by
Andrei Gerasimov
The aggressive marketing campaign
of Trados makes us to believe that you can't be/stay successful/competitive on
the worldwide translation service market unless you have/use this
"industry standard" TM software. The objective of this micro-study is
to check whether the above statement is true and, if so, to what extent. I
believe that my case is quite representative, since I am a typical freelance
technical/marketing translator translating about 500 thousand words from
English into Russian per year. My clients (businesses and translation
companies) are from all over the world—USA, Israel, Japan, Belgium, UK, France,
Russia etc. These facts make my own case study typical enough for drawing valid
conclusions regarding the truthfulness of the above-mentioned marketing
campaign.
I was quite happy with Wordfast for
a year when a lost job (use of Trados was a strict client's requirement) made
me buy Trados 5.0. It was in January 2002. It took me two weeks (full-time) to
learn how to use the tool (despite the fact that I was thoroughly familiar with
the TM concept and had used DéjàVu and Wordfast). By the end of the first month
I was proficient enough in the use of Trados to translate various types of
files. After that I sent notification that I owned/used Trados 5.0 Freelancer
to about 2000 (two thousand) translation agencies worldwide, including my old
clients.
By the end of the second month I
returned to Wordfast in my daily work for several reasons. Some of them are as
follows: IMHO, WF is much more user-friendly. My OS and applications (Windows
98, MS Office 97) never crash when I use WF. The last reason was purely
psychological one: I did not feel obligated to migrate to Trados from WF only
because I paid USD 745 for Trados and WF was licensed free of charge.
From January 2002 to August
2002 I did 125 small, medium-sized, and large jobs. Only three jobs required
the use of Trados. In these 3 cases the source files were in MS Word format.
The total word count of these 3 jobs was less than 3 percent of my total
workload. I did these 3 jobs using WF 3.35, and no client noticed any
difference. They were sure that I had used Trados 5.0 and were happy about my
translation services.
Of course my experience with
various TM software is a limited one. However my conclusions are as follows:
Keep your head cool when
you are attacked by overly aggressive marketing experts.
The Author:
Andrei Gerasimov graduated from Moscow State University in
1980. In 1989, after having received his Ph.D. in Technical Sciences with a
speciality in electronics, he became a full-time freelance translator. By 1998 he
had 56 book translations published by top Russian and CIS publishers to his
credit. Currently he translates technical and business documents for Volvo
Cars, Ford, Ericsson and several Russian companies. He also regularly
translates for ASET (US), MTW (UK), and other foreign translation agencies.
Recently he has been engaged in several localization projects.
Andrei Gerasimov is a member of the Association of Moscow Writers (Department
of Literary Translation), Literary Fund of Russia and the Union of Translators
of Russia (Department of Technical Translation).
His philosophy as a translator is outlined at his website http://www.aha.ru/~gerasae
Dr. Gerasimov can be contacted at gerasae@aha.ru
©
Copyright Translation Journal and the Author 2002
URL: http://accurapid.com/journal/22trados.htm