This article was written by Michael Benis (www.michaelbenis.cwc.net) and first published in ITI Bulletin (www.ITI.org.uk).

Now is the time that many of us finally invest in ourselves, caught up in the general fever of Christmas spending. Here's the information you'll need if this means you finally succumb to the temptation of Translation Memory software.

Thankfully part one of the Translation Memory review went down very well with ITI members, non-members and even the manufacturers themselves. That notwithstanding, many of you have taken the time to ask me which I think is the "best" product, or (not generally known for my reticence) accuse me of sitting on the fence.

I didn't come out with the ITI Bulletin equivalent of a "Which? best buy" for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I wanted to gather feedback from readers to provide added depth and breadth to any recommendations I might make. Secondly, because first impressions can be misleading, and finally, because it’s important to understand that as much as I have tried to be as objective is possible, in the end we're talking about one translator's personal preference. The detail of both parts of this review means that anything I say now in summing up will be within a context that allows you to evaluate whether or not you're likely to agree. Much of this detail is in part one, however, and it may help to re-read that before proceeding, since I didn’t want to waste space or your time by repeating everything that’s already been explained there.

When it comes down to your final choice, there is no single best of the bunch, but it is likely that one product will suit your needs more closely than any of the others. That may not necessarily be the one I prefer. After all, the only way you'll feel the same about any of these products as I do is to become me, and that's not frankly something I'd recommend. Nevertheless, the conclusions to this review will be brutally frank because that's the only way they can be really useful. So, strap yourself in tight and enjoy the ride.

One of the most surprising facts to emerge from member feedback was that several of you have bought Translation Memory products and never used them. Frightened into feeling you would be relegated to translation prehistory, regarded with contempt by your much more technically-sophisticated colleagues and treated with disdain by potential work providers, you rushed out and spent over £2,000 on a box, dongle and floppy disks that some of you have never even got round to installing. You never needed Translation Memory because you were quite busy enough as it was thank you very much, because your work arrives by post or fax and because none of it's particularly repetitive, if at all. It doesn't matter how good a tool is, it's wasted money if you don't need it.

Well, I don't know if it's much consolation, but at least you now know you're not alone. Others in this group include those who do fairly repetitive work but for one reason or another believed it would be worthwhile scanning printed/faxed texts to convert them to files. They without exception found they spent more time correcting the output from their Optical Character Recognition programs than they saved with Translation Memory. As I reported in part one, it just doesn't work that way. Suffice it to say that the only real use of OCR to translators is in scanning source texts to obtain word counts. They’re generally great at recognising a word is a word, but start straining as soon as soon as you ask them to tell you what that word actually is.

If you can identify yourself with either of these categories, you might as well stop reading this now. Go away and empty your piggy bank on speech recognition, mince pies or champagne instead. Any of these three are more likely to increase your productivity.

A third group is formed by those who do use Translation Memory but have been disappointed by the productivity increases achieved. In many cases this is simply because, like the former, they do not receive enough work in electronic format for Translation Memory to you make a significant impact on their earnings. In certain cases, however, it is also because they have been misinformed about the scale of productivity increases that are possible.

One of the problems is Translation Memory companies (no names!) who behave more as if they were used car salesmen in the time-honoured tradition, quoting one-off instances of productivity increases (in some cases over 60%) as if they were the rule rather than the exception. Don't bank on getting more than a 30% increase overall - and that's not on your total income but just for those texts that are suitable for TM.

So how do you avoid buying a lemon? Fortunately, I believe there is an acid - not to say citrus - test. If you already suspect Translation Memory could help increase your productivity it probably will. If, on the other hand, you read through part one of this review without some sort of a penny dropping that it might have anything to offer you... then keep a tight hold on that penny. There are other ways of increasing your productivity, foremost among them dictation and speech recognition - also considered in this issue. Indeed, it’s my opinion that most ITI members will gain more from speech recognition than from Translation Memory, which is why I shall also be highlighting how well the various different Translation Memory packages work with the best speech recognition solutions on the market. When they work well together the productivity increases can be very good indeed.

Both parts of this review refer to the fact that certain clients and translation companies in particular may require you to use the same translation memory system they do (or a system that is compatible with it) to work with them. A number of ITI members consequently considered the purchase of a translation memory system to be a useful marketing tool for attracting new clients. Indeed, the marketing tactics of certain TM companies encourages this.

User feedback indicates that this is not, however, the case. If a company promising regular work insists you use a particular package for a specific long job, maybe even encouraging you with a discounted purchase price, then you can weigh up the pros and cons, and make a choice that is based on known elements. Very few translators who followed this route ended up being disappointed. Conversely, most of those who speculated and invested in a package believing it would help attract new business have not achieved a return on their investment, including those who did succeed in attracting new clients requiring the product concerned.

One thing that has to be borne in mind is that many clients apply a differential pricing structure based on the percentage fuzziness of the matches they obtain when pretranslating/analysing a job. Some, for instance, will be reluctant to pay more than 25% of your per-word rate for a 100% match. Such an arrangement might mean that you actually suffer a fall in income working on certain projects, since it is wise to check your 100% matches at least once to make sure there is no database corruption, that there are no errors or poor translations in the database and, finally, that the 100% match is actually appropriate. "How can it not be?" you ask. I'm sure, however, that it won't take much head scratching for you to imagine potential situations for your language and subject combinations in which a given sentence may need to be translated in different ways to suit a different context.

Likewise, some clients only want to pay 50% of your normal rate for a 50% fuzzy match. Don't accept it. The time you spend editing a 50% fuzzy match is unlikely to be less than that required to translate the same segment anew. If you're dictating text and have a well-fed terminology database (for those odd moments when your memory needs quick refreshment to remember some exquisitely rare term), you even may find there's very little difference in your productivity for 0% matches and 75% matches or higher.

There are two lessons to be learned: be careful about how you negotiate any such deals and don't count your chickens until they're hatched when it comes to the return on investment you can expect from increased productivity gains. There's no doubt these products can increase your income, but also remember that if there isn't going to be an immediate gain based on your current situation, buying TM may have an effect on your credit card statement alone.

The main purpose of splitting this extended review was to receive feedback from users. This feedback consisted in over 30 e-mails, a number of phone calls, one letter (from a resolute typewriting veteran who managed to encounter every known weakness in Windows 98 in less than 98 hours) and many informal conversations at ITI events such as the Conference, Seminar on translating for the European institutions, Open Forum and Weekend Workshop.

The nature of this feedback was very varied. Most users seem to acquire the minimum working knowledge they can "get away with" to process texts using Translation Memory. Only a few dig below the surface to maximise the productivity gains achieved. As may be expected, these tend either to be translators with a very high throughput of repetitive technical texts or translation company managers and their staff. I'll be reporting on their and my own findings system by system below.

DejaVu received by far the most enthusiastic support of all the various different Translation Memory programs. There were a number of reasons for this. In a market dominated, at least until very recently, by packages costing around £2,000 without including alignment software or filters for the big DTP programs (allowing you, for instance, to work on Interleaf or FrameMaker files), DejaVu distinguished itself with a philosophy that combined a "complete product" approach with what was generally perceived as a much "fairer" price.

The single most vocal complaint against Translation Memory companies in general is that little user support is provided and that it is generally considered to be inadequate and overpriced. Atril scores heavily here, providing very prompt e-mail support and often working on a user's files to resolve a particularly thorny problem - sometimes quite obscenely late at night and over the weekend. One user in particular, now in-house and "forced" to use a competitor's system, contrasted his very positive "DejaVu experience" with the inferior performance and backup provided by one of the program’s much bigger commercial rivals who actually charged when he reported a bug to them. All Atril's user support, on the other hand, is provided free of charge.

There are two main Internet user groups for DejaVu, both administered by Atril, on which it maintains an active presence, one for general users and one for beta testers. Both of these are far more active than their equivalents for other products mainly because they don't just discuss how to use DejaVu, but also make suggestions on how it can be enhanced and expanded. This becomes a dialogue for the simple reason that practically every suggestion for which there is some sort of consensus gets incorporated in a new release within a matter of days (when it can be downloaded free from Atril's Website), and its implementation then discussed and possibly improved. Many user's loyalty to DejaVu (and this includes translation companies) comes precisely from the fact that it has been customised to their needs.

This sometimes has its drawbacks, particularly for those using the beta versions, who may find that some cherished feature, which worked perfectly well in the past, suddenly stops working until the problem is sorted out. But there is a simple solution to this - only experiment with a new release when you don't have an urgent project on the boil (unless you also want to experiment with your ability to cope with rapid changes in blood pressure). One way or another, this constant feedback and group problem solving means DejaVu users form a virtual community that is without parallel for any other translation memory product.

An effect of this is that DejaVu has developed much more rapidly than any of the other systems in this review - and that's notwithstanding the fact that Atril are currently working on a completely new version of the product due for release late this year or in early 2000. The latest version (2.3.86 as I write) now offers filters for PowerPoint, runs much faster, features a number of automated troubleshooting routines, a repetition analysis function, TMX filter, a very handy filter option that works like "Fold" in transit (allowing you to revise or analyse all the occurrences of a particular "problem" en bloc), powerful SQL features for database management and the first implementation of Shallow Translation Memory.

Let's just consider that last one for a moment. What exactly is Shallow Translation Memory? Translation Memory systems break your source and target texts up into corresponding segments, such that when they meet the same or a similar (fuzzy match) source segment in a new text they will match it with the old target segment. What happens, however, if the new segment is exactly the same as part of an old segment? Depending on your fuzzy matching settings it will be retrieved for you to edit. But if the new segment contains two sub-segments, both of which already exist as separate sub-segments of two different segments in your database, even the best fuzzy matching will retrieve either one or the other and you will have to edit the result to bring them together. That takes time. Not much, but it mounts up in the course of a job. Shallow Translation Memory technology aims to bring these two sub-segments together to form a new segment without your having to do any work.

Although all the main Translation Memory companies are working on this technology, DejaVu is currently the only product to offer it, albeit in simple form, on the market. First steps in this direction can also be seen in the way Transit is able to automatically integrate Termstar entries in fuzzy matches. Likewise, Trados has a function called "Substitution localisation" that automatically replaces dates, times, measurements and user-defined variables such as product names. Both these functions can in some cases transform fuzzy matches into 100% matches.

From the user's point of view, however, gaining the full advantage of DejaVu’s shallow translation memory technology requires a little patience. That's because the current versions require you to manipulate the three different types of databases it uses in a project (project lexicon, terminology database and memory database) to achieve this result. At the moment, DejaVu basically implements shallow Translation Memory technology by assembling the translation units out of sub-segments you yourself create using a number of semi-automated routines.

You are best off experimenting with this only after you have gained experience in using the less sophisticated features of the product. The old adage of learning to walk before you run was never truer than in Translation Memory and very definitely applies to DejaVu. Take things methodically one step at a time, making full use of the excellent advice on offer in the Internet user groups and you'll make steady progress while maintaining a constant smile. Ignore this advice at your peril! I have received many late-night phone calls from hysterical users who tried to do too much too soon, were rudely surprised by the results of their experiments and found themselves in a real panic about how to meet deadlines. The biggest surprise for me has always been meeting them subsequently, their sanity restored and - miraculously - their hair still showing youthful vigour and colour. Nonetheless, I'm convinced the risk of sudden hair loss is real. Avoid it if you can.

Talking of sudden shocks, DejaVu is one of the most stable systems, along with Transit. Unlike the latter and indeed the rest of the pack, however, it saves your work as you move from cell to cell, so that should you experience a crash you will at the very worst only lose the last segment you were working on.

Those users who have mastered this three-way database assembling technology have reported that it makes a significant difference to their productivity gains and I can confirm this. No other system on the market currently allows you to get so much out of your databases. The new SQL features allow you to leverage this further and are proving particularly useful for project managers.

As if that weren't enough, the forthcoming Version 3 will also include filters for Corel Catalyst and Excel (which will probably also be available for version 2 before the end of November), a new more flexible user interface with re-sizeable cells that can be edited in situ, user-configurable menus, tool bars and keystrokes, together with Wizard-driven assistance for beginners and other enhancements to improve user-friendliness. There will be a new editor for Windows dialogue boxes that automatically re-sizes all objects in the dialogue box to accommodate translated text lengths. The program will also support all Windows languages, including right-to-left and Asian languages as both source and target. It will be possible to use multiple, hierarchical databases for each project and import different file formats in the same project. Format support filters will be plug-ins so that third-party companies can develop their own. Batch alignment of existing translations will be possible, semi-automatic glossary building will be provided and the system will include a back-end for Access databases and, optionally, for SQL Server and Oracle databases. True shallow translation memory technology will integrate example-based machine translation principles to yield much more accurate results when assembling translations, meaning that Version 3 of DejaVu will mine your past translations much more deeply. Atril states that productivity gains are expected to reach up to 5 times the current version's figures, which are in themselves amongst the highest for any current translation memory software. The final bit of good news is that anyone who has bought DejaVu after October 1st 1999 will be able to upgrade to version 3 free of charge.

Last but not least, DejaVu is also one of the very best Translation Memory programs when it comes to integration with speech recognition technology. Dictation inside it is no problem and nearly all the standard editing commands work faultlessly. It is also relatively easy to create macros that activate its very many keystroke shortcuts for increasing productivity. Our Bulletin Editor, Antonio Aparicio, was reporting productivity in the region of 1,000 words per hour on a technical manual revision within a matter of days of integrating the two.

In short, whereas DejaVu used to be a product that held its own with the best while offering the advantages of an attractive price and "complete solution" philosophy, it has now very much come of age. While continuing to be a complete solution - even allowing you to work on projects for translation companies that use competitor products - it now offers an array of features, filters and productivity tools that none of its competitors can match. Its product support and user satisfaction also seem to be much better than its competitors. What's more, if the forthcoming Version 3.00 is half as good as promised it will zap everyone else straight between the eyes. Definitely one to watch and probably the one to buy, but read on before you make up your mind.

We got less feedback about IBM Translation Manager than almost any other program. That said, there were no negative comments on the latest version. Those who use it regularly tend to have been "encouraged" to do so by one of their major customers and have quite simply got used to it and even grown fond of its idiosyncrasies. Such is its reputation for zero support and slow development that many of them actually seem to apologise for liking it.

They have no reason to do so. Translation Manager is a stable complete package that's predictable and effective. It can be integrated with IBM's own machine translation technology (something we're hoping to test in the future), enjoys more support than it used to and even a little marketing. That said, it's not the most user-friendly product on the market, nor the easiest to integrate with speech recognition technology. If a translation company providing you with substantial volumes of work asks you to use it, you need have no regrets. But if you're after a solution that will enable you to familiarise yourself with this technology and maximise your productivity while enabling you to cater for the greatest diversity of demand, then go for DejaVu, which also allows you to work on Translation Manager projects.

It will be interesting to see what IBM delivers in the future. There's no doubt they have the resources and expertise to make Translation Manager a much more effective contender and to market it much more strongly. They're certainly not slacking when it comes to research on Shallow Translation Memory, machine translation integration and very possibly the grey area where the two meet. Sadly, quite what will emerge from this has a big blue question mark hanging over it.

Topping the low-feedback sweepstakes, I received only three comments about SDLX, all of them negative by people with little or no experience of TM who hadn't persevered in their use of the program. Although I did not find SDLX any more complicated to use than its rivals, the program is not helped by the fact that you have to run a separate utility for converting your source files to and from the internal format used by the SDLX translation environment. Higher integration and more user wizards would help. These are promised for a forthcoming new release, which should therefore mark a significant improvement in the initial user-friendliness of the product.

This is a pity really, because SDLX arrived on a market that thought it had done pretty much everything it could with the parallel-window interface, and did two things nobody had thought of. One of these was colour-coding the tags that show up in your usual TM setup. This is a nice touch that make things look less intimidating but doesn't make any real difference to the way you work. The other was far more significant, bringing good old WYSIWYG text formatting such as you find in Word (with bold in bold, italics in italics and so on) into the Translation Memory interface. What, you may ask, is so astounding about that? Well, consider the fact that what you would otherwise see is the same words with codes before and after them to "turn" the bold or italics etc. formatting on or off. Many translation memory programs use numbered codes or tags to do this, which requires you to shuffle them around as required, often causing them to appear in a different order. This can be confusing to both the translator and the program itself (because the code/tag order can change), not least of all because it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether the tags are for formatting or something else. The only other program that does not have this problem is Trados' Translator's Workbench (but only in Word or PowerPoint). It should be emphasised, however, that if you get an exact match in any of the other programs they will generally convert the codes for you automatically and DejaVu can often do this even when you don't.

SDLX has now taken this one step further, using the information it obtains from this function to transfer formatting information in the database across different file formats. This functionality will be appearing in a new version due to be released towards the end of the year and it will be interesting to see whether it makes a real difference. If this is matched by a similar level of attention to user-friendliness throughout the product, then SDLX will become a much more serious contender. As it is, I feel it's in a similar situation to IBM’s Translation Manager. If you do a lot of work for SDL, it won't take too long to master and you'll be quite happy using it while becoming a valuable member of their team. And just to get your mouth watering, it's currently available at half price to ITI members if you buy it before the end of the year. But if you don't work for SDL, nobody else is at this juncture likely to request that you use it and you will gain more functions, greater user-friendliness and higher productivity increases using other tools.

You either love it or you hate it. Undoubtedly the most widely-used Translation Memory software amongst translation companies, freelance translators are fiercely divided about its merits. Every Trados user from whom I received feedback had reservations while at the same time being extremely pleased with the productivity gains they had achieved from the product. Backup and service were universally criticised by users in more than one country, as was the company's pricing policy. Trados have recently addressed the latter with their new all-in "freelance solution", which is available at a very much more attractive price. Whether they address the former remains to be seen. It’s not all roses, however. There are a few initial bugs in the Freelance edition and Trados has generated a little ill-feeling amongst translation companies by refusing to sell it to them, insisting they have to buy the "team solution" even if it isn’t the best suited to their needs.

Admired by all for their marketing acumen, Trados is nevertheless seen by many as the VHS of the TM world - an inferior product that has been sold well. This is not entirely fair, since it forgets Trados' pioneering work in making Translation Memory user-friendly. The problem is that Trados hasn't done too much in the way of development since then apart from increasing the stability of its product, updating it to 32-bit operation and improving the reliability of its filters. The most significant recent developments are Tag Editor, which continues to be very unstable, and a new PowerPoint interface that works very well, although it occasionally highlights Trados’ weakness at finding acceptable matches for short segments. I believe that both these problems are, however, being addressed.

Nevertheless, if you work in Word nearly all the time, and now PowerPoint, too, there is much to be said for Translator's Workbench. You work in the same programs you're used to and enjoy full WYSIWYG - what's more, that includes being able to see all the drawings, diagrams and photographs etc. in context. Proponents of other programs will, however, counter that they prefer the greater speed of whatever happens to be their own favourite program and find it easier to work from printouts to check any graphical or formatting context as required.

There are however also significant disadvantages to the Trados solution of using a Microsoft product as its translation memory interface. Most of you know how slow Word can be, with its memory-hogging behaviour, and just what a nuisance this can be when working on very large files with a high graphical content. This is even worse when using Translator's Workbench because the amount of text effectively doubles as you proceed through your translation (see part one for more information on of this), while additional demands are of course imposed on your system by the translation memory system itself. As a result, the best results can only be achieved by running the program under Windows NT in order to make effective use of RAM above 128 MB, especially if you want to integrate it with speech recognition software, in which case you would be well advised to install double or even four times that amount.

Another disadvantage of Trados is that when you're checking your document - and however scrupulous you've been as you work on each segment I would strongly advise this - you are actually comparing contiguous sentences. It is much less tiring and time-consuming to do this in the parallel window setup of a dedicated translation memory editor. This is worse when you're working on tagged files prepared using Translator's Workbench's filters, which make things even more complicated to follow. In these cases you have all the disadvantages of Word integration with none of the advantages. Trados would do well to either develop Tag Editor, making it a parallel-window translation environment for working on files other than Word and PowerPoint (and possibly even for those two in order to cater for those translators who find they achieve higher productivity in this type of editor), or maybe take a leaf out of SDLX's book so that at least the formatting is shown in Word in the usual way and only the remaining information is shown as tags.

Nor do the disadvantages end there. Many people dislike the "clunky" interface which makes its way through your document by opening and closing the translation units one by one as it goes. There's no doubt that this is much slower than its competitors, particularly Transit, but it's not the end of the world. A further disadvantage is that you can only perform batch translations in three steps and not on all types of files (e.g. PowerPoint). Imagine, for example, that you receive 15 files which are the updated versions of the manuals for a given product that you translated last year. With Transit or DejaVu you could import and pretranslate all these files simultaneously and jump instantly between only those translation units that are new, propagating them through all the files at the same time to complete the job. With Translator’s Workbench you have three options. You can translate them file by file using "translate to fuzzy" in which case the program will admittedly only stop at the no/fuzzy matches, but won’t jump straight from one to the next without opening all the intervening translation units along the way. Alternatively, you can pretranslate each file and then simply jump from fuzzy to fuzzy without "passing" through the 100% matches on the way. Finally, you can pretranslate all the files in batch mode using the Analyse function, export all the no/fuzzy matches, translate them as a separate file and then process this cleaned-up single file to create the target files. One way or the other, Trados is a slightly more complex and less productive solution in these situations.

Despite their criticisms of the company, however, most Word-only users seem relatively happy with the product. Several voiced their appreciation of the way Translator's Workbench integrates the system's terminology and memory databases (although this is not unique to Trados) and one Windows 98 user strongly recommended the use of two monitors (one for MultiTerm and one for Word + Workbench). The same user also very rightly pointed out the advantages of using all the project settings right from the outset, making it easier to split up one’s databases when they grow very large.

Particular dissatisfaction was also expressed by translation companies using Trados regarding both the cost and quality of service. Several have commented on the time lost in having to go through their local distributors when much of the technical backup actually comes from the developers in Germany, Eire and the Belgium. Making up for Trados’s deficiencies in this department there is a fairly active independent user group. Moreover, Trados themselves are about to set up a Usenet support group.

The cost of the products is also a bone of contention for translation companies (just in case all you struggling freelancers thought you were alone in this!). One translation company even performs its file alignment using an ordinary text editor, stating that WinAlign is quite simply not cost-effective for them. Others have encountered a bug that sometimes causes WinAlign to insert duplicate segments. Several translation companies acknowledge the weaknesses of using Word as an editor for tagged files and use other Translation Memory software for PageMaker, Interleaf and FrameMaker, Transit in particular.

Most users confirmed my comments about the fragility of Workbench tags and the risk of database corruption. If you're a Trados user, don't forget to make regular backups of your databases and keep copies of the source files for your projects until they have been completed.

This will all have sounded pretty negative. To be fair, the biggest company in any market often tends to attract stronger criticism than its smaller competitors, and as far as pricing and packaging policies go none of them apart from Atril have ever offered anything significantly different. What's more, Trados' recent price cuts can be thanked for having helped the market generally become more competitive. Combined with the new Trados complete package philosophy, they certainly result in a much more attractive solution, shortly to be enhanced by new developments including Word 2000 compatibility, XML and Bidi.

Translator's Workbench does offer excellent database and project management facilities and is, at least in the very beginning, easy to learn to use (some of its more complex features are - well, complex, and little is done to make them more user-friendly). If all your work is in Word and PowerPoint, you mainly work for companies that want you to use Translator's Workbench and you don’t feel confident in your computer skills, then Trados will be the most suitable product for you... and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Equally, if all your work is in Word or PowerPoint and you don’t make frequent use of translation memory, then the advantage of a familiar interface, easy formatting and the absence of "strange" codes may well also make it the best choice for you. If either of the above describes you, move now to see if you can still take advantage of the Trados special 15th anniversary offer to buy the entire system at half price; (note however that Word 2000 is still not supported).

On the other hand, if you're not computer shy, and particularly if you work on a wide variety of formats in projects that could benefit from batch translation, I would strongly recommended you consider using DejaVu or Transit. The same applies if you want to integrate translation memory and speech recognition, especially if you don’t have a very powerful PC.

If Trados is the VHS of translation memory, then Star's Transit is in many respects (hopefully not all!) the equivalent of Sony's ill-fated Betamax. That's certainly the way Transit users see the situation, or at least all of them that contacted me. If they were responsible for marketing the product, there wouldn't be a translator on God's earth who wasn’t aware of its strengths.

The most curious thing about the Transit "fans" who contacted me is that many of them are translation companies and specialist technical translators who do most of their work using translation memory and also use at least one other system, generally Trados. The features they most seem to appreciate are the performance of its filters (more than one translation company commented that it was the only program that coped really well with Interleaf files), together with its speed, stability and the flexibility of its reference file system. Another factor that earned the program praise is that its system of reference files takes up much less server space than any of its competitors' database systems. Incidentally, Trados databases tend to be smaller than the rest of the database pack, using a compression system, although many maintain it is precisely this repeated compression and expansion that tends to make Trados databases less stable.

Getting back to Transit, translation companies were particularly aware of the time-savings the Transit alignment facility offers compared to its competitors. They were not, however, without their criticisms and some in particular had encountered problems with drawings in very large Word files. I believe, however, that this has been corrected on the latest service releases. I myself never experienced any problems even with manuals several hundred pages long. There was universal criticism of the user manual. Most also acknowledged that the program is getting a little long in the tooth and all were looking forward to the new 32-bit version with anticipation. Freelance Transit users particularly appreciate Termstar and one in particular took issue with me for contending that the terminology features offered by these programs should not be a major consideration in one's selection. Those who share this point of view should note that Termstar is not only more sophisticated than all its competitors, but also much easier to use than most. It’s also worth noting that very good dictionaries for Termstar are available from third-party suppliers.

These findings were all pretty much in line with my own. Even in its current 16-bit version, Transit is significantly faster than any other translation memory program on the market, jumps straight between fuzzy matches that need editing without any noticeable time lag and highlights the differences between each fuzzy match and new segment to make editing faster and easier. It also features a large number of keystroke shortcuts that increase productivity during editing and operating the program itself. It's "Fold" feature, which allows you to display only those segments containing a particular problem word or phrase, makes it much easier to analyse and find a solution for such problems and makes editing much simpler and faster for translators and revisers alike. It's only real (albeit minor) drawbacks are that the fuzzy match window doesn't close automatically and that performing the equivalent of a "Scan" in DejaVu or a "Concordance" search in Translator's Workbench is a two-step operation that requires a little bit more concentration than its competitors.

As far as integration with speech recognition goes, only DejaVu comes close either in speed of response or the sheer number of things you can do with it (partly because of the way all its many keystroke shortcuts can be activated by voice macros, partly because it’s so fast anyway and partly because it makes much lower demands on your RAM than its competitors).

Star has been promising a new version of Transit for some time, but it's not here quite yet. It's close enough, however, for the jungle telephone to be well and truly buzzing with reliable rumours about what it's going to offer. For a start, it's going to have more filters, with only FrameMaker and Interleaf costing extra, while Excel, Help File, HTML, PageMaker, PowerPoint, RTF, SGML, Word and WordPerfect will all be standard. Full support for right-to-left and Asian languages will also be provided. It will also feature a number of user wizards to make setting up a project with its reference files much easier. On the subject of user-friendliness, several readers who bought Transit on the strength of the first part of this review contacted me specifically to let me know that they were not only very happy with the product but found it much easier to use than my comments had led them to expect. Other developments include TMX compatibility and powerful SQL features to aid translators and translation companies in particular in manipulating Transit reference files and databases. Nobody seems to be clear about whether the system is any faster in its 32-bit incarnation and any improvement in this department shouldn't be taken for granted, but if there is any, Transit will quite simply be frightening.

Flavour of the month, undoubtedly influenced by DejaVu's success and Trados' 15th anniversary special price offer, is - you've guessed it - a series of very attractive package options and a special offer upgrade to the new version when it comes out. So far, so good. The disappointing news and possible confirmation of Star's ingenious Betamax marketing strategy is that now, just as the rest of the world seems to be moving over to a complete "solution" package, Star is still selling its admittedly excellent FrameMaker and Interleaf filters, as well as its alignment facility, as expensive optional extras. They are now the only remaining translation memory company to do this. You could in fact buy the complete DejaVu program, including alignment facility and all filters, for less than the price of Transit's alignment add-on alone. If you ask me, they've shot themselves in the foot over this one. Transit has the potential to be a real winner. If only Star would get their marketing right.

Everything considered, Transit currently has the edge over DejaVu in speed and stability, but only just, and when you start to get really cunning in your use of DejaVu's "Assemble" technology the latter may just sneak into the lead where productivity is concerned. DejaVu unquestionably offers more features and the sheer volume of information it provides can increase productivity on projects with little in the way of 100% or fuzzy matches. Admittedly, Termstar is superior to DejaVu’s Termwatch, and Transit's alignment facility offers massive time-savings over DejaVu's, although neither of these "advantages" are likely to cut much ice with freelancers. How things will square up with the release of the new Transit and new DejaVu remains to be seen. One way or another, however, Transit won't be competing on price. The question is, can they afford not to? To be fair, they go some way to alleviating this by offering these extras on a very competitively-priced monthly hire basis, but whether they will be able to deliver this promptly enough to cope with sudden unforeseen client requirements (aren't these the rule rather than the exception?) remains a mute point.

All the programs tested will significantly increase your productivity on the sort of texts that are good TM fodder. There were however noticeable differences between one program and another at all stages of the learning curve, although I must again emphasise that I am only reporting my personal experience during one year’s use. Someone who is only using one product will also gain more, since they don’t have to keep re-learning all the various different keystroke shortcuts and other little tricks that help us work faster. I used databases in the following fields: automotive, electronics, information technology, and urology. The databases were the same for all products.

Productivity increases with Trados were higher than all the others except Transit in the beginning, but stayed pretty much the same throughout the test period. DejaVu, SDLX and Translation Manager came in at about the same level, gradually rising until they were slightly higher than Trados. Productivity in DejaVu continued to rise beyond this level, however, and once I had built up large terminology databases and mastered the use of the project lexicon it increased still further, in some cases matching and even exceeding that of Transit. Transit was in a class of its own, rapidly rising to a level only subsequently matched and not always by DejaVu. Remember, however, that high productivity is not the only criterion for choosing one product rather than another.

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to understand a number of simple things.

One, all these programs work. If you're a technical translator (in particular) working on long repetitive projects for which you are also required to cope with frequent updates and revisions, any of them will enable you to increase your throughput significantly. This will not only raise your income through higher productivity but also, in many cases, by allowing you to cater for direct clients whose requirements you would otherwise have been unable to meet.

Two, if your main client/s also use translation memory systems, and particularly if they all use the same one, it could be a wise idea to keep life simple and follow suit, irrespective of whether you or I are convinced that another system performs "better".

Three, personal circumstances may also influence your choice beyond any "abstract" considerations. If, for some reason, you do not want to upgrade your hardware immediately, then system demands might place Transit at the top of your list and Translator's Workbench at the bottom, everything else being equal. If, on the other hand, practically all your work is in Word, maybe occasionally PowerPoint and very rarely anything else, and you have neither the time nor the patience to fiddle around learning how to use another interface, Trados should be your first choice. What's more, you can now buy it safe in the knowledge that it will allow you to cope reasonably well with practically anything that any work provider can demand of you - and that this small step towards heaven will no longer cost you the earth.

One way or another, you should take a good look at all the systems, however, download the demo versions, play with them, frequent the Internet user groups, ask plenty of questions and take your time over choosing. It doesn't matter what I or anybody else thinks of these programs, you're the person that will be using the one you buy, and you'll be buying it with your money.

If you're expecting some tremendous confession now, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you. I don't have an absolute favourite. To my mind there are only three products at the top of the tree contending to be king of this jungle. When it comes to Word and PowerPoint, Trados is in a world of its own, albeit not - to my mind - in a class of its own. One way or another, you quite simply can't compare it directly with any of its competitors. Either you want to work in Word or PowerPoint directly, with all the advantages that brings, and are prepared to make the attendant sacrifices where the corresponding disadvantages are concerned, or you aren't. It's your choice.

Working with Trados is a perfectly enjoyable experience (although not be compared with sipping cocktails on the Caribbean). Indeed, I grew quite fond of it in the way that anyone grows fond of what they're used to. In fact - as an aside - I would for precisely this reason advise you to be on your guard against the criticisms users of one system make of another if they have not made equal use of them both.

When it comes to throughput, however, I’m afraid I consistently get significantly higher productivity gains working in either DejaVu or Transit (the other two contenders if that wasn't already clear). The translation process itself is faster and revision considerably easier. Both also work better with speech recognition technology - an important consideration for me. Finally, when it comes to working on tagged files, I very much prefer working in the traditional parallel window environment. If, of course, you never receive requests for anything other than Word or PowerPoint, or don't want to work on anything else, then none of that matters. But if a lot of your work consists in FrameMaker, PageMaker, Interleaf, HTML or SGML files, then there's no question in my mind that Trados is not the most effective solution. Your choice will, therefore, once again depend on what you feel most comfortable with or what interests you most, but there's always a trade-off involved.

So, where does that leave us if we decide to forget integration in Word and PowerPoint? Again, we have to come to terms with a trade-off. Buy DejaVu and you can cope with practically anything, including Translation Manager and Translator's Workbench projects, although - ironically - Transit projects present something of a problem. What's more, from day one you know you have everything you'll need, whether it's having to cope with the occasional Interleaf file or align last year's annual reports to feed this year's practically unchanged version of them through the system. You also know that you'll be getting a product that keeps on improving, very possibly with your own input, and provides excellent support. Atril's implementation of shallow translation memory technology also looks very exciting, although there is no way of knowing how far everyone else is down the road.

Shifting across to the Transit camp, you have the advantage of speed (although DejaVu is catching up) and a very versatile and stable "database" system. Conversely, you have the disadvantage having to pay extra for the FrameMaker and Interleaf filters should you ever have and/or want to work with them. Likewise, you will have to pay extra to either rent or buy the alignment facility if you either have or are likely to receive useful legacy material. That said you will, comically enough, be able to use the demo version of DejaVu to align old files, exporting the resulting database in TMX format and then importing it again using the forthcoming new version of Transit (the current version doesn’t support TMX). You won't be able to work on Translation Manager projects using Transit, but you will be able to do so where Translator's Workbench projects are concerned if whoever is sending them to you is prepared to send them in the old Trados format, since there is a little DOS utility that will then convert them to Transit projects. The new version will allow you to send the resulting database in TMX format if required, which Translator's Workbench is able to import.

When it comes to integration with speech recognition Transit has the edge, but only just. It's easier to shuffle codes around in DejaVu, and all the various different windows that open for one reason or another also close automatically (which they don't always do in Transit). Conversely, Transit has more handy editing commands, such as Delete to end of segment etc.. You can get both programs to zip straight from fuzzy match to fuzzy match without a pause using a single voice command.

Finally, DejaVu is more versatile and can be configured to provide much more contextual information for reference as you proceed through your work and also offers the productivity gains of "Assemble" (which Transit rivals to a small degree by being able to automatically substitute individual words in fuzzy matches if the "new" word has an entry in Termstar). Transit, on the other hand, offers the advantage of always highlighting (well, underlining actually) the differences between each fuzzy match source and "new" segment, saving you the time of having to identify them.

Hopefully you get the picture. Six of one and half a dozen of the other. If a big customer of yours asks you to work in Transit, jump at the excuse. It’s a great program. You could always save some money and buy DejaVu instead of the Transit alignment facility and filters, which would also allow you to work on Translation Manager and Translator's Workbench files without any trouble. But then, of course, you could save even more money by just buying DejaVu. Because if you’re only going to get one product and no-one’s telling you which one that ought to be, as things stand DejaVu is the one to go for. But that statement has to be qualified.

In the end, when it comes down to discussing the differences between DejaVu and Transit, it's currently all a little academic since both are about to release important new versions that could radically change the situation. Only when they’ve been tested will we be able to come out with a clear-cut conclusion. So, as they say, watch this space. We will, naturally, also be hoping to keep you updated on every development affecting the other programs we've tested as part of this review. They too may have more than one surprise up their sleeves!

http://www.atril.com

http://www.qsoft.de/ibmtrans.htm

http://www.star-ag.ch

http://www.trados.com

http://www.sdlintl.com

These are a good source of advice both before and after you buy. Monitoring them before you buy will give you a good idea of any problems you’re likely to encounter.

Register via the Atril Website (www.atril.com).

Go to www.egroups.com, search for SDLX and then register following the instructions on screen.

Go to www.egroups.com, search for Star Transit and then register following the instructions on screen.

Got to www.onelist.com, search for Trados and then register following the instructions on screen.

I’d be delighted to receive your comments. E-mail me at: michaelbenis@cwcom.net

Michael Benis and ITI Bulletin would like to thank the following for their collaboration in the preparation of this review: Chris Evans of Star UK, Denise Baldwin of SDLX, Emilio Benito of Atril, Gerald Dennett of Star UK, Henri Broekmate of Trados and Steffi Scheible of Star Deutschland.