is where the company stands out. I was not able to evaluate the support in languages other than English.

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I regularly use the two other products and appreciate Smartcat including more features than MateCat, such as storing of projects and contact with agencies and clients.

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I tried using memoQ to get used to server-based localization tools, but experienced critical issues such as translation data not being updated on the server so stopped using it before I get used to it, unfortunately. It must be updated and improved by now, so I might try using it again in the near future.

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• Translation memories and CAT tool help us ensure maximum consistency in our translations which is always appreciated by clients.
• Team collaboration made it easier for us to grow our business and take on bigger projects, which brings us more revenue.
• Payment solution helps us save money on wire transfer fees which is always great when working with multiple freelancers.

• As we have the license we can accept and take on our clients' requests without problem.
• Integration with other tools such as Xbench makes it very easy to apply our QA procedures.
• It is less efficient compared to our main CAT tool thus sometimes it can get time-consuming.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info