You try to scroll, but the editor won’t show any text while you do it, so you just hope to get lucky and find the piece of text in question by trial and error. For example, let’s say you want to get back to a previous string to make a correction. It apparently needs to load something for each of your actions. You keep clicking around, hoping that you didn’t forget to do something the software expects you to – because it won’t do it for you, and it won’t let you know until the very last moment. The problem is that they add up to the point anything you try to do ends up in frustration. You may say all these are fairly minor inconveniences, which is true. What’s the point? Why do you need two steps for that? Even that good old Office 2007 is able to handle that for you. But if you click on one of them, the ribbon won’t unfold automatically. If you fold it, you’ll still see the tabs. Can’t just the software offer some default option, like the path you’ve used the previous time? Time to export your finished project! You’ll need to manually choose an export path. Trados does that automatically for you and even offers to reopen files afterwards. If it’s not, you’ll need to close the error message, click the Wordfast tab, go back to the editor interface, close the file, then go back to the project interface and finally be able to run your analysis. Need to run an analysis on a file? Make sure it’s closed first. You want to switch from a project to another? You’ll need to close the former one first (which does… nothing at all besides wasting your time). Every single action is tedious and far more complicated than it should be. The interface is a disasterīesides the general slowness of its functionalities, Wordfast also suffers from a catastrophic interface. The result was almost instant with Trados (as in too fast to be timed), while Wordfast needed a full 6 seconds. No regular expressions or anything complex, just a good old plain text search. Still in the 20k word project mentioned above, I compared how fast Trados and WFP4 could find a string located towards the end of the chained file, with the cursor placed in the first segment. That’s 59 times slower than SDL’s product.Įven such a thing as the “Find” feature seems to take ages. Wordfast 6… minutes! OK, not quite, 5 minutes and 54 seconds (yes, I timed it). Shouldn’t take very long, right? Trados needed 6 seconds to do that. The next thing I tried to do was to run a file analysis with an empty TM. So that’s more than twice the time for WFP4, but it’s nothing compared to some of the other features. The same process took only 12 seconds in Trados. It took it 27 seconds to chain the files and present me with the result. The original files were in Wordfast’s txlf format, but I’ve been using them in Trados thanks to the xliff filter.įile opening is where Wordfast seemed to suffer the least. Now, what about processing speed? I ran a small experiment on a 20k project I was working on. Some web-based solutions like Memcloud Cloud have shown that’s it’s possible to have a fast and clean-looking app online, and not something that reminds me of the cheap and buggy shareware of the early 00’s. I understand they’re trying to push their online version of the tool, but it doesn’t excuse the unresponsiveness. Really, Wordfast Pro 4 actually uses a browser plugin to render its interface, so the combination is the same, and the experience is very comparable. You know, those web apps that took forever to load with the coffee cup icon – and barely faster after that? It’s exactly the same thing. When you open a piece of software and see a bunch of Java threads show up in your task manager, you know you’re in for a bad day. How disappointed was I to find out that the software had completely changed, in a terrible, terrible way. So when news broke that Wordfast Pro 4 was out, I was curious to see where improvements were made. Take Trados, it’s far less buggy than it used to be, much faster at processing files and its plugins add tons of useful features. Although CAT tools love making us upset in various ways, you have to admit they’re generally getting better with time.
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