TRADOS 2011 just around the corner – a wishlist

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What will the new year bring for translators who have behaved well?

Dear Colleagues, you can’t choose your friends, right? Sometimes, you can’t choose the people you work with, either. For many of us this is what’s happening with the SDL Trados software… We love and hate it, but we must use it, because despite its shortcomings, SDL Trados Studio remains the most complete and professional solutions for freelance translators and agencies. We all know about the problems that this software often causes us, more than one of us has at some stage tried to give up and chose a similar product instead, Wordfast, Kilgray’s quite functional MemoQ, OmegaT (though I’m not sure that is still under (more or less proper) development, etc. However, I for one have always found myself coming back to SDL’s software, not because it is particularly likeable (as I said, the software is buggy, old-fashioned, and unnecessarily complicated), but because it still gives us the best control about the way out translatable files are processed electronically, and is still best equipped to deal with large volume translations in such a ways that it saves us some serious time.

Some of the advantages the new SDL Trados Studio 2011 is supposed to bring to the table are:

• MS Word 2010 spell checker integration – comment: hopefully: the current spell checker tool is limited and there is no grammatical correction, which means that nearly all translations need to be proofread in MS Word once they have been exported – effect: the TMs we keep have spelling mistakes
• Faster opening and preparation of translatable files – comment: it was a bit slow, but that was a minor issue, more speed is always good though
• Track changes functionality – comment: I personally do not use it but a lot of people have been crying out for it, quite loud

Nice? Well, these are certainly some improvements that make sense, hell, it even seems SDL has been listening to its users for a change, though that is a rather bold assumption considering the company’s history…

Here’s what we really want:

• A revamped interface: how that should happen depends on each person’s personal preference, but here are some suggestions: ribbon design, more text, fewer symbols (which seems to be the current design trend, see Windows 7 and 8), ditch the old-fashioned Word 2007 blue for a more elegant and discreet colour
• an import and export feature that “just works”
• easier and fast project set-up, which does away with needless steps while still giving us all the advanced options in “advanced” tabs
• more flexible file extension management (I only have Word 2010 and therefore must convert all my word files to docx to be able to translate them? Come on!)
• better customer service, actually providing positive options why people should buy, rather than illegally download, their programmes.

Do you agree with my wishlist? Are you satisfied with the new features published so far for Studio 2011? Let us know in the comments.