THE LEADER'S PROGRESS

 

Michael Benis reviews TRADOS 6.5.5

 

First in a series

 

Following on from our review of Déjà Vu X several issues back, bulletin will be bringing you reviews of the latest versions of all the major translation memory products on the market. This issue kicks off the series with a two-part review and introduction to the best-known name on the translation memory market: TRADOS.

 

Starting at the beginning

 

Unusually for a software review, I'm going to start this by taking you through a very quick potted history of TRADOS the company as well as the product, because that's practically the only way to gently provide the information that non-users require to evaluate whether they should consider buying it or not. There are a number of reasons for this, foremost among them the fact that TRADOS has practically become synonymous with translation memory software, but at the same time follows a very different approach from almost all its competitors. This means that freelance translators and translation companies often talk about "TRADOS" when they really mean translation memory, often leading many who are about to take the plunge into translation memory to opt for TRADOS without even making a detailed appraisal of the alternatives. This isn't to say that there's anything inherently wrong with the product, but rather to raise an initial red flag reminding readers that there's nothing quite like making an informed choice. So let's get back to our whirlwind history. Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride!

 

David makes his mark

 

CAT specialist Bob Clark at the University of Leeds is rightly fond of pointing out how the history of translation memory is full of David and Goliath stories. TRADOS started out over a decade and a half ago as the David who taught IBM's Goliath Translation Manager a couple of tricks or two. Up until then Translation Manager was by far the most user-friendly software amid a pretty grim bunch of characters that generally separated the process of generating translation memory matches from the "editing environment" in which the translator themselves worked. TRADOS, which at that stage meant a couple of bright young lads from Germany, took the revolutionary step of bringing translation memory and an electronic glossary together on one screen with Microsoft's Word, which was at that time only just beginning to assert itself over the far more popular WordPerfect (but that's another David and Goliath story all in itself).

 

If you take a look at TRADOS' Word environment you will find that in fact very little has changed over the years. You still get Word occupying just over two thirds of the screen, where it shows your current source and target segments (or Translation Units as TRADOS prefers to call them) in different colours, highlighted against the rest of the document, while the interface known as Translator's Workbench sits at the top of the screen, with a main section showing you any matches it has found in the translation memory (which stores previously-translated sentences or segments) and a smaller section showing any terminology matches.

 

TRADOS new approach had many advantages over its competitors, foremost amongst them that you could actually see what your document would look like. No less important, however, was the fact that fuzzy matches and terms were displayed and could be copied across into your translation, providing additional support while allowing you to continue working in more or less your usual way. As with most David and Goliath translation memory stories, however, TRADOS also gained a lead for the simple reason that it also cost a lot less than its competitors. A similar situation can be found today, only with TRADOS playing Goliath and Wordfast playing the new David. From the very beginning, however, TRADOS was in another way an exception to the rule in the translation market, committing itself to sustained marketing campaigns. It was this combination of an innovative approach and low price supported by strong marketing that quickly established TRADOS as the number one in translation memory, not least of all because the company was equally adept at selling the software's advantages to the big international and multinational companies which produce such a high volume of documentation that even modest gains in productivity meant savings of millions of dollars. The icing on this cake was when a substantial share in the company was bought by Microsoft itself, bringing an injection of capital that took the company into an entirely new league. David had now very much grown up into a giant.

 

With greater age comes greater responsibilities

 

Despite the lack of changes to its Word interface - and some might argue "Why change a good thing?" - it isn't as if TRADOS has stood still over the years. Firstly, its reliance on Microsoft Word meant that the company had to update the programme every time a substantially new version of Word was released. The functions offered were gradually refined with each of these releases, adding things such as the Concordance function, which displays all the translated segments in your translation memory that contain the translation of a given word or phrase that's been selected in the file being translated, thereby showing both the translation chosen for the Word concerned and the associated context of its usage. At the same time, a whole range of new desktop publishing programs gradually came onto the market and TRADOS developed a series of utilities for converting the files created in these programs to tagged files that retained all their formatting information, enabling TRADOS users to translate these files in Word using Translator's Workbench and then convert them back to their native format. The problem with this solution was that although it worked, it was a bit of a nightmare in practice because it killed off the prime advantage of working in Word in the first place, which is to say being able to see the formatting of and any graphics in the document being translated. Instead, one got a whole series of angled brackets with gibberish in between them (at least as far as the uninitiated were concerned), breaking up the text and making it more difficult to understand the flow while also being very sensitive to any inadvertent translated keystrokes, that could cause subsequent problems when trying to return the file to its native format. Under pressure from dissatisfied users and losing market share to its competitors (whose parallel-window interfaces abbreviated these tags and were starting to provide more information and functions in a more tightly-integrated manner), TRADOS eventually brought out a second translation environment called TagEditor, which displays these tags in a graphical format that makes it easier to recognise them and mentally "filter them out" from the text, while also protecting them against any inadvertent "damage" by the translator. This was the first time that TRADOS had actually developed an editing environment of its own. Until that point the "TRADOS philosophy" had always been to integrate Translator's Workbench with the native application, although at that stage this only really meant either Word or PowerPoint. Subsequently, and taking us up to a few years ago, TRADOS also developed a series of environments called "T-Windows" (short for "Translation Windows") that offer simple environments for translating executables, resource files and even, quite simply, the contents of the Windows Clipboard, meaning that TRADOS could be used to handle practically any text requiring translation.

 

So far, so good, you might think. But in the process TRADOS had become a rather unwieldy beast, with up to 6 translation environments, plus of course Word, MultiTerm (TRADOS' glossary/terminology management system, which had to run separately in order to work in Translator's Workbench) and Translator's Workbench itself. This made it a daunting prospect to learn, though in fact the logic for using the various different programs was pretty much the same, even if the keystroke shortcuts sometimes differed. One of the problems at this time was that in fact there were a number of completely separate teams working on the different products, often in almost total isolation from one another, and it showed. In practice, though, most translators simply continued using the Word interface, helped by the fact that an increasing number of companies were using Word to prepare their manuals instead of a desktop publishing program, while TagEditor was principally used for translating HTML and help files as well as DTP files. The real problem, though, was that while TRADOS had been concentrating on how it could integrate its systems with its large corporate customers, the company's competitors had brought in a whole series of features that enabled their products to offer a series of productivity and quality control benefits during both the translation and quality control stages that made life very much easier for translators and revisers. TRADOS' software started to be perceived as clunky and laborious in use compared to most of its competitors and the TRADOS reputation for a clean, use-friendly software began to tarnish.

 

TRADOS also suffered from the fact that it had to bring out new releases to support every new version of Word, but also charge for and ensure that the price of these new releases was sufficient to pay for its development team. Conversely, TRADOS' competitors had fewer such problems either because they were much smaller (often with just one or two people handling everything from programming through to marketing), or could rely on subsidisation from other revenue streams (the case of SDL and STAR, for example, which are also large translation companies).

 

As a result, there was a backlash against TRADOS amongst the translation community on both functional and economic grounds, a backlash aided by the fact that an increasing number of competitor products had filters that enabled them to import and export TRADOS projects, allowing users to gain from the benefits offered by the visually less attractive but more functional parallel window interfaces found in products such as Atril's Déjà Vu, SDL's SDLX and STAR's Transit, but still deliver the work to their end customers in a format that would integrate with their own systems, which had been designed for integration with TRADOS.

 

Moreover, this backlash in the freelance translator community was heightened by the fact that TRADOS and its Analysis feature in particular were frequently blamed for the increasing practice of translation companies applying differential rates in relation to the different percentage fuzzy matches found in any given project. This was exacerbated by an increasing sense of disillusionment about the real productivity gains to be made using translation memory products in general. In short, freelance translators felt that the benefits of translation memory had been overhyped as far as they were concerned and that the benefits of the products to their customers were being inflated at their expense. The most damaging perception, however, was that TRADOS was one of the least efficient products where their own productivity was concerned, whilst simultaneously being one of the most expensive on the market both to buy and to keep updated. In addition, several of TRADOS' competitors were also favoured because they delivered more conscientious and immediate user support that was also less costly and in many cases free, while simultaneously benefiting from a natural sympathy for the "underdog" or David, if you like. TRADOS' transformation into Goliath was by now complete. The only thing that kept the loyalty of TRADOS' user base from crumbling entirely was that demand from large corporate customers and therefore the translation companies serving them continued to be high.

 

Reinventing a role as market leader

 

TRADOS' initial response was hasty and ill thought out, principally aiming to provide enhanced support and a virtual community for freelance translators through its Translation Zone website, a move that mainly succeeded in creating ill-feeling with translation companies, who felt the move was an attempt to cut them out of the process. The recognition that this was a mistake coincided with a realisation that the company's organisation had become bloated and inefficient. It was at this point that TRADOS understood that drastic action was required, but although the changes were deep-seated, particularly at a structural level, the only obvious differences for the translation community were the reorganisation of Translation Zone and the active participation of a number of the company's programmers in the technical self-help mailing list set up by ITI member and highly-experienced TRADOS user Iwan Davies. Below the surface, however, TRADOS was launching a robust strategy to reclaim its image. Recognising that its position had weakened with freelance translators and small-to-medium translation companies, while likewise being aware that the margins on the sale of its products to this user base were insufficient to finance the development of a radically more efficient interface in the short term, the company concentrated on the area where it was both at its strongest and could rely on the most substantial revenues, namely the big international and multinational companies that had the most to gain from translation memory and were at the same time a market that TRADOS had targeted with much greater success than its competitors. In terms of product development, the first results of this new strategy could be seen in two areas: a move to make all the products in the TRADOS suite fully Unicode compatible to ensure that most major language groups could be handled, and a move to make all these products operate using files that are in a proprietary version of eXtended Markup Language (XML) to ensure both the possibility of full integration with its big clients' in-house systems and to enable all of these systems to use Word-based client/server technology, thereby affording both large corporate and translation company customers the benefits of tight control and full integration across a number of different sites and suppliers.

 

Take a look at the TRADOS website and you'll soon see what I'm referring to. The homepage itself immediately announces TRADOS' repositioning as "The global business accelerator" and "World leader in globalisation management solutions". But dig deeper and you'll see how just far these changes go: the translation tools represented by Translator's Workbench, MultiTerm, TagEditor and the T-Windows Collection now account for less than half of the many sophisticated products offered, ranging from project management tools to server and application interface products, and even more sophisticated automatic content management systems that can, for example, automatically detect any changes to the texts in a website and send the relevant portions for translation through the system. Currently, there is quite simply no translation memory company offering the same depth and breadth of globalisation services, which means that TRADOS' market leadership is still secure and, indeed, likely to be consolidated and even enhanced in the immediate future. There is consequently every probability that the new lean TRADOS will be able to capitalise on this position by radically advancing the efficiency of its translation/editing environments to regain its leading position in all areas.

 

That said, you'll find we are looking at a series of evolutionary rather than revolutionary improvements in the new TRADOS 6.5.5, which we'll consider in detail in the next issue of bulletin. For the time being, suffice it to say that the new version is more robust overall, provides better Unicode and TMX support and offers an extensively redesigned version of MultiTerm that, amongst other things, makes it much easier to convert, import and export Termbases.

 

An additional program, MultiTerm Extract, is available as an optional extra to enhance the terminology management features of both the LSP and Freelance versions of TRADOS. MultiTerm Extract is used to prepare monolingual glossaries of the terms used in a given file, to create bilingual glossaries extracted from translation memories and also to implement valuable terminology quality control functions.

 

TagEditor likewise benefits from an extended range of quality control plug-ins and is now, in addition, also able to display the formatting of TRADOStag files using a plug-in for its Preview function. Both the Word and TagEditor interfaces can now be used to process Excel and PowerPoint files directly, which has become the preferred TRADOS solution since it is both more reliable and more robust.

 

Lastly, from my own testing I can report that TRADOS' customer service, which has been criticised in the past, is now amongst the best in the industry.

 

All in all, therefore, TRADOS 6.5.5 provides a worthwhile series of improvements and additions without, however, introducing any radical changes to the manner in which the TRADOS interfaces work. No surprises, then, but a more robust package that allows users to process practically any text format required while being able to rely on effective interfacing with many of the world's leading international companies and a vast swathe of the major players in the international translation industry. The next issue of bulletin will give you a detailed, blow-by-blow analysis of the drawbacks and benefits of the different programs in the TRADOS Suite, complete with a series of recommendations for users across the spectrum from the novice translator to the large international translation company.

 

[Captions]

 

[Caption 1 -- Word + WB.jpg]

The TRADOS Translator's Workbench interface working with Word as the translator's editing environment. As you can see TRADOS provides you with a view of your document as it will be printed, together with your current source sentence (or segment) and any corresponding translations in your translation memory, plus (on the right) any translations of individual words found in your MultiTerm Termbase. Note that only one match is displayed at a time.

 

[Caption 2 -- TagEditor.jpeg]

The TagEditor editing environment compresses all the tags found in tagged file formats and presents them in a protected graphical format. Translator's Workbench again sits at the top of the screen as your interface to the translation memory and Termbase.

 

[Caption 3 -- DVX.jpeg]

Compare the TRADOS approach with the interface in Déjà Vu X, for example, which shows all the various matches found in the translation memory and terminology databases simultaneously while you formulate your translation. Similarly, providing a parallel view of your source and target texts makes checking easier, faster and more reliable. These are just two examples of how the TRADOS approach is not always the most effective for the translator, although the company unquestionably provides the most comprehensive array of solutions for the translator's end client. Note that Déjà Vu displays any tags as protected codes in curly brackets.

 

[Caption 4 -- Analysis.jpeg]

TRADOS's Analysis function in Translator's Workbench, which provides a useful indication of the extent to which you will be able to leverage your translation memory for any given document and therefore also provides a rough and ready guide to what sort of time savings you can expect. The declining practice of applying differential rates in relation to the percentage matches found worked to the disadvantage of many translation companies and freelance translators, while also generating unfair resentment against TRADOS itself.

First published in ITI Bulletin, 2004.

You can read part two of this review as published in ITI Bulletin here.