Cat tools comparative review

No, this post is not about Caterpillar CATs, it’s about the so called Computer Aided Translation tools 😉  But there are so many analogies between the heavy industry and our industry that I wanted to use their logo…

I took the time to compile an extensive list of CAT tools available on the market today, both commercial and Open Source. The goal is to compile a gap analysis and a comparison review.

Here’s the list of CAT tools:

Across	Déjà Vu	Lokalize	Omega T	Pootle	WordFast
Alchemy Publisher	GlobalSight	Swordfish	Omega T+	SDL Trados Studio	Microsoft Helium
AnyMem	gtranslator	MemSource	Ocelot	Similis	Microsoft LocStudio
Atril Déjà Vu	Kilgray MemoQ	MetaTexis	Open Language Tools	Star Transit	Uniscape Translator Studio
CafeTran	Lingotek	MultiTrans	Poedit	Virtaal	RC-WinTrans Translator’s

Among all these CAT tools I decided to install and test 11 of them. Here’s the list of the CAT tools I tested:

Commercial	Open Source
SDL Trados Studio 2014 Professional	Heartsome Translation Studio
SDL Trados Studio 2014 Freelance	Omega T
SDL Trados Studio 2014 Express	Omega T+
Kilgray MemoQ Translator Pro
WordFast
Atril Déjà Vu
Maxprograms Swordfish
Memsource

I also took the time to compare the different license costs:

CAT tool name	License Cost
SDL Trados Studio 2014 Professional	$2,895.00
SDL Trados Studio 2014 Freelance	$825.00
SDL Trados Studio 2014 Express	Free for WorldServer users
Kilgray MemoQ Translator Pro	$770.00
WordFast	$530.00
Atril Déjà Vu	$520.00
Maxprograms Swordfish	$345.00
Memsource	$140.00 per month (1PM +10LSs)

Among the criteria I used for this comparative analysis:

• State of the art TM and TD technology.  In other words,  is the TM able to automatically propose relevant translations from the Translation Memory as a complete (“exact match”) or partial solution (“fuzzy match”) whenever the same or a similar sentence occurs in the project and also automatically detect glossary terms in the Terminology Database?
• Project-level views and operations.  For example, is it possible to open a batch of files as if they were just one big file to boos productivity? Can you easily add TMs/TDs, and import and export assets?
• State of the art Multilingual Editor.  In other words, is the editor user friendly and productive? Can you easily customize it to your needs?

I’ll start the comparative review with the first of the three Open Source tools: Heartsome Translation Studio. Stay tuned!