Another Example of SDL’s Terrible Support (Trados Studio 2015 Thread on Proz)

I already mentioned what I thought of SDL’s support in my short review of Trados Studio 2014. Whenever you ask for a bug fix or a feature that seems slightly beyond the reach of the developers, the conversation soon turns to personal attacks. This is always the translator’s fault for a reason or another, and why should they spend time fixing bugs when there are lengthy workaround available? New buggy features are much more likely to generate quick cash, after all.

Today, on Proz, a user was asking whether it would be possible for SDL to make it easier to work with Trados files in other software – even offering to pay for it if necessary. I would like to mention here that other competitive tools offer such features.

Here is what they had to say about it:

… you want SDL to provide a standalone tool that would allow you to do anything other than work with our tools. What sort of business model is that? Would you provide your translation memories and termbases to your clients so they can use them to give the work to someone else? Sounds the same thing to me. (…)  I toyed with responding until I thought better of it. We are already doing enough to facilitate the things you talk about, more than any other vendor. But I think any explanation I make is wasted on you.

I think the quote speaks for itself. By the way, it seems our friend has no idea how things work in 90% of the top 100 translation agencies. Conversations like this happen on translation forums almost weekly. At this point, I am very seriously considering to other CAT tools.