[Freecats-Dev] Re: Freecats-dev Digest, Vol 2, Issue 22

[Dave Simons]

> Some thoughts:
>
>   - If what we build is good enough, people will switch
>   tools and come to us, especially if we are nice enough
>   to provide 2-way migration tools.  So the fear of Trados
>   and wordfast gaining too much momentum is illusory, not
>   real.

The question is _who_ will switch tools and come to us? Maybe you're not 
familiar with how a lot of translation operations are sturctured these 
days. (Even if you are familiar, those who aren't might find this 
enlightening):
First off, very many (most, I suspect) translators are freelance; that's 
how the trade works. When many agencies ask for a job done, they specify 
"Trados required." You don't have it, you don't get the job, simple as 
that. Agencies have two reasons for demanding Trados or TMs in general. 
First they want to keep vocabulary consistent, which is fine; but second, 
they don't want to pay translators the full rate for phrases that come up 
more than once, which for me is not that fine at all (though that doesn't 
concern the debate here).
Here's the rub, although agencies that insist on the use of TMs are still 
in the minority, the number is growing quickly, and the ONLY TM I've ever 
seen specified is *Trados*, never Deja Vu, never Star Transit, never 
Transsuite, never SDLX (apart from SDL themselves), never Wordfast. So we 
can guess where all those who have't yet jumped on the bandwagon are going 
to jump.
Thay have invested heavily in Trados (which in its corporate version is 
VERY expensive) and expect translators to make the same investment. You 
come along and say "sorry I prefer WordCake(tm)" or whatever, they say "Ok 
don't bother, we'll find someone else who does have Trados." Do you see the 
mindset? It's like telling a customer "no you can't have the translation in 
MS word format, I prefer Word Perfect." Any migration tools would have to 
make the shift completely invisible.

Therefore I humbly reject your dismissal of my Trados alert as illusory and 
suggest that the approach "if the tool is good enough people will come to 
us" amounts to rather naive optimism.

Dave