Survey for Translation Transcription and Dictation

The website with the survey and short explainer video is http://www.sightcat.net
The idea is to build a human transcription service. We just need a few translators per language that want to work with a transcriptionist due to RSI, productivity etc. and we can use that data to build an ASR system for that language. There is also a good chance the ASR system will be accurate for domain-specific terminology and accents as it will be adaptive and use source language context. 

Click on the graphic to go to the survey

memoQ Fest 2018 was, among other things, a good opportunity as always to spend time discussing things with some of the best and most interesting consultants, teachers, creative developers and brainstormers I know in the translation profession. One of these was my friend and colleague, John Moran, whose work on iOmegaT introduced me to the idea that properly designed, translator-controlled (voluntary) data logging could be a great boon to feature research and software development investment decisions. Sort of like SpyGate in translation, except that it isn't.

John and I have been talking, brainstorming and arguing about many aspects of translation technology for years now, dictation (voice recognition, ASR, whatever you want to call it) foremost among the topics. So I was very pleased to see him at the conference in Budapest last week, where he spoke about logging as a research tool in the program and a lot about speech recognition before and after in the breaks, bars, coffee houses and social event venues.

I think that one of the most memorable things about memoQ Fest 2018 was the introduction of the dictation tool currently called hey memoQ, which covers a lot of what John and I have discussed until the wee hours over the past four years or so and which also makes what I believe will be the first commercial use of source text guidance for target text dictation (not to mention switching to source text dictation when editing source texts!). John introduced that to me years ago based on some research that he follows. Fascinating stuff.

One of the things he has been interested in for a while for commercial, academic and ergonomic reasons is support for minor languages. Understandable for a guy who speaks Gaelic (I think) and has quite a lot of Gaelic resources which might contribute to a dictation solution some day. So while I'm excited about the coming memoQ release which will facilitate dictation in a CAT tool in 40 languages (more or less, probably a lot more in the future), John is thinking about smaller, underserved or unserved languages and those who rely on them in their working lives.

That's what his survey is about, and I hope you'll take the time to give him a piece of your mind... uh, share your thoughts I mean :-)

Survey on Internship and Mentoring in Translation

Internships are an important part of university translation programs in many places, and mentorships of various kinds play a significant role in professional development in a number of professional associations with which I am familiar. Attila Piróth, a Hungarian translator based in France, has conducted and published a number of very thorough, interesting studies on several aspects of the language services professions and is now undertaking the study of intern and mentorship arrangements from various perspectives. I think the results will be very interesting.

If you have been involved in such arrangements, please take the time to contribute your experience to the study. Please note that in its present form, it is difficult to take on a smartphone, so it is probably best to use a full-sized computer or large tablet of some kind.

In a series of surveys I want to explore translation internship and mentoring programs from the viewpoint of different stakeholders: interns/mentees, mentors, organizations running internship programs, educational institutions and translator associations. 

Through a mixture of learning by doing, expert supervision and building a professional network, internships and mentoring programs serve to accelerate the transition of early-career translators into the profession. Yet graduating students are often under pressure from their educational institutions to complete an internship in order to gain credits, but the internship environment is often quite different from their future work environment. 

Therefore this series of surveys aims to identify best practices for internship and mentoring so that students, mentors and other stakeholders can make better choices in planning and implementing their internship and mentoring programs. 

I would thus like to ask your help in completing this survey. There has been no comprehensive research conducted to date on internship/mentoring practices, even though such practices are becoming more common. All stakeholders can benefit from knowing more about current practices in order to avoid negative experiences, to promote positive ones, and to hear what the perspectives are of other stakeholders. 

If you participated in an internship/mentoring program as an intern/ mentee, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-I.  

If you participated as a mentor, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-M.  

If you represent an organization that runs internship programs, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-O. 

If you represent an educational institution, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-U. 

If you represent a translator association that has promoted internship/mentoring programs, please complete https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TR-int-A. 

Please also share information about these surveys among other stakeholders.
The full survey report will be available for free to survey participants and other interested parties. I thank my colleagues, Catherine Howard and Maria Karra, for their help in creating this series of surveys. 

Thank you for taking the time to complete it.

             -- Attila Piróth

The Great Translation Rate Conspiracy in France!

The French Society of Translators (SFT) is conducting another of its periodic rate surveys. Although the American ATA treads fearfully in matters of rates, deferring to corporates who prefer to keep everyone in the dark, afraid and focused on more important matters like the Kramer vs. Kramer spectacle of TransPerfect and the latest venture capital conquests of Dopeling's Stormin' CEO, European organizations occasionally pander to the masses like the sleazy socialists we all know them to be and do these surveys that injudiciously gather and publish real data from real translators in inconvenient contradiction to the usefully manufactured figures of the Common Nonsense Advisory which aforementioned corporates employ as their rightful negotiating bludgeon to keep 'em down in The Bulk Market Bog that is the world to all those who think that translation is mostly about proZtitution for the sake of Larry the Language Lizard at thepigturd and other industrial luminaries of word sausage.

The survey from those cheese-eating surrender monkeys includes 25 questions and is expected to take 20 valuable minutes of your time which might be better spent translating political propaganda praising Robert Mugabe for Translators Without Borders for free or registering to pay Lionbridge for the privilege of receiving lowball bulk market offers to churn words into sausage to feed their better bottoms' line.

The survey is open to anyone who can puzzle out its French, and those who foolishly believe in the value of free information in a free society for free-thinking translators to make informed decisions with a knowledge of current compensation statistics can support this leftist plot by clicking the link below and not selflessly sacrificing their futures for the good of their Big Bog betters:

http://sondage.sft.fr/index.php/765913/

Survey for legal translators

Juliette Scott, author of the legal translation blog From Words to Deeds, is conducting a confidential survey of legal translators as part of her thesis research. It took me less than 10 minutes to respond to the questions, some of which I found to be useful reminders of some issues I have intended to address with a few clients for some time.

If you consider yourself a legal translator, please have a look at the survey and help her research:

http://protra.wufoo.com/forms/legal-translators-how-are-you-briefed/

(link corrected!!!)

The 2013 translation environment tools survey

From mid-October until the end of 2013, I placed two small survey questions at the top of the blog page and publicized these in a variety of user forums. The questions were similar to two posed in 2010, because I was interested to see how things might have changed. This is, of course, an informal survey with a number of points in its "methodology" wide open to criticism, though its results are certainly more reliable than anything one can expect from the Common Sense Advisory :-) My personal interest here was to get an idea of the background readers here might have with various translation environment tools, because it is useful to know this when preparing posts on various subjects. Here is a quick graphic comparison of the 2010 and 2013 results:

Responses to the question about the number of translation environment tools were very similar in both cases. About half use only one, with between 25 and 30% of respondents using a second tool and increasingly small numbers going beyond that. The question posed covered preparation, translation and checking in projects, so some respondents using multiple tools may be translating and maintaining terminologies and translation memories in only one tool. I am encouraged by this result, as it means that despite changes in the distribution of particular tools, users are exercising good ergonomic sense and predominantly sticking to one for their main work. Everyone benefits from this: translators generally work more efficiently without tool hopping, and more effort is focused on what clients need - a good translation.

In 2010, half the respondents cited the use of some version of "SDL Trados" (more details on this were provided in a later survey); the next highest responses at just under 20% were for Déjà Vu and memoQ. Three and a half years later, Atril's share of users appears to have declined considerably, and the use of memoQ appears to be about on par with SDL Trados Studio. OmegaT, an excellent free and Open Source translation support tool capable of working with translation formats from the leading tools, appears to be doing better than many of the commercial tools in the survey, which should not surprise anyone familiar with that software.

Across continues to be a loser in every way. Despite massive efforts in the low end of the market to promote this incompatible Teutonic travesty and the availability of the client software free of charge to its victims (translators), no real progress has been made in the Drang nach Marktanteil. One would expect that a good solution supported by a competent professional development team and a marketing budget, available free to translators, would easily beat the low-profile OmegaT. And I am sure that this is the case. The case simply doesn't apply to Across, which drives some of the most technically competent translators I know completely berserk. The fact that OmegaT is about twice as popular despite its volunteer development and total lack of marketing budget speaks volumes.

More important than any of the individual figures for translation support tools are some of the implications for interoperable workflows that the numbers reveal. Most of the tools listed support XLIFF, so if you use a tool capable of exporting and reimporting translation content as XLIFF, developing an interoperable workflow for translation and review that will work with the majority of tools will probably not be that difficult. An XLIFF file from SDL Trados Studio or memoQ is usually a no-brainer for translation in Déjá Vu, OmegaT, Cafetran or Fluency, for example, and any concerns can be checked quickly with a "roundtrip test" using pseudotranslation or simply copying the source text to the target, for example.

While individual tools have largely improved in their mutual compatibility and ability to share translation and resource data, there is legitimate continuing concern about the increased use of translation servers by translation agencies and corporations with volume needs who manage their own translation processes. Jost Zetsche and I have expressed concerns in the past regarding the lack of compatibility between server platforms and various clients, though with the appropriate use of exchange formats, this can still be overcome.

The greatest challenges I have seen with server-based work is that the people creating and "managing" projects on these servers often lack a basic understanding of the processes involved, so that the skills of the translators competent with a particular client tool may be effectively nullified by an incompetently prepared job. I experienced this myself recently where segmentation, termbase rights and even the source language were set wrong on the server, and the project manager had no idea how to correct the situation. However, things worked out in the end, because I had a playbook of strategies to apply for such a case. In the end, better training and a good understanding of the interfaces to the processes our partners use can get us past most problems.

Computer-aided translation tool survey

A bit over three years ago I conducted a small survey to get an idea of what working tools were popular among visitors to this blog and how widespread the use of multiple tools is. A lot has changed in the meantime, and another look at current pattens of use could be interesting.

The two survey questions will be found in the left margin at the top until the end of this year. If your work habits change between now and then, you can return and change your answers. Let's try to get the best statistical sample we can - spread the word!


UPDATE: The results are here:  http://www.translationtribulations.com/2014/01/the-2013-translation-environment-tools.html

It's 2013: the latest BDÜ rate survey!

It's been two years since I last reported on the rate survey which Germany's largest association of translators and interpreters (the BDÜ) conducts. Since 2008 the organization has contributed some of the most valuable hard data on what is really happening "out there" for average qualified professionals. Others, such as the ITI, seem to be moving in a similar direction and offer interesting variations on the collection and analysis of data, but the BDÜ have a solid five-year data history that is so consistent and plausible that it shows most clearly the likely self-interested deficiencies and distortions of less professional surveys and claims by the machine translation lobby and its paid agents such as TAUS and the Common Nonsensers.

The data clearly show that, while rates are not keeping up with what I feel real inflation is, they are not generally declining in absolute terms. On the whole, the qualified professionals reporting in Germany's survey seem to be doing well enough in these troubled economic times.

Unfortunately, the only record I have of the previous years is what I have published on this blog in past years. I gave my previous surveys away to various friends who were not in the BDÜ to show them the averages charged by large numbers of colleagues who actually make a living from translation.

This year, I received not only the usual rate survey - this one conducted in 2012, covering 2011 rates - but also received a small correction booklet in which the BDÜ republished some tables found to contain errors. So I will discuss a bit of these data. And because I am particularly concerned with my own main languages, German and English, my discussion will be skewed toward that. Sorry. But for a mere 15 euros you can order yourself the full story for all language combinations reported from the BDÜ publication department. This investment is worth it!

The BDÜ are a clever bunch, but not yet clever enough to realize that many people who don't read German will care about this publication or their many other excellent works. So the publications page (unlike the multilingual main page where the database of translators can be searched) is in German only. However if you click HERE, a copy of the Honorarspiegel (literally, the mirror of rates) will be put in your virtual shopping cart, and you can proceed to checkout (Zur Kasse gehen), running the gauntlet of more German pages and login requirements until you are ultimately rewarded with a purchase. I do hope my German friends find a way to make this easier for the rest of the world; I can only think of about half a dozen viable approaches. Nonetheless, somehow my very monolingual American mother manages to navigate the Teutonic thickets of Amazon.de to give gift certificates to me and her granddaughter in Germany, and if she figures all that crap out without a single error in a decade, I figure the occasional professional linguist can manage too. And I do find it odd that Amazon, for all their commercial savvy, don't seem to offer an easy way to give gift certificates to friends and family in other countries with a friendlier user language interface. So the BDÜ could theoretically easily blow away Amazon in that point of commercial savvy. The world is full of wonders.

So what are the hard data for my language pair and direction (German to English)? Here are the latest averages:

The rates cited are in euros. Alessandra Muzzi's Fee Wizard provides a convenient way of recalculating these target line rates into word or page rates that might be more understandable to you.

And, last but not least, here are a few data for other directions and combinations:

There are averages. If you are a top-quality translator in one of these pairs and charge on the average considerably less, perhaps a bit of reflection may be beneficial.

The full rate survey from the BDÜ contains a lot more data, including average interpreting rates, hourly charges and word rates accepted, so it really is worth spending a bit and seeing the whole picture.

Survey on terminology in TM & MT systems

Until January 15th, Peter Reynolds is conducting a short survey to be discussed in the Terminology Cookbook, which will be edited by Drs. Frieda Steurs and Hendrik Kockaert. He is seeking information specific to how terminology is used in processes for machine translation or where translation memory technology is used and what functionality there is there to support quality assurance and using the right terminology.

The URL for the survey is:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/termilogy

(Yes I know there is a typo in the URL, but the URL is correct.) 

Lies, damned lies and CSA data baiting

The Common Sense Advisory (CSA) has announced another rates survey for translation providers - would anyone like to hazard a prediction of the results that will be reported?

As a child, I was subjected to the annual school ritual of standardized testing, as most of those who pass through the US school system are. Around the third or fourth grade I noticed something rather odd about the tests. Aside from a puzzling tendency to repeat the same question material from year to year,the answers were often obvious even for questions I didn't understand. My scores on these standardized tests were more a reflection of my memory and ability to perceive bias than they were of any understanding of the subjects tested. The makers of the test had no particular stake in my choice of any given answer; it's just devilishly hard to avoid pushing someone toward what you perceive as the "right answer". Any good teacher knows how hard this is. That's also why we have double-blind testing and other methods in our often unsuccessful attempts to avoid experimental bias.

If honest people have a hard time constructing a valid test or survey, how much harder is it for those who have a particular agenda to do so? Do they even really try? The CSA bills itself as an independent Massachusetts-based market research company ... [which helps] companies profitably grow their international businesses and gain access to new markets and new customers ... [with a] focus ... on assisting ... clients to operationalize, benchmark, optimize, and innovate industry best practices in translation, localization, interpreting, globalization, and internationalization. Wow. Quite an orgy of jargon to describe what many perceive as a predetermined agenda of special interest propaganda. Like the sellers of another Watchtower, in recent years, the CSA appears to offer salvation.

As I'm sure they do. But for whom? I see the CSA quoted most often by industry shills for machine translation, those who follow the old formula of repeating lies often enough that they are eventually taken as gospel. Rates are dropping, rates are dropping say some of the self-selecting four percent who have responded to past CSA surveys. The fact that my own observations confirm at least the German part of the CSA statement that language pairs involving French and German were the only ones to escape substantial price drops is not prima facie evidence that anything else happens to be true or even that my own observation is generally correct for all market subsegments. In fact, some I know would argue that German translation prices have indeed been depressed in recent years. Statistics drawn from a tiny opt-in minority in a survey are simply incapable of offering any real insight into the truth of either undifferentiated statement, and one would have to be foolish or dishonest to maintain otherwise.

Now the CSA has sent out the call for the four percent and perhaps a few more suckers to share their financials, with the support of agency associations such as the Dutch VViN (formerly ATA, the bunch that try to convince translation agencies that they must get on the MT boat or drown with propaganda fests like the conference in Ede in the Netherlands) and others. The current survey is an "honor system" attempt (i.e. unverified, unaudited) to draw out the details of price policies from participants (freelancers and translation agencies are among those targeted - the CSA rejects the definition of an LSP in the EN 15038 standard and applies it only to companies with a certain number of employees). But there is no mechanism to prevent some monkeywrencher from filling the survey out any which way and skewing the results to paint a picture bearing no resemblance to reality. And even if there were, the tiny participants sample is hardly representative of industry trends as a whole. If I were to look for more reliable sources of data, I might start with some of the mandatory reporting data in certain national jurisdictions, such as that gathered in Germany by the Statistisches Bundesamt. Or try something approximating a recognized method of random sampling or introduce some kind of data auditing. If I felt that these data had any more value than to promote a set, self-interested charlatan agenda of machine translation, I might make an effort to gather credible data.

Rate surveys without a particular ideological or commercial agenda from the ITI and IoL in the United Kingdom and the German BDÜ have larger samples of service providers in many languages, and they mostly tell a story of stable or slightly increasing rates for language service providers.

But if I were paid to get results for my co-conspirators....

Kilgray survey until April 25th: ready, aim, respond!

Kilgray is conducting a survey until April 25th, the results of which will be discussed at the conference in May. This is an opportunity for users of memoQ and their other products to say what's working and what's not and perhaps influence the future course.

It's a short survey and should take little time to answer. The first question asks three things they are doing right, the second one asks which three things are wrong and need to stop, and further questions ask your opinion on the importance of maintaining independence (in contrast to SDL Trados, Star Transit or Wordfast, for example, which are owned by language service resellers which compete with agency customers and freelancers for business) and what "big idea" you might like to see implemented.

On several occasions in past years, I have seen Kilgray respond quickly to clearly expressed user feedback, and I believe that this is still a reasonable expectation. So have your say to help make some good tools better!

Just the facts: real rates and earnings of real translators

For several years now, I have published excerpts on quantity and hourly rates from the rate surveys conducted by the German translators and interpreters association BDÜ. These data are quite extensive and available for purchase at a nominal fee. I have found them quite helpful in understanding the relationship of my rates to the qualified market in the German-speaking region of Europe.

Colleagues and clients in other parts of the world have some problems with these data. First of all, they are published in German only, and other than my small translated excerpts I do not believe that they are easily accessible to those without competence in that language. This is too bad, because the publication also contains data for the translation of some languages beside German to and from English, since German clients sometimes use English as the "gateway" language for large, multilingual projects. But another problem that is claimed with regard to the German data is that they are alleged not reflect the market in other western countries. Anecdotal evidence from qualified translators I know who live elsewhere often does not support this assertion, but it is heard often enough from members of the poverty cult and erstwhile bottomfeeding resellers of language services or those without the competence or confidence to package their services at sustainable rates.

Thus I welcomed the news that the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL) and Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) in the UK had published a new survey of rates and salaries for translators and interpreters. This 56 page document offers an excellent overview of the current demographics and economics of the markets in which members of those organizations are active. It also includes valuable information on business practices regarding job cancellation, rush work and more.

Altogether 1750 translators and interpreters responded to the survey conducted in 2011, providing an excellent statistical basis for the report. Over 80% of all respondents (male and female) were freelancers, with an average age of 46 years. The age distribution is normal, so the median age (not reported) is around the average. Fifty-four percent reported English as their native tongue or language of habitual use (I like that term!). Seventy-three percent of respondents were UK residents with the rest distributed in Continental Europe and the rest of the world. The median years of experience for freelance and salaried full-time translators was the same (13 years), with slight differences for interpreters (10 and 7 years respectively). One percent of respondents listed "no qualifications", the rest having some sort of relevant degree or certificate/exams.

The median gross income for translation and interpreting, a shockingly low GBP 22,000, was distributed fairly evenly over the range from less than GBP 5,000 per year (pin money for part-timing spouses) to GBP 75,000, with a sharp drop above that and only about 1% reporting a six-figure income. The names of these individuals are a closely guarded secret, and there is probably no truth to rumors that members of the Occupy movement will be setting up camp in their front gardens shortly. A strong majority (80%) reported incomes to be the same as last year or higher, contradicting general mutterings of "plunging rates". Apparently there is indeed a demand for quality despite the reluctance of some talking heads in the MT subsector to admit that such a concept applies to language services.

Over 80% of respondents work for translation brokers, with just under 50% setting their own rates and about 70% arriving at rates by negotiation. So much for the "powerlessness" that is so often cited by the poverty cult when discussing compensation for services.

The report contains a further wealth of data on business practices, CAT tool usage and discounts, voice recognition technology, output and specialties as well as a wealth of information on salaried positions, which might be very valuable for assessing one's own status or reasonable terms for working with others.

The section with translation data for the various language pairs is not as granular as the BDÜ report, which has five client categories. Here the data are simply divided into "direct" and "agency" clients. Comparing the data to those with which I am familiar from the BDÜ survey I note that at the present rates of exchange between the euro and the British pound, the figures are lower than I can usually accept, but they are not nearly as grim as many claim. If the pound rises again, some of these rates could look quite reasonable to those living elsewhere. In interpreting the data for planning in other markets, I might use a different theoretical rate for GBP as I now do for the Australian dollar, which has risen sharply in recent times.

In each category. the highest, lowest and most frequent rates are reported along with the number of respondents, the maximum and the median.

Members of the ITI and CIoL received confidential copies of this report a few weeks ago, and private translators forums have been abuzz with the discussion of its implications. There is indeed much to think about, and the modest price asked by the organizations for a copy is well worth the investment. Non-members can purchase the report for GBP 20.00 by telephoning the ITI office at +44 1908 325250 - payment can be made by debit or credit card over the phone. (Please note that credit cards and non-UK debit cards are subject to a 5% processing fee.)

Translation industry survey until September 23rd

In preparation for the TM Europe conference in Warsaw at the end of this month, Peter Reynolds is once again conducting a survey on the translation industry, standards and tools. Respondents include translators and interpreters, consultants, translation agencies and other intermediates as well as translation consumers (end customers). Those completing the survey will have access to the results of last year's survey - an excellent report with significant value as market intelligence for any of the aforementioned groups. I was personally surprised by how much useful information I got out of the analysis.

So if you haven't taken the survey yet, please take ten or fifteen minutes to do so now before September 23rd. Like any survey I've seen, there are questions I might have structured a little differently and items I think belong in a list (but adding them is usually an option). Nonetheless, it is well designed, and the workup of the data is very good.

The 2011 survey is here: http://svy.mk/pC7evd.

Results of the June translation tools surveys

At the end of May I discovered that a new widget had been added to Google's Blogger tools, which offered me a simple way to conduct single question polls. I had been wanting such a feature for a while, so I promptly tested it with a poll on translation tools used (the one on the bottom in the graphic at the left) and followed it a few days later with a question on the number of tools used routinely when it occurred to me that they were a number of others like me who make routine use of multiple tools. As I see it, the responses to that question are also important when considering the significance of responses to the other question. The initial trend of the results remained fairly constant throughout the month, even with a large surge in responses after Alex Eames kindly mentioned the polls in his last tranfree newsletter.

Over 40% of respondents use more than one translation environment routinely. (Astute readers may note that the percentages don't add up. Google's programmers are obviously fond of new math or at least screwy rounding and truncation.)  This would include people who actually translate in multiple environments as well as those who use environments other than their favored one for project preparation and QA. My partner is a good example of this latter category; she uses "classic" Trados all the time to export TMs and terminologies provided to her, pre-segment Word/RTF and TTX files for translation in Déjà Vu X or memoQ and to perform tag QA on TTX files. Probably a few other things too. But after she learned the benefits of more modern translation environments, I would risk singing soprano if I suggest that she actually take up translating with the Trados Workbench macros or TagEditor again. Maybe I can get her to look at SDL Trados Studio 2009 one day, but first I think I'll take up something safer like mud wrestling with crocodiles.

The 8 to 12% of respondents who indicated that they use no translation tools is probably well under the true figure in our profession. My blog tends to attract readers with an interest in the technology of translation and not so many who like to contemplate flowery phrases for translating obscure poetry (too bad, really - that's more my taste, but first bills must be paid). But since one of my intentions in creating these polls was to get an idea of the technology interests of my readers and perhaps choose some future topics to reflect these interests, I'm not really concerned about an accurate representation of the full population of translators. The profession is simply too diverse and fragmented for me to care. It's interesting to see that I belong to the 1% of nutcases that use 5 or more tools - I can hear I told you so on this one already from many quarters. And I like to think I'm not a nerd. Einbildung ist auch 'ne Bildung.

In the poll on specific tools, I received some criticism for not including certain tools under a category more specific that "other". As you can see, with a grand total of 15% other, I'm probably not missing much there. When I see interesting minor tools I'll certainly mention them if I can do so with some knowledge, but I don't have the time to offer the extensive expert surveys that you'll get from a guy like Jost Zetzsche and his Toolkit newsletter or book on computer skills and tools for translators.

I probably also should have split the Trados part of the question into at least the new and old generation of SDL products, but I simply didn't think of this until a few days after the poll was running, and I decided to deal with that issue in a follow-up question another day (and I have - see the poll in the left sidebar, which will run until August 1st). This is also relevant to me, as I'll be exploring the no-longer-so-new Studio 2009 version more in the future. (Why call it 2009 still when you release the service pack that actually makes it work in 2010?) It may run like a lame pig on many machines, but I do like some of the interface elements a lot, and it's the best program on netbooks I've used as far as critical parts of screens and dialogs not usually getting cut off.

If the poll statistics even roughly approximate the real distribution of tools among commercial translators, then the perception that "everyone" uses Trados is certainly not even close to correct. The greatest share of licenses is certainly for some version of Trados, but if one considers the number of people who use it as I do primarily for some of its filters and to prepare projects for clients who ask for Trados uncleaned deliverables, then the percentage actually translating with Trados will be far under 50%. This is a point well worth considering for those who want to use the most qualified translator for a given subject: statistically, the odds are against you if you insist on Trados use. It's far better to design projects in a tool-neutral manner as far as practical and let the translators work with whatever they feel most comfortable with. The importance of using the best qualified translator for a particular subject rather than the first monkey with a particular tool in his box is one of the reasons why I like Déjà Vu X and memoQ so much: the RTF table exports from these two tools allows projects to be translated or edited by anyone with a modern word processor regardless of the source format. Every translation environment tool should follow the example set by Atril and Kilgray in this respect.

It's also interesting to note that "major" tools like Star Transit and Across only have 6% of respondents claiming use. Anyone who tries to insist on a translator using those tools is playing a very bad hand.

The main conclusion I draw from these data is that give the diversity of tool use among qualified translators, it is more important than ever to design and test our processes for true interoperability and to drop the religious insistence on the use of One True Tool, no matter what that tool may be.

But that's just my initial reaction to the data. What do you think?