TRADOS when someone mention the word Translation Memory, most people think of TRADOS. Even if they don't really know what it is.

In 2009 the SDL Trados Studio 2009 saw the light of day, what a change!

SDL did a pretty good job of describing the tool suite themselves.

SDL Trados Studio 2009 Professional/Freelance is the ultimate translation software. It provides all your translation tools in one integrated editing, reviewing, project management and terminology environment.

In 2011 there is a new version is on the way... and you can get a discount on the upgrade here.

Tags: SDL Trados Studio 2009 Professional, Passolo

The Fusion One Translation Memory application is a powerful and specialized language translation environment facilitating the leveraging of legacy or previously translated documents to increase your productivity.

Swordfish III is an advanced CAT (Computer Aided Translation) tool based on XLIFF 1.2 open standard, designed for demanding professional translators.

GlobalSight is a collaborative, open-source initiative to develop a flexible and sustainable Translation Management System (TMS)

Anaphraseus is a CAT (Computer-Aided Translation) tool for creating, managing and using bilingual Translation Memories. It is an OpenOffice.org Basic macro set available as an OpenOffice.org extension or a standalone document.

Originally, Anaphraseus was developed to work with the Wordfast TM format, but it can also export and import files in TMX format.

Its main features are:

• Text segmentation
• Terminology recognition
• Plain-text TM (Unicode UTF-16)
• Fuzzy search in Translation Memory
• Unicode UTF-16 TMX export/import
• User glossary
• OpenOffice.org extension

openTMS is a free, open source, translation memory system based entirely on open-source standards (for an explanation/definition of translation memories, see Wikipedia).

The system relies heavily on XLIFF, TMS, TBX and accompanying standards to ensure a free and unencumbered exchange of translation and localization data.

openTMS implements a standard translation workflow, but features a very fine-grained modularity that makes its adaptable to any conceivable workflow design

MemoQ is an advanced localization workspace. Please read on to learn about the basics of localization workspaces.
During localization you transform documents available in one language into documents available in another language, taking into account the cultural specificities of the target culture. These documents usually bear some resemblance to each other; if you are a manufacturer or a service provider, most of your key documents are related to your fields of activity. If you are a translating professional, you get similar documents from your customer or you get multiple documents about the same topic, e.g. legislation-related matters or user manuals. The localization workspace takes advantage of these similarities.

The Across Personal Edition is the standalone application developed by Across and offers full translation functionality, particularly for freelance translators. The application assists you in re-using contents, controlling processes, and ensuring a high quality level. Thus, it speeds up the delivery of high-quality foreign-language contents to your customers and significantly reduces your own translation workload.

You can download a free copy for freelance translators from Across Systems’ website.

MetaTexis a nice TM that runs in Microsoft Word, it is very competitively priced and has a lot of interesting functionality and is a well constructed tool. Another thing that should make people like MetaTexis is that it can easily replace Trados, it supports read import/export all Trados formats. Give MetaTexis a try, the price wont kill you and you will not regret it.

According to Hermann Bruns, MetaTexis Developer, CAT-Tool manufacturers usually try to target large companies ignoring the costs for translators.

Star Transit is one of those tools that just does what is supposed to without fancy talk and flashing lights. It is a very good Translation Memory Tool, so have a look at their new power-packed version. You can download the Star Transit PE Satelitte version along with a tutorial.

WordFast is the one of the least expensive TM tools available, it is basically a TRADOS clone but it does it's job better than TRADOS at times. It and can even fix files TRADOS has corrupted. We have tested WordFast under Windows, OS X and Macintosh (classic and OS X, see picture below for classic) and it performs well and we have nothing but good things to say about this TM progam.

Tags: WordFast

SDLX is a translation tool with translation memory (like) functionality and a user-friendly interface. SDLX has been a rough ride in the past but I must admit that it is now both stable and pleasant to work with. SDLX is slightly better than common solutions like Trados TagEditor because you see the full sentence and not an insane segmentation of short sentences over several tokens/TUs caused by the formatting of the text. You can download a free trial version of SDLx lite from their website.

As of 2009 SDLX is a part of the SDL Trados Studio, which is an excellent collection of tools for the professional translator.

To be blunt avoid T-stream, it is written in Java and therefore it runs pretty sluggish by default and this is especially true for large projects. I know at least one translator who did not get paid for her work because this tool prevented her from working at the normal speed. On top of that, this "fantastic" tool has the most non-sensical Translation Quality Checking tool I have ever come across. It attempts to check if your work is in compliance with the approved glossary/terminology, but at the same time it is too inept to take the differences between singular and plural into consideration. The result is an "error" report a mile long with no real content - A REAL TIME-WASTER. Also, the TM functionality if we can call it so, is so inconsistent that you cannot rely on it to recognize even 100% matches. I am simply not impressed...

Fusion I have not tested yet but it look promising except from the fact that it is limited to languages using the latin alphabet.

DejaVu is a Spanish developed Translation Memory Tool. With this tool in your toolbox you will be able to handle the most common file formats as well as other TM formats. Not only can it work with Trados' file format, but is also superior when it comes to stability and features that give you a head start. DejaVu can assemble translations from the lexicon, terminology database and previously entered entries in the TM.

While some TM tools might be fine translation tools - DejaVu is Simply Excellent

OmegaT is a free translation memory tool written in Java so it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. If the project is handled by a capable project manager translators can use this tool without any problems. However, in the real world you might have to solve the issues yourself. Nevertheless, it is a good program that does what it is supposed do very nicely. Now since my first use of OmegaT it has changed and improved a lot and it is now possible to choose between paragraph or sentence segmentation. Earlier versions suffered from by only offering paragraph segmentation. I think you should try OmegaT...