In his presentation on strategically marketing translation services, Don DePalma asked the audience of freelancers and small agencies whether they used translation memory tools. Few do, again validating our estimate of low TM penetration among individual translators and small service providers. While larger agencies push most or all of their translation work through TM, even their leverage is often limited to the project at hand.

One technology-savvy translator introduced translation memory to the audience, singing the praises of workbenches that have doubled her productivity. However, she also outlined two issues that keep many translators from trying out the tools — high price and complexity. Language software vendors should heed these warnings that we have heard many times before:

• High price. Most TM tools cost the translator more than US$700, a prohibitive amount in some markets and pricey even for some low-volume translators in the U.S. and Europe. But the initial purchase is not the last time a supplier hits up the translator for money; the speaker noted that Trados seemed to offer her an upgrade every 6 months or so. Note: Trados users will be offered another opportunity to upgrade in November when SDL begins integrating the SDL and Trados products. We have suggested US$99 pricing for TM products (even less for emerging markets) or a low-cost annual subscription to eliminate this barrier to entry. We mentioned this to Yves Champollion, creator of WordFast and another speaker at the conference, before his product demonstration. He later offered WordFast at half price to delegates, bringing the cost down to nearly US$100.
• Complexity. The freelance TM advocate noted that some translation tools are considerably easier to use than others, singling out Trados out as the worst culprit. TM products that plug into Microsoft Word offer translators the quickest path to increased productivity, especially for those who use Word as little more than a smart typewriter. WordFast is one such Word-enabled TM product, inheriting Office’s ability to work with speech recognition and other plug-ins. The few TM users in the audience also discussed problems with backing up large translation memories, sharing TMs among other translators working on a project, the demands of some clients to use a specific TM tool rather than deliver a TMX-compliant memory, and their concerns about guessing which product will survive culling from the merged SDL-Trados portfolio.

Some more experienced translators in the audience confessed that they arbitraged several TM different tools to translate, using one to extract files, another to do the work, and yet another for specialized functions. This multi-tool reality underscores a classic problem of productivity and development tools — striking the correct balance between ease-of-use and scalability. What’s the bottom line for freelancers? While US$700-1,200 is a lot of money to spend, TM cognoscenti feel that they recovered their investment in just 1 or 2 months. TM-less professional translators need to run their own numbers and determine whether it’s worth it to them to buy, even at today’s high price points, or wait for something better, cheaper, or easier to use. It might be a long wait to hit that trifecta.