Trados translation memory software

This is what I found out about Trados Translators Workbench 6.5, Multiterm iX:

1. However many terms in your sentence are in the ‘termbase’, you only get to see them one at a time.

2. If you change a sentence, you have to ‘open’ and ‘close’ it again for your changes to go to memory.

1 and 2 above mean there is a model of the translator as machine, doing one sentence perfectly and moving on to the next, never to return, and entering one translation, unadapted, per term, in the sequence of the source text, into the target text.

3. You can overwrite the source text. You can forget search and replace (there are other ways of doing this though).

4. There’s something called ‘cleaning’. This seems to mean you have to do all sorts of copying to keep hold of your work in various stages.

I write this as a happy user of STAR Transit and Termstar since 1998. Thank goodness projects can be exported nowadays!

P.S. No flames in the comments, please. I know this is a religious war, usually between Trados and Déjà Vu, like Word vs. WordPerfect.

LATER NOTE: 5. You can look at several dictionaries in Multiterm, but you can link only one dictionary to the Workbench.

6. The memory is a mystery, not a bunch of ASCII files.

7. When Multiterm contains a term, that term is not highlighted or shown in a different colour in the text window: it has a red line above it. This means you have to stop and look twice, to see which words the red line is marking.

8. You have to deal with files individually. You can’t just load ten related files together and treat them as one for checking and processing.

4 thoughts on “Trados translation memory software

  1. No flames I promise :-)
    I used to be a moderately happy Trados user until version 5.5. Then I just had to switch to Transit. I’m a happier person now :-))))

    I see you don’t mention that awful Trados function called Automatic Concordance, with a window that pops up in the middle of your screen scaring the hell out of you.

  2. Isabella: I suppose I expect people to say Transit is rubbish and only Déjà Vu is OK. There’s also a newer one called Across that looks quite nice.

    I’ve exported my project into Transit now. But when I was using Trados for it, I didn’t mind the pop-up concordance so much, because there was a translation memory not created by me, so it made it easier to be consistent. Normally I never use the TM at a client’s request. It’s unfortunate there isn’t enough room on the screen for that message, of course!

  3. I capitulated and bought Trados because one of (higher-paying) clients wanted me to use it. I think it could be a lot better, but it does the job. Maybe I’ll get Deja Vu or Transit sometime, if they’re more user-friendly.

  4. Jerz: I think Trados have the market sewn up, and my hope is that exchange between these programs will become easier. I won’t say Transit is everyone’s first choice. But I think Trados’s main problem is that you work inside Microsoft Word. Programs like Transit and Déjà Vu that separate ‘content’ and ‘format’ and then just process the content before recombining the two are subject to fewer limitations, I think. Numbers 1 and 2 on my list really slow me down in comparison to Transit. The fact that I can only see one word of the glossary at a time, and even that is not boldly marked on the screen, is what made me export into Transit. I want to see all the terminology quickly and then decide what to use.

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