Localization Trends That Never Arrived: Trados will become the standard TM tool

Over the years there have been many exuberant predictions of change that would fundamentally alter the localization business. However, most of these dreams of the industry have never come to pass.

Trends that never arrived: Trados will become the standard TM tool

This myth has already crumbled before our eyes. Everyone in an SLV or MLV has long felt trepidation that they have to purchase Trados from a very large competing translation company. Fears over the ramifications of this has likely fueled the spectacular rise of alternative tools such as memoQ which now has many fervent followers in Europe.

Still, Trados was once dominate and the move away to other tools has many repercussions for the industry.

The bottom line for linguists who have already have invested in Trados (as well as expensive training) is complicated. They have little incentive to invest in every new Trados-killing tool that appears. But when companies insist on their own tool, these linguists risk their livelihood if they cannot quickly move to the new tool.

When a company insists on a particular tool that is not Trados, it instantly limits the pool of qualified and reasonably priced linguists they can call on. I cannot tell you how many times we encounter dejected and shell-shocked project managers who simply cannot find the right translators because their upper management declared that using an obscure TM tool would solve everyone’s problems.

NEXT: Trends that never arrived: Maybe not said, but suspected: Translators will get smart and start working directly with end clients and cut out the middleman