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Trados Studio

Score5.2 out of 10

45 Reviews and Ratings

What is Trados Studio?

Trados Studio is a translation management and language localization platform, from multinational SDL headquartered in the UK. It is a computer-assisted translation product, designed to be a complete translation environment for language professionals who want to edit, review and manage translation projects whilst in the office or on the move.

Media

Great tool!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I frequently use Trados Studio Freelance 2024 and all the past editions, as some of my clients work with this tool. Once you understand it, it will be easy to use and help me reach my daily goal of high quality. I am also a user of other tools but prefer Trados Studio.

Pros

  • TM for clients.
  • Termbase
  • Receiving and sending projects.

Cons

  • N/A

Return on Investment

  • By using Trados Studio, I gained more clients.

Usability

Other Software Used

Smartling, memoQ, Phrase Localization Platform

Memory problems

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Trados Studio for my at-home freelance translation projects.

Cons

  • Memory usage. Trados Studio exhibits random hang and abnormal termination. Very annoying since I bought a new laptop w/ suggested memory (32GB?) just for this. The problem didn't improve.

Return on Investment

  • positive - single file edit - doesn't have to overwrite the original
  • negative - frequent lost work due to unexpected abnormal termination

Usability

Comprehensive tool but crashes at times

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Trados on a daily basis for a long time as this is a requirement for most of my clients. In my opinion, it is pretty user-friendly and helps you manage your projects and resources. I believe it has wonderful features such as a spelling check, quality assurance and segment filters. On the downside, in my experience, it is not so good at managing large projects/files and there are frequent bugs and system crashes. The latest version is causing me a great deal of problems as it crashes each time I accept a segment, although I can work around this problem but this makes more work for me. Terminology is often not displayed and the system often does not like you to make changes to termbases. My operating system is Windows 11 64-bit and I believe that does cause more problems.

Pros

  • Project management
  • Quality assurance
  • Handling different document formats

Cons

  • Unable to handle large files efficiently
  • 64-bit version required
  • Improved terminology window and usage

Most Important Features

  • QA
  • Terminology bases
  • Translation memories

Return on Investment

  • Complete jobs more quickly, so you can do more work
  • In my experience, when it crashes, you can waste a great deal of time getting it sorted

Alternatives Considered

Wordfast

Great choice for medium and large-size translation agencies

Pros

  • Improves translation efficiency.
  • Fairly easy to use.
  • It supports a lot of different formats and integrates well with other tools.
  • A lot of translation agencies prefer SDL Trados, so being able to work in it results in increased client demand.

Cons

  • Very expensive.
  • Lots of bugs that lead to constant updates and service packs.

Return on Investment

  • Improved efficiency by 30%.
  • Helped us retain clients by offering additional discounts for repetitive texts.
  • Streamlined the overall workflow of our organization.

Alternatives Considered

ABBYY SmartCAT

Other Software Used

IFTTT, Sprout, Mandrill

Trados Studio as an aid in daily translation tasks

Pros

  • The TM use helps a lot to identify repeated words and fuzzy matches.
  • Trados and MemoQ files are compatible, so if a client sends a file to be worked in MemoQ I can mostly translate it in Trados too.
  • I can edit and correct any errors the same way I do in Microsoft word: I can use track changes, find and replace, among other things.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • Trados is used by many clients, so it helps me to get more jobs.
  • Having one of the latest versions helps me a lot. I can, for example, import editable pdf documents and work on them within the Trados environment.
  • It also helps me with files which need to be returned in bilingual format in Word.

Alternatives Considered

Wordbee

Other Software Used

Wordbee, Memsource