Smartling vs. Trados Studio vs. Weglot

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

Weglot is great for a small static website that doesn't have frequent content updates. It is also good for businesses that want to look at only a single language translation. It tends to fall apart when you either have a larger, growing website or multiple languages that you want to translate for. We had the system cut out several times when we first launched due to it repeatedly hitting our translation cap, with little or no warning from the vendor. Once it happened during a critical communication time.

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

• Automatic translations across a wide variety of languages
• Ability to make custom translations to better clarify phrases
• Dynamic swapping of resources like pdfs based on language
• Good analytics on use

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

• Price model is very poor for larger websites who produce content regularly
• Price model is also poor for multiple language options (ie, each language translation is a separate cost)
• Customer service isn't very helpful (non-US based company)

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

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

Weglot was really the only option we saw that met the needs of our schools. If we could find another tool that did the same thing for a cheaper price or was more reliable in it's customer service, we would have went with that system. As it is, they seem to the the best game in town, despite the higher price tag.

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

• Improves the ability for us to deliver accessible content to various non-speaking constituents
• High cost for a benefit that used to be free (Google Translate) adds an extra expense to our business
• Poor customer service means families are sometimes cut off from new translated content, leaving them with a poor experience

Incentivized