Why We
Chose
Memsource

by Luciano O. Monteiro
Originally published on the Memsource Blog

In early 2013, I set out to choose a new translation productivity tool. We had worked with some leading CAT tools in the market, such as Trados and Memoq, each one of them with their own advantages and disadvantages.

What my team and I had noticed, however, was that whilst most tools would have reasonable entry prices for freelancers or very small translation companies, costs would soar if you wanted to add real-time, server-based collaboration features, not to mention that their price structures would usually mean an expensive one-off payment for a license — as well as subsequent renewals to keep receiving updates.

Thus, we established that we needed a subscription-based solution with a so-called Software as a Service (SaaS) payment structure. A tool which we could use on a regular basis but easily unsubscribe to if it were no longer meeting our needs.

At that point, we were left with a much smaller pool of translation tools to choose from, and we also realised that a cloud-based solution would be more cost-effective than a server-based one. But we still needed to make sure we would not sacrifice reliability, speed and uptime. Finally, the feature that made us choose Memsource over their closest competitors was the fact that Memsource offers not just a web-based translator’s workbench but also a very fast and responsive desktop alternative, Memsource Editor. Other solutions we considered had web-based editors only, which most of our translators don’t like to work with.

We’re now very happy with our choice. Real-time collaboration with no time wasted in emailing packages back and forth has increased our productivity. Any bugs in the system are quickly dealt with after being reported. Linguists like it because it’s so easy to use and it still has very advanced features. Finally, customer support has been very responsive to our requests, many of which have been implemented in recent versions.