Exploring the Costs of Top CAT Tools for Freelance Translators (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Dominique, I'm a translator and self-proclaimed cat guru. In this video, I'm going to talk about the price freelance translators are typically prepared to pay for a first-tier or mainstream cat tool. What do I mean by first-tier cat tool? Well, I mean the big four, which are Deja Vu, MemoQ, SDL, Trader Studio and Wordfast. I listed them by alphabetical order in order not to be accused of favoring one over the other. So, how did I end up narrowing the list to these four? Well, I had a look at all the mailing lists of cat tools that I was aware of and I selected those tools that have more than 1,000 subscribers in their list. Wordfast has the most subscribers, 7,500 in total, when you combine the classic and the pro lists. SDL, Trados, is second with 5,400 subscribers. Deja Vu comes third with 2,400 subscribers. And MemoQ is last with 900 subscribers. I could have included a fifth tool, which is OmegaT. OmegaT has 1,400 subscribers on the mailing list, so it's quite a popular tool. But since OmegaT is free and since this video is about the price, translators are prepared to pay for a first-tier cat tool, I decided not to include it. It should also be noted that MemoQ is the newest product of the bench and their mailing list was created only five years ago, while the mailing list of all three other tools was created more than 10 years ago. So that explains why they currently have less subscribers than the other products. Now let's look at the list price, normal price, of each of these tools and let's have a look at them by decreasing price. The most expensive product is SDL Trader Studio, which costs 845 euros. Second is Deja Vu, Deja Vu Professional Edition, which costs 690 euros. MemoQ is third at 620 euros. And the least expensive tool of the bench is Wordfast, which costs 500 euros if you include both the Classic and the Pro version, or even lower, 350 euros if you buy only Classic or only Pro. Now it seems to be that these normal prices are to a large extent theoretical and this is because there has been a growing number of translator group buys organized by pros.com. It seems that there are such group buys now almost every second month and the last one was during the last week of January and it just ended. And this group buy in January 2012 included three of the four products of the Big Four. So let's have a look at the deals. Let's start with Deja Vu, which offered the biggest discount, 50%, which means the net price was 345 euros. MemoQ had a 40% discount, which translated into a net price of 372 euros. And SDL had a 35% discount, so the net price on Studio 2011 was 545 euros. There was no group buy for Wordfast, but on the other hand it's the least expensive product of the bench. So it looks like the price a freelance translator is prepared to pay for a CAD tool nowadays is comprised between 300 and 500 euros and only a fool would be paying 6, 7 or even 800 euros for such a tool. At least this is the conclusion I came to and I would be very interested to hear about your comments. So if you agree or if you disagree, please leave your comments below and tell us why you think the same way or otherwise. Now let's have a look at the number of licenses that were sold during this last group buy. MemoQ was the most successful tool. They had set themselves the highest goal, 120 licenses, which they reached and in addition to that they have a mailing list of 8 persons. So they have managed to sell 128 licenses. SDL had set themselves a goal of 60 licenses, which they also reached and in addition to that they have 35 persons on their mailing list, so they have sold a total of 95 licenses. Deja Vu had set themselves a goal of 30 licenses, which they reached and they have no one on their mailing list, so they have sold 30 licenses. So the clear winner of this group buy is MemoQ, definitely the tool with the strongest momentum at the moment and the situation is not new because we had a similar case during the last quarter of 2011. So MemoQ already outsold twice SDL before. So it's just a confirmation of an ongoing trend and it's especially impressive given that KillGrey, the company behind MemoQ, is a much younger and smaller player than SDL. So that's really quite impressive. Now I plan to have a follow-up on this video about the price of CAD tools in which I'm going to look at not only the upfront price that you pay when you buy the product but more at the total cost of ownership when you take into account technical support and upgrades and these kind of things, so just to see if we are in the same situation or if the ranking between the products can change because of that. Also about this video, it was quite a new format compared to what I've been doing before. So my previous videos were mostly screencasts, whereas this one is more a kind of talk show. So I would very much like to hear about your comments. Did you like this type of videos and would you like to see more of this before or do you prefer the kind of screencasts that I have had before? So please leave your comments below and let me know what you think. So thank you for watching once again and do hit that like button if you liked what you saw and if you are interested in seeing more similar videos in the future do subscribe to my channel, CADGURUEN, so that you are informed of future videos. Thank you.