A comment I posted today on Paul Filkin's post regarding the Studio/MemoQ comparison:Paul, I believe that one of the greatest obstacles in carrying out such a comparison, apart from the lack of bias, is the in-depth knowledge of all the tools involved. This is hard to achieve, as there are not many people who have this kind of experience with multiple tools to start with, and even if at some stage they did have it, it is probably outdated by now as tools evolve quite rapidly adding new features and improving old ones (and introducing new bugs or... not fixing old ones). One would need to devote a great deal of time and effort in order to produce something objective (hence Jost dropping the idea of providing such a comparison if people were not willing to pay for it).
In fact, it is so complex, that even if one was limited to the comparison of two tools, as your very valiant effort does, they would need to write at least a 300 page book to even begin to envisage to do justice to the complexity of the task.
For example, commenting on:
The memoQ user throws the files into their LiveDocs corpus and uses them as additional leverage as they work through the translation. They can’t pre-translate the project files from this because the idea is you only confirm the files as you find an aligned pair of segments.
In fact, LiveDocs, apart from providing reference in the form of a monolingual corpus, dabble as an under-the-hood aligner. One simply connects source and target files and you are good to go (you can then use the resource to pretranslate as well as get matches while translating).
How it is done: Right click in Project home > LiveDocs > Create/Use New (Corpus that is) > then in bottom pane Add Alignment Pairs..., add source and target file(s), and alignment is carried out in the background without any other user intervention. The default penalty for these resources is 5% which, of course, is customizable. Of course, this alignment is editable, if a user wants to do so, but the most amazing thing is that one can edit it right from the Translation results window. You simple right click on the match and you select Show document, whereupon the aligned document is displayed and you can make any changes in alignment if necessary.
Another point, we discussed recently that SDL is not willing to support conversion of their own legacy formats (i.e. ttx) in the cloud. Guess what, both TMAnywhere (Wordfast) and MemoQ already do. And it is the legacy format of a... competitor.
Adding terms on the fly in ANY other tool is really so much easier than Studio which has to refresh and delays the translator for a number of seconds. I know, there is the new
Rapid add term plugin, but one would not be able to make use of these terms if the file was pretranslated and/or lookahead enabled. Contrast this with MemoQ: Ctrl+Q instantly adds the term which becomes immediately available for insertion... no strings attached.
I would also like to mention that Fragment assembly in MemoQ does not result in the system crashing, which is not exactly the case with Studio (apparently my post confirming that
this bug remains unfixed with Studio 2021 has disappeared).
Some relevant excerpts from the reviews linked to in the original post:
Within its main translation editor, MemoQ is not radically different to Trados regarding the insertion of terms from a TB. However, it does manage slight improvements in a few important areas. For example, entering terms into a TB from within the translation window is simpler and faster than in Trados as there is a “Quick Add Term” function, which adds and saves two selected terms automatically by pressing CTRL+Q. This means that new terms can be added in about 5 seconds as opposed to approximately 15-20 seconds in Trados.
Comparing Trados and MemoQ in terms of…terms - Translation England