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Transit NXT is the next generation of STAR's translation memory system. This new version will offer an optimized solution to make your translation teams even more productive.
Translation Memory in Context: What Makes Transit Different?
The sentence is the basic unit of language. However it is not necessarily the basic unit of meaning. Translators read sentences in the source text, but are only able to do a good job of translating them if they are able to derive and understand their meaning from the context. This is a principle which was taken into account in the first version of Transit, over 20 years ago. In contrast to other translation memory systems, Transit does away with a database which is exclusively sentence based; instead the full breadth of the context contained in a document remains available in the Transit reference material.
Hans Lenting . I've used Transit for about 15 years. I was once enthusiastic about it, now I think that Transit is no longer up to today's standards.
This tool has always been very expensive to buy. The file format filters are of high quality, but additional filters are expensive too. Other CAT tools offer these additional filters (FrameMaker MIF etc.) for free!
The learning curve is quite steep. The documentation is great.
Transit only supports XLIFF in *one* direction (import), which is quite unacceptable. It missis out on smart editing features like automatic case adaption during Find and Replace, auto-assembling etc. It's not possible to select the whole content of one segment (without defining a macro first) and to perform operations on that selection (like case toggling).
The Access or MS SQL databases that are used to store terminology, respond slow when more than about 500,000 entries are stored. Importing terminology can take a long time.
Support is quite expensive and doesn't always provide a solution.
Transit's tag handling is a real disaster. There are so many tags, many of them grouped, which makes it even harder to insert/move them. It's a dull task to insert the necessary tags. You have to be a keyboard magician, using all kinds of keyboard shortcuts.
By default, you have to overwrite the target text, instead of starting to type in an empty segment. You really have to like that (or not).
Personally, I let my Transit rest in a Virtual Machine and use another tool to process all Transit project files. One that lets me focus on the text at hand, instead on tags.
13 out of 13 found this review helpful.
1 out of 5
How easy is it to learn?
Not recommended for any reason whatsoever
Review by
Giuseppina Gatta, MA (Hons) . I bought this CAT tool only because requested by a client. I'd never buy it if I had to choose. Very user unfriendly, complicated installation with all the license and activation numbers back and forth and customer service requested my police report after I was stolen a laptop and asked to reset my license. This is unheard of and made me feel like I was a liar! I don't recommend this program to anyone. License is also expensive.
12 out of 13 found this review helpful.
5 out of 5Excellent CAT tool, I can recommend it
Review by
Ladislav Filo (X)Transit NXT Freelance Pro (version I am using) is excellent tool with freely by user customizable views, layouts and taskbars. When comparing to Trados Studio 2011 Freelance, it has smaller installation file (just one) and works with smaller package files (when exchanging projects). But spellcheckers must be installed separately and spellchecking generally runs slightly slower than in Trados. It has no third party plugins, but some useful features for which there exist plugins for Trados, are in Transit built-in.
Working in Transit is like typing in MS Word, including all shortcuts used in Word (e.g. Shift+F3 for changing capitalization whenever cursor is in the word, without highlighting it, Ctrl+Del deletes the word, but not the space before next one).
Words which are in glossary(ies), are color highlighted both in source and translation pane, so you can just by a shortcut change the source word to translation, when the cursor is on a glossary highlighted word. This speeds up the whole work.
Scripts for finding and replacing can be saved and anytime loaded again. The same applies to regular expressions. With regular expressions there can be also variables stored, so very complex regex can be used.
Transit can process Trados .ttx files, but they have to be prepared in Trados with an extra option checked in advance.
Learning is easy, but needs some time like with all CAT tools
15 out of 21 found this review helpful.
5 out of 5
How easy is it to learn?
Best CAT by far, but unfortunately not popular enough.
Review by
John Hayes . Of the 4 CATs my company uses, including Across, SDL Studio, Transit NXT and MemoQ, Transit is by far the best according to a unanimous vote among my companies 10 translators and editors. It certainly has some weak points, and requires a little getting used to, but its range of features enhance both speed and quality.
Too bad more translators don't know.
More importantly, too bad so many end-customers are bought by the huge marketing departments of Across and Studio.
Which brings me to Transit's possibly greatest weakness: STAR doesn't market it well enough.
9 out of 16 found this review helpful.
1 out of 5
How easy is it to learn?
A clunky software that belongs in the bins of history
Review by
Jean-Michel Nadeau . Horrible interface. Horrible performance. Horrible help menu. Just plain horrible.
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