Speaker 1: If you're wondering which cut tool to get to boost your translation career, this video is for you. Coming up. Hello and welcome back to the Freelanceverse. Thanks so much for tuning in once again this week. Today I have quite a translation specific video for you guys. I'm going to talk about cut tools. I was wondering what kind of video I could make on these on these tools. I didn't want to just make a generic one. I looked for another YouTube trend and I found the tier list trend. Now this year tier lists have been blowing up on YouTube. I'm not exactly sure why. I think it has to do with relatability. Anyways as you can see here like they make millions of views once again so I thought why not put my own twist to it and do a cat tools tier list. So I put one together with the main cat tools that I have ever had any experience with. So of course there are others these are just the ones I can judge because I had either translation experience or as a project manager. A first little introduction to CutTools. What actually is it? So computer-aided translation tools are software that pretty much every professional translator has or should have. What they basically are are productivity tools so you can work more efficiently and be more productive. So then they work with four main features. So that's first of all segmentation. What that means is when you import a document into a CAD tool, it immediately segments it down to translation units, they are called. Usually these are sentences or in bullet points, they would be every single bullet. If you have, for example, the sentence, I bought some bread, full stop, that will be one segment. So when you work on the job, this would be displayed in one square, in one segment. you translate it and then you push enter, control enter, shift enter, depending on the software to confirm this specific segment and then you can move on, right. Now what is this for? First of all it's good for the user experience, you know, you translate segment by segment so you're not overwhelmed by a huge block of text. But the main thing is it leads to the second feature, the TM translation memory. You can have a translation memory for a client, for a topic, for a domain really everything you can imagine and it's basically a storage for existing translations if we take the same sentence i bought some bread you translate this once and then you confirm it it puts this source sentence together with this target sentence into the translation memory later on the same sentence comes up i bought some bread then it will already be translated and confirmed as a 100% match, because you already confirmed it higher up in the text, right? So this is auto-complete and auto-confirm function. It saves a lot of clicks, a lot of thinking. Let's say there is a sentence that says instead of I bought some bread it says I bought one bread. That's a very high match, right? But it's not a 100% match. But still, the translation will be in the target if you want that. That's a setting, I really like that. it will be already in there with not 100% match but maybe 80 or 82 or something and a different color so all you you know all I need to change is something small like this sentence sum to one and you can confirm it and then in the end it can be very useful if you can tell to the client you know I have this tm that's very specific for skiing for example or a tm specific to you as a client that's a lot of value right you can people sell these for a a lot of money. The third function is called TB term basis, terminology basis. This is basically a glossary. A customer can send you a TB in the right format for this specific translation tool. You can import it and then you have while you're translating you have a little window in one of the corners depending on the software that tells you exactly if there are terms that are approved by the customer. Product names that need to be as they are. DNTs which are do not translate by the way if you ever come across DNT as an abbreviation that means the client doesn't want you to touch the target just leave it as is do not translate and that's another thing you can perfectly implement into a translation tool so you have all in one place you don't need to click into an Excel etc that's the worst right if you have a word text to work on an Excel glossary, a PDF style guide to check and I don't know an external translation memory and all you have to do is switch between these that's terrible so you can just make sure it's all in one software it makes your life much easier. And the last of the four points are references that's not a big deal like yeah but it's just quite nice to have as I said you don't need to click around they can just upload your style guide or whatever reference they have into the CAD tool as well. Okay, so let's go ahead. I hope it doesn't get too controversial, but let me know in the comments what your thoughts are if you are just deciding if you should get one, which one you should get. I hope this video can give some insight into this. Of course, this is my personal opinion from the experience I have. I'm going to switch to the computer. While I do that, make sure to subscribe because I see in the analytics that a lot of people are not subscribed. So please make sure to subscribe. It helps out a lot. but see you in a second. All right, here we are. This is the tier list that I make. It's called the Tier Maker website if you want to make one on your own. And I called it Cut Tools Tier List, so you can also find it on there. So then I have A, B, C, D, and E tier, and all the tools are down here that I will rate. So let's start. First up is MemoQ, and I have to say MemoQ is, for me, the number one, very clearly. It's just the one that I use the most. This is quite a young tool. It's from a company called Kilgrae. They are a Hungarian company and they kind of came in and disrupted the whole industry in a bit, I would say. So before it was always everyone for themselves, you know, you had the packages you could only use in the respective translation tool. And then MemoQ came in and said, you know what, any format you have, you can use. So if you have a Trados package, a Transit, a Wordfast, everything you can use in MemoQ as well. which is a huge plus for me as an individual, as a freelancer, because then you realistically only need to buy one and you can use it for all of them, right? Now it is of course a bit expensive, so that counts, but anyways for all of them make sure to never just buy it on your own, you know, that's a very important tip. If you just google over here, let's say MemoQ Pros Group Buy, here you can see it. Current campaigns on pros.com there is always a campaign going so as you can see people are buying together in a group which makes it much more much cheaper. STL Trados you can buy, MemoQ you can buy in a group. Wordfast there's one so make sure to always check here it can be huge the discounts like more than 50% sometimes. I will try to also insert a little clip or a picture of each of them just to see the the environment. For MemoQ it's very important because the UI experience is amazing, I really like it, it's very modern, it's kind of adapted to mobile as well, you can use it on your tablet very easily, and a lot of automation workflow features as well, so the client can send you something through their server only for your workflow, is it translation or review or whatever, you do it and you send it back to the client, you never even see the other workflow, you know. And one amazing feature that I'm missing from most of the other ones is the live preview. So when you're translating in the lower part, you see the original document. And then while you're translating in the editor above, it immediately replaces the text in the targ, in the preview of the original file. So you immediately see if the spacing, if the formatting is right. If you have a call to action button, you're translating, you immediately see now the German call to action button, how it looks like. Next up is STL Trados, which is by far the biggest one out there, so it's the most popular one, the biggest one. A lot of agencies will ask you to actually have Trados to work with them. For that reason, it's definitely competing with MemoQ, but I'm putting it in B. I'm not putting it in A because it's expensive to buy as a freelancer, but usually someone will help you, either the pros group buy or even the client itself. For me, it was the client that said, we really want to work with you, but you need to have Trados so they help me with providing a license while you need one they can give you a license from themselves then you can of course not work for other clients with it but until you have other clients it's perfect to use like this sometimes it can be a bit lucky for me and also from other people I've heard it because it's very large the packages are very large and yeah when you open it when you open a package it's usually takes like you see the window goes into not responding and it takes a while. Of course I don't have a very powerful computer but I don't think it should be necessary for a translation cut tool because yeah well if you want to work on the train or whatever you know it it's just a bit the whole thing became a bit too big for me. You can you can have a 30-day trial here I'm sure about MemoKey but probably as well but here you can have a 30-day trial you can try if it works for you. The translation memory and turn-based features are very strong here, very good results and it's well integrated into the editors. One thing that's really bad in STL Tratos is the spell checker. I don't know why, it's just ridiculous. I always have to export it and put it into Word to do a spell checking afterwards because it just doesn't recognize very basic words. It always, whenever you hyphenate something which is quite common in German, it always wants to write them apart. B for Now Memsource is very cool, it's free, I don't use it myself but I've used it before so I'm just going to put it in C because I don't have more experience with it. I think it's a good way to start your translation career because it's free. There's a cap on megabyte, I think 10 megabyte is the max and also two files are the max. And in general there is I think a thousand projects cap, which is a lot of course but you know over the years you can easily reach a thousand so I need to have unlimited for sure. The cool thing is it's a cloud-based tool exclusively so you can work from anywhere, don't need to have your laptop with you, you can just go to another computer and log in and it works fine. It's a very good tool, more for beginners I would say. Now SmartCAD is really cool, it's kind of similar to Memsource but I have to bump it up to B. I use it quite regularly now and the one thing it's basically like Memsource but it also has a built-in marketplace so you can have a profile on there and people can contact you if they want, if they find your expertise useful and they can also pay you through the SmartCat tool itself. So it's quite, yeah, it's quite cool. The whole package is there and there is a chat function where you can immediately chat with your clients. And I found some cool direct clients through it actually. It's a good way to, if you want to look for direct clients and not for agencies, go on the SmartCat thing, log in and go to this built-in marketplace. Quite an interesting thing. Also the whole no license movement they have going on on LinkedIn. So they say it's free, we don't want to punish you for using this. Just try it out. It's really cool actually. The only thing I'm not the biggest fan of is the UI and also the automated population feature. For me it's almost too sensitive because when I finish a job and finish a file and then I work on the next file and it has the same translation in it, then it will still change it in the previous file which I don't like because the previous file I completed right so I had some inconsistency issues with it but other than that very good B is awesome for a cloud-based tool can compete with STL I think they would be happy for that. Next up is Deja Vu I can only put it into D unfortunately I know lots of people work with it and are fans of it for me it didn't work at all even though it is quite it used to be probably quite complete package, but it's just not up to standard anymore in my opinion. The whole thing looks quite stale to today's standard, it's not intuitive at all. Even though it has a very good spell checker, I have to give it that. So I only worked with it as a project manager, but for me it wasn't it. Even worse, Star Transit. I have to put it in E, I'm sorry, but that's my only E. I worked with it quite extensively as a project manager and it was a nightmare. I really don't like transit it's outdated for me it's very stiff it's not intuitive yeah i know that a lot of technical translators still work with it because of its technical features fair enough but for me it's not it's even though it's still the second most popular tool used in the eu apparently next up is wordfast i have i have to say i almost have no experience with it so i put it in c i only tried it out once but then i had to say look the others are just superior so i don't use it and also it can... I recently came across quite a lot of issues with it from other people that used it. So I for example got a Chados or a MemoQ package to review that someone worked on with WordFast and it would mess up the tags, it would mess up the formatting, everything. So be careful with cross tool use of WordFast. But if you just use it in WordFast for yourself it's very cool. It's a neat tool, it's easy to use. Sometimes you don't really find what looking for. The whole placement of things is not very intuitive. It's good to use for your personal use for sure. I wouldn't use it as an interface between agencies or clients. I heard that it has some problems with Mac, so if you have a Mac, but almost exclusively except for MemoQ, if you have a Mac, you will have some problems. Except for the SmartCAD and Memsource, which are cloud-based of course. Next up is SmartLink. It's another cloud... oh sorry, it's a bit cut off. It's another cloud-based tool, but it's not as good as SmartCAD and Memsource, so I have to put it in D. I only work with it for one client, but I really don't like it. It's not intuitive, there is always stuff missing from the TM. Things that I know I confirmed in the previous job are then not in the next job. So yeah, it's not consistent, but the UI is okay. I mean, there's a lot to improve. So if you can decide between Smartling, Memsource and Smartcat, definitely don't go for Smartling. And the last one is Acros, and it's between E and D for me, but I'm gonna put it in D because it's not as bad as transit but it's comparable like it's just outdated. I work on it on the web-based tool which is much better I have to say. First of all it would be way too expensive I only work on it for one client so I said I can work on it but you need to provide me some kind of free access to it. But yeah it's definitely not my favorite tool to use. There you go that's my tier list I hope I didn't offend anyone. Of course that's my personal opinion if someone is down in D and E that's just Yeah, I just wouldn't choose to use them. It doesn't mean they shouldn't exist, right? They all have a right to exist. For me, I will always recommend people to go for MemoQ. I think it's the future. It also has, by the way, a very good machine translation implementation, if that's something you want to use. So if you import a text, you can just run a machine translation through it and then do a post-editing in the MemoQ. And it works very well. Hopefully, you have a good overview over these tools and let me know in the comments which one you use, if you're happy with it, if you think about changing. This was a very niche, translation niche video, so I'll see you next week with probably a more general one again, but yeah, I really enjoyed it. Hope you too. See you soon. Bye-bye.