Although translation memory (TM) tools have been around for quite some time, there are always new features being developed. Some of them seem like minor improvements to existing functionalities, whereas others open up new possibilities. With examples from two of the most popular TM systems on the market (memoQ 2015 and SDL Trados Studio 2015), I would like to draw attention to some of the new or enhanced functionalities.
I focus primarily on features that both tools have to a greater or lesser extent, as I would like to show where our translation tools have been going over the last two years. Each tool has individual and wonderful functionalities, not all of which I mention here, but the point is to look at where the tools are going rather than giving all the details on individual features.
Let us start with the look and feel of the tools. We see a strong influence from the web with their simplified and clean icons as well as from Microsoft’s move toward ribbons instead of pull-down menus. Personally, I still think the pull-down menus are more structured and it is easier to find what one is looking for, but that might just be me. I am also not so much in favor of icons being faint in color and looking very similar — this makes them harder to find.
More and more, the user can customize the look and feel of the tool. Maybe developers should think about letting the user customize the icons as well; this is just a thought and I know that the developers will hate me for that — or maybe at some point in the future, we will get some nicely structured pull-down menus back? Or at least a chance to customize the user interface in such a way that one can define one’s own menus? OK, I’ll stop here; these things are minor compared to functionalities that improve quality, file format support, speed and so on.