Fantastic CAT tool for freelancers and small translation teams
Updated October 11, 2019
Fantastic CAT tool for freelancers and small translation teams
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ABBYY SmartCAT
We've been using ABBYY SmartCAT for the past few years to manage a variety of localization projects with a team of freelance translators. It's been an incredible experience and helped us save a lot of headaches when working on urgent assignments with tough deadlines. Their team collaboration features that allow multiple translators and reviewers to work on a project simultaneously are absolutely outstanding, plus handy statistics help us track the progress of each translator and handle payouts.
- Project setup is super easy and straightforward. Literally takes seconds to create a project, assign TM and termbases and add team members.
- As a project manager, I need to understand the progress of the project and where everyone on the team is. ABBYY SmartCAT makes it easy to track these things.
- SmartCAT makes it incredibly easy to pay our translators which is much cheaper than handling payments via wire transfers.
- Their CAT tool offers great collaborative features including the ability to assign segments and leave comments on strings so proofreaders could see them.
- 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.
- 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.
We also tried Memsource but it was lacking in terms of overall user experience and ease of use. Assigning projects in SmartCAT is a much more intuitive experience, plus it has all these other additional features that are absent from Memsource (like payment solution for freelancers). On top of that, the SmartCAT is absolutely free to use.