When I started out as a translator I had an immensly expensive computer with a whopping 20 MB (no – not a typo) hard drive which I was very proud of. The texts to translate often arrived by snail mail, either as papers or as files on a diskette. The world wide web wasn't that wide yet, and the information highway more like a cobblestone alley.

If I needed to check on any facts in the texts, I made a call or went to the library. Google was something unimaginable, even for me, who was kind of in the business at the time. It was an interesting time, but I must say it's way better these days!

Tools of the trade

In the beginning of the 1990's the German company Trados released its Workbench tool, and 1997 Microsoft chose Trados for their localization work – which I did a lot of at that time. It was truly a revolution. Many a traditionalist is still sneering at these tools, but for a technical translator they are a marvel. I mean, it's not that fun to translate ”Click Start and select Programs” a hundred times a day.

Trados Workbench boosted my productivity something enormous, and it still does. I can also offer discounts based on repeated texts (like the example above) and use the tool to look up previous translations and terminology that might be suitable for other clients and subject areas. Language is language, after all.

Trados

For a long time I favoured version 6.5 of the freelancer flavor, but was convinced by quite a few clients to move on to version 2006, which I still use. I do have SDL Trados Studio 2009, but in my opinion it's a memory eating bloatware that I only use when forced to.

MemoQ

This is my most recent purchase, and I can't say that we're buddies yet, but we're getting there. The look and style remind me of Studio, but there are some really impressive tweaks to the workspace that I like – among other things the possibility of treating parts of sentences as building blocks, possible to reuse in other parts of the current job, or any other job, for that matter.