Trados—Is It a Must?by Andrei Gerasimov |
 I was quite happy with Wordfast for a year when a lost job (use of Trados was a strict client‘s requirement) made me buy Trados 5.0. It was in January 2002. It took me two weeks (full-time) to learn how to use the tool (despite the fact that I was thoroughly familiar with the TM concept and had used DéjàVu and Wordfast). By the end of the first month I was proficient enough in the use of Trados to translate various types of files. After that I sent notification that I owned/used Trados 5.0 Freelancer to about 2000 (two thousand) translation agencies worldwide, including my old clients. By the end of the second month I returned to Wordfast in my daily work for several reasons. Some of them are as follows: IMHO, WF is much more user-friendly. My OS and applications (Windows 98, MS Office 97) never crash when I use WF. The last reason was purely psychological one: I did not feel obligated to migrate to Trados from WF only because I paid USD 745 for Trados and WF was licensed free of charge. From January 2002 to August 2002 I did 125 small, medium-sized, and large jobs. Only three jobs required the use of Trados. In these 3 cases the source files were in MS Word format. The total word count of these 3 jobs was less than 3 percent of my total workload. I did these 3 jobs using WF 3.35, and no client noticed any difference. They were sure that I had used Trados 5.0 and were happy about my translation services. Of course my experience with various TM software is a limited one. However my conclusions are as follows:
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