Smartling vs. Trados Studio vs. Transifex

Smartling is great for a company or team that doesn't have the resources to translate multiple properties in-house. It automates the process and makes it much more manageable. If you have a large website that is managed by one local team and not a global team, Smartling is for you.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Transifex is great for when you have content you intend to 1) localize to multiple languages and 2) keep updated over time. It's probably not necessary for one-off projects that you expect to stand the test of time. It's also ideal for companies that intend to add more and more languages over time as business expands

Incentivized

• Website translation without the need to build separate websites for additional locales
• Translation of Indesign Documents (ingests text only) without having extract text - simply upload an idml file and download the translated idml file

• 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.

Incentivized

• Integrates with other tools - makes localizing more straightforward and less of a gargantuan project.
• Easy to add a new language to a project - When making the business decision to expand languages, we can provide decision-makers with accurate estimates before committing to a new language.
• Provides access to multiple translation companies - We get to evaluate and pick the 3rd party translators that work best for our use case.

Incentivized

• Perhaps a global replacement feature for the translation management system (TMS)?

• 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.

Incentivized

• Once you have a lot of resources in a project, ordering gets tricky because there's one long list of resources. I wish I could search for the resource when ordering.
• When you import your resources from another source, it will overwrite any changes you made to the translated article. For example, we stopped creating localized screenshots in our documentation because the images would be overwritten with the original English ones anytime we made updates.

Incentivized

We think Smartling is the way forward in terms of cloud-based translation management tools.

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!

Incentivized

I always receive timely and pleasant support from their Help Desk!

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.

Incentivized

Support has always been easy and fast. Anytime something has come up, we have gotten a quick response and had our issue resolved. Bugs don't seem to stick around for very long either. Seems like their Customer Success and Support groups are in great sync with each other, which always has a positive impact on the customer experience

Incentivized

We prefer Smartling as an online CAT tool because it is easy to use and we can onboard new translators quickly without lengthy training cycles. Our customers like Smartling because they can manage all of their translation needs (website, apps, business documents) through one single platform, share style guides, glossaries and translation memory and save on translation cost over time.

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.

Incentivized

• Helped us win 3 enterprise deals where localization is a must- got us an additional $XXXk ARR.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Fewer people needed - without Transifex, we would probably have to hire more staff to many just the localization projects.
• Meet business demand quickly - now that we are set up with our Transifex flow, adding a new language is relatively easy and we know exactly when to expect the final product to deliver to customers.

Incentivized