TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSURANCE TOOLS: CURRENT STATE

Thanks to Jost Zetzsche and his Tool Kit Newsletter where a link to this study (441 kb PDF) was made available.

The 1.6 mb presentation file that comes with it is also very interesting.

A very thorough study on current QA tools that, of course, focuses on Windows tools and for good reason.

Excerpts from the document:

As expected, most of the respondents (141 or 86.5%) represented translation/localisation service provider companies while a few (more specifically, 11 people) were from service buyer side and 2 were software developer representatives. 3.07% of other organisations were consulting and academic institutions, and one respondent reported his organisation to be multilingual quality assurance service provider.

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The most popular operating system is Microsoft Windows, and 62.58% of respondents confirm their companies work only in MS Windows with no other OS11’s. Users of both Windows and MacOS who follow Windows users comprise only 19.35%. Users of three OS’s (Windows, MacOS and Unix/Linux) account for approx. 9%, and those who work under Windows and Linux comprise 7.1% of all respondents. 0.65% (1 respondent per each category) work only in MacOS, Unix/Linux and other (medical hardware) OS. So, the amount of translation professionals who never uses Windows was below 2%.

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After SDL/Trados merger, SDL translation memory tools are indeed prevailing. Almost 60% of respondents use Trados and/or SDLX as their translation memory solution. Star Tranist (11.11%) is the third popular TM according to the feedback, and Wordfast and Déjà Vu account for 9.8% and 7.84% respectively. Other tools mentioned were across, Idiom, Logoport, MemoQ, Lingotek, Heartsome, MulitTrans, OmegaT, WordFischer and proprietary tools. Many respondents also named Passolo, Catalyst, RC-WinTrans, Helium, LocStudio and other localisation tools which, however, are beyond the scope of the paper. 4.9% of the respondents stated they don’t use any translation memory tool at all.