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Why are more and more agencies these days choosing memoQ or SDL Studio as their "preferred" tool?
Thread poster: Michael Beijer
Merab Dekano
Merab Dekano  Identity Verified
Spain
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Preferred tools Nov 16, 2015

Agencies have clients who often are other agencies (new ones for sure, as they have not yet build solid end client base). If most of the time they receive Studio packages, they will pass it o to their service provider (us). This clearly means:

- they themselves need t have Studio licence.
- the chosen service provider needs to have Studio licence.

Now I know that you can deal with Studio packages with other CAT tools, but not everyone is willing to undergo the ha
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Agencies have clients who often are other agencies (new ones for sure, as they have not yet build solid end client base). If most of the time they receive Studio packages, they will pass it o to their service provider (us). This clearly means:

- they themselves need t have Studio licence.
- the chosen service provider needs to have Studio licence.

Now I know that you can deal with Studio packages with other CAT tools, but not everyone is willing to undergo the hassle.

Let's not dramatize; if an agency prefers a CAT tool, you are still free to use your own provided it's technically compatible. If the agencies asks you "do you work with Studio?", you don't, but you say you do, them unzip the thing, translate it, zip it back again and send it somehow in the "return package" format, bravo, nobody will arrest you for that.

I myself, without being any agencies at all, have Studio and DVX licences. I prefer DVX, but do use Studio when prompted by my clients. I see no problem, really.
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Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
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Yikes Nov 16, 2015

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

From the perspective of an individual translation, I don't find this trend uncomfortable at all. After all, if in the end the two price fighters left in the ring (memoq and SDL Trados) beat up all the other cat tools to extinction and then fight one another to the finish, leaving just one in the ring, things become all the more simple for me. I just need to buy that final winner and master that tool, instead dividing my money and effort in buying and mastering half a dozen competing products.

As for the analogy of publishers asking writers to choose between two pens, isn't that what they already do? Most reputable magazines and publishers have stringent style sheets which authors wanting to publish their works with them have to scrupulously adhere, and most authors do so uncomplainingly.


All choice gone and only one CAT tool left? Yikes. No thanks.

‘Uncomplainingly’? I think not. Maybe you don't mind following rules right and left, but I do. It's one of the reasons I love being my own boss.

Michael

[Edited at 2015-11-16 11:23 GMT]


 
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL  Identity Verified
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Agree... Nov 16, 2015

2nl wrote:

Yes, I guess that this is the way it works. But what is efficient for a PM, isn't necessarily efficient for a freelance translator (like me). For instance, I think that the memoQ server workflow (whenever I have to use it), is costing me a lot of time. Time in which I cannot translate.



To me, efficiency and productivity are paramount... this is a problem especially with the online (cloud) platform, that don't allow you to use your specific tools. At the end of the day, we can increase our rate to take this aspect into consideration, but they'll always find someone who's prepared to be "tortured" this way... and work for peanuts in the most challenging environments...


 
Balasubramaniam L.
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Darwin will take care of efficiency Nov 16, 2015

2nl wrote:

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

I just need to buy that final winner and master that tool, instead dividing my money and effort in buying and mastering half a dozen competing products.


So for you it doesn't matter how efficient that one last remaining CAT tool is? No more competition, no more need for improvement?


When the CATs fight to the finish, the fittest of them will emerge the victor, and the winning feline will be the most efficient one, if Darwin can be trusted!


 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
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I hope the defeatist monkeys enjoy their peanuts and minimum wage. Nov 16, 2015

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

2nl wrote:

Balasubramaniam L. wrote:

I just need to buy that final winner and master that tool, instead dividing my money and effort in buying and mastering half a dozen competing products.


So for you it doesn't matter how efficient that one last remaining CAT tool is? No more competition, no more need for improvement?


When the CATs fight to the finish, the fittest of them will emerge the victor, and the winning feline will be the most efficient one, if Darwin can be trusted!


Sorry, but I am not a monkey, blindly bashing away at a keyboard. I am a human being, and natural selection can go play its ruthless tricks somewhere else. I actually studied the Origin of Species years ago; what peanut-eating monkey can say the same?

So anyway, I think I'll stick with my "boutique" CAT tool, and my stubborn belief that all this CAT tool "progress" nonsense is not doing much good to our industry. I hope the monkeys enjoy their peanuts and their minimum wage.

Michael


 
Michael Beijer
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agree with EVERYTHING you said! Nov 16, 2015

Rolf Keller wrote:

Michael Beijer wrote:

Personally, I think this is very bad for the industry>. What about you?


Agreed. But no direct client, no agency, no tool provider and - last but not least - no translator will ever orientate its individual behaviour to what the industry would benefit from in the long term. All humans work for money and/or for joie de vivre, although some of them don't admit that fact.

their tools are contributing negatively to the landscape of our profession, on a large scale.


Agreeed again. But this holds for any Translation Memory tool as well. These tools are definitely needed for certaintasks like "Produce a manual for a new or a different car model, taking an existing manual as a starting point." Essential precondition for this workflow: There is a unbroken and linguistically monitored communication & proofing chain in both directions between the final text product and the original authors. Otherwise the translation memory will be turned into a huge heap of scrap sooner or later. But in reality there is no such chain which means that even for such TM-appropriate texts the TM tools are not really valuable – they just save time at the expense of quality, i. e. at the expense of the car manufacturer (angry buyers, unnecessary service requests, frustrated translators who will refuse to rework the stuff next year, ...)

And of course there are many texts for which a TM tool is counterproductive, because it tempts the translator to a "chopping style". Depending on the language this is more or less bad regarding the style, but in any language it leads to unprecise or false translations because the way one reads original & translation is an inappropriate way. At KudoZ you can see many young people who have never translated without a TM tool and thus are on the same low level as many young non-translators: They never have trained to read more than one single sentence in connection, so they are not able to grasp obvious meanings, logical references and so on, if these info isn't given bite-sized in the very same line. The most poular statement from such people reads "Unfortunately there is no context at all", which means "I'm not able to see a page of text as a whole, let alone more than one page."

Unfortunately some agencies urge translators to use such tools even for things like media releases or ads. Phew, do they really think that this will save money or time? Actually the translator needs additional time for the TM handling, compared to a simple, overtypable .doc file. So, as good translators are a rarity, why not release them from unnecessary TM fiddling? Just get "text mechanics" do that work. Architects don't want to lay bricks.


Michael

[Edited at 2015-11-16 17:08 GMT]


 
2nl (X)
2nl (X)  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 11:32
Actually, I like this sentence-based chopping up Nov 16, 2015

Michael Beijer wrote:
Actually the translator needs additional time for the TM handling, compared to a simple, overtypable .doc file.


I import everything in my CAT tool. Even press releases. I really like this presentation of source and target below each other. The big disadvantage of overtyping is: once you have overtyped any text, it's gone. (Unless you have a print out .)


 
Michael Beijer
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The Choppy Segmented Sea. Nov 16, 2015

2nl wrote:

Michael Beijer wrote:
Actually the translator needs additional time for the TM handling, compared to a simple, overtypable .doc file.


I import everything in my CAT tool. Even press releases. I really like this presentation of source and target below each other. The big disadvantage of overtyping is: once you have overtyped any text, it's gone. (Unless you have a print out .)


Funny that you should say that, as I was thinking exactly the opposite just today. Let me explain.

For a few years now I have been doing press releases for company X, which I have always done in a CAT tool. For no particular reason, yesterday, I decided to try to translate one of these press releases using the same method I used many, many moons ago, when I had just started translating and didn't yet use a CAT tool: I used to create a copy of the Word document, and open the two docs side-by-side, using MS Word's cool ‘View Side By Side’ feature. Anyway, so this is how I translated this press release. I actually had to open my CAT tool to look up a few specific terms, as my memory never has been that great. And guess what? I actually discovered that a few of the things that I had stored in my TM, which I have been automatically using for months, if not years, were ... suboptimal. I was also stuck by something which has been niggling me now for years when translating in CAT tools: how working in segments can really mess up the flow of your translation, and result in a stilted, choppy text. Probably no biggie with your product manuals, but not so great with many other kind of text. Forcing your target text into the form of your source text will often create a strange sounding target text. Of course, CAT tools allow you to merge and split segments (unless some idiot PM sent you a malconfigured SDL Studio project file), but this often isn't enough. It wil often be necessary to do some serious moving around of phrases etc. to create a target text that doesn't sound like a translation.

For a very interesting look at similar issues, see Joy Burrough-Boenisch's great book "Righting English That's Gone Dutch": https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fs472dICNgMC&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq="choppy"%20text%20writing%20English%20it's%20going%20Dutch&source=bl&ots=UCrki_A_9X&sig=fa5zMtco-bcqCXqzNxQLKRLPji0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAGoVChMIgZHB_tGVyQIVAlQaCh2zrwCx#v=onepage&q="choppy"%20text%20writing%20English%20it's%20going%20Dutch&f=false

Michael


 
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Why are more and more agencies these days choosing memoQ or SDL Studio as their "preferred" tool?







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