Hi David !
Unfortunately I can't help you, but I can tell you that I'm EXACTLY in the same situation as you! I work for a little software company and I'm the only translator in the office. I just asked my employer to purchase LogiTerm because one of my professors at University strongly suggested it, but I don't know ANYTHING about it.

Anna

My choice is neither SDLX/Trados, nor MultiTrans, nor LogiTerm. My choice is Deja Vu.

NK

My choice is MetaTexis (www.metatexis.com).

Low price, powerful features, frequent updates, and unbelievably responsive customer service and tech support by the author himself. Does everything Trados does (reads/writes TMX files, etc.) and more.

The author doesn't spend money on promotion, which is why his prices are low, but also why so few realize what a good tool this is. Requires Microsoft Word and nothing else.

Hi everyone,

First, thanks for all the responses.  It's great to be able to talk to people about these kinds of things.

To respond to Marc's question: We didn't want to cast our net too wide and just get confused by trying to do detailed comparisons of all the CAT tools out there.  So, we did a quick and dirty market survey.  Trados is obviously the biggest player.  Logiterm and Multitrans are both popular in the local market (Montreal), probably because they are local products.  They are also quite similar in terms of their features.  To be honest, I had not even heard of a few of the products you mentioned.

Anna, Logiterm was partially developed by people at the Universite de Montreal - which I imagine is why your professor was familiar with it.

A big part of the appeal for both Logiterm and Multitrans is the fact that, with their bitext-based approach, we will have to do very little alignment work and we will be able to very quickly feed the database with our pre-existing translations (several year's worth of material).

Nikita, Terry (or anyone else), do you have experience with MT or LT?  Is there a reason you prefer the other tools?

Thanks again,

David

Hi,

I've used Trados and MetaTexis extensively since 1999, and trialed or briefly used WordFast, DejaVu and OmegaT. MetaTexis is defintely my pick out of this lot. I haven't trialed the others as at first Trados was about the only viable player, and then when I found MetaTexis I've never wanted for other features or programs.

HTH / FWIW!

Terry

Terry,

Do any of those other systems use bitexts?  I'm somewhat curious about people's experiences with bitext versus segment-based TMs.

It's too late for me to add any new systems to our list of candidates.  However, I've been looking over Deja Vu and Metatexis's websites a little.  What do you prefer about Metatexis vis-a-vis Deja Vu or SDL/Trados (or Multitrans or Logiterm if you've used them)?

David

Yes David, there is a reason.

I should say that I'm new to the world of TM CAT-tools. I've tried MemoQ, WordFast, Trados and Deja Vu.

There are two main reasons for my preferring of Deja Vu:

1) When I started to familiarize myself with WordFast and Trados I had a feeling of my total incompetence though I'm not a computer novice. With Deja Vu it was all different: the next day after its installation and after several hours of a user manual reading I was able to do my first project with a help of the program.

2) The philosophy of Deja Vu is quite different in comparison with those of WordFast and Trados. All three programs support various file formats and handle projects for Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, Windows Help, Microsoft Excel, Micosoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Access, OpenOffice/StarOffice, Adobe FrameMaker MIF, Adobe InDesign, Adobe PageMaker tagged text, QuarkXPress XTG, HTML, etc. But in most cases WordFast and Trados are just ad-ons to corresponding programs, in order to handle projects in Word, Excel, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, InDesign, etc. you should know all those programs. When you work with Deja Vu you don't need even to be familliar with all those applications because every task within Déjà Vu is performed from and within the same user interface. Deja Vu  is not only a translation tool, but a highly customizable translation environment. It is designed to simplify the whole translation and translation management process. In my view it is very important.

For translators, this means that there's no training required to be proficient on a number of word processing, desktop publishing, software, and web development tools. And for project managers, it takes away any worries that the coding of their files may be corrupted.

Besides  anything else as far as I know Deja Vu supports all Trados formats and its price is lower.

NK

Hi Terry,

I saw your post and wondered if you could help me. We're looking for a trados/dejavu etc type package but it would be a great help if we could "pre install" existing translations as we have lots of ongoing projects. Is this possible with MetaTexis, the software package you suggested? Thanks in advance, hope to here from you soon,

Andrea