Which software is better? Here is a rundown of features and reviews to help you make your decision.
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| Name | Transit NXT Professional+ | Wordfast Pro 3 |
| Review breakdown | | |
| Most helpful review | Once Top of the Bill I've used Transit for about 15 years. I was once enthusiastic about it, now I think that Transit is no longer up to today's standards.
This tool has always been very expensive to buy. The file format filters are of high quality, but additional filters are expensive too. Other CAT tools offer these additional filters (FrameMaker MIF etc.) for free!
The learning curve is quite steep. The documentation is great.
Transit only supports XLIFF in *one* direction (import), which is quite unacceptable. It missis out on smart editing features like automatic case adaption during Find and Replace, auto-assembling etc. It's not possible to select the whole content of one segment (without defining a macro first) and to perform operations on that selection (like case toggling).
The Access or MS SQL databases that are used to store terminology, respond slow when more than about 500,000 entries are stored. Importing terminology can take a long time.
Support is quite expensive and doesn't always provide a solution.
Transit's tag handling is a real disaster. There are so many tags, many of them grouped, which makes it even harder to insert/move them. It's a dull task to insert the necessary tags. You have to be a keyboard magician, using all kinds of keyboard shortcuts.
By default, you have to overwrite the target text, instead of starting to type in an empty segment. You really have to like that (or not).
Personally, I let my Transit rest in a Virtual Machine and use another tool to process all Transit project files. One that lets me focus on the text at hand, instead on tags.13 out of 13 found this review helpful.
Read more reviews → | Quite good, especially for the young translator I started with the demo version of this tool and later on bought the licence. It's quite easy to use and has the basic functionalities needed by a young translator. Compared to other CAT tools, there are a lot of improvements to make. It is however worth its price.
It is a good entry level tool for those new to the translation industry, especially its demo version. Unlike other cat tools, you can import and export TMs even with the demo version. The only limitation is the size of the TM.
Wordfast still has a long way to go in order to match other CAT tools. You will soon feel the need to buy other CAT tools: Trados which seems to be the most used by agencies, MemoQ which a good number of freelancers enjoy, Deja V, etc.
NB: for those living in developing economies (Africa, India, etc.), you don't need to buy Wordfast through Proz TGB. A 50% discount is offered through their website. On TGB, you only have 40% discount, and will wait for weeks for the buy to close.21 out of 22 found this review helpful.
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| Product description | Transit NXT is the next generation of STAR's translation memory system. This new version will offer an optimized solution to make your translation teams even more productive.
Translation Memory in Context: What Makes Transit Different?
The sentence is the basic unit of language. However it is not necessarily the basic unit of meaning. Translators read sentences in the source text, but are only able to do a good job of translating them if they are able to derive and understand their meaning from the context. This is a principle which was taken into account in the first version of Transit, over 20 years ago. In contrast to other translation memory systems, Transit does away with a database which is exclusively sentence based; instead the full breadth of the context contained in a document remains available in the Transit reference material. | THE #1 TRANSLATION MEMORY SOFTWARE FOR ANY PLATFORM
Wordfast Pro (WFP) is a standalone, multiplatform TM tool designed to change the landscape for every stakeholder in the translation process, from project manager to freelance translator |
| Price | Options include 3, 6, 12 month and perpetual options starting at €240 | €400 |
| File formats | No data | MS Word MS Excel MS Powerpoint HTML XML ASP/JSP/Java INX (InDesign) MIF (FrameMaker TTX PDF |
| License type | Perpetual | 3-year license |
| Operating system | Windows | Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.4 and higher, Linux, Windows XP |
| System requirements | 200 MHz Processor, 1 GB RAM, 250 MB Hard drive & 1280 x 1024 SVGA Graphics card | No data |
| Compatibility | Transit NXT product brief | No data |
| Support and upgrades offered/included | Free upgrades for duration of license/Subscription | Free upgrades for duration of license/Subscription |
| Support and tutorial links | No data | No data |
| Free trial | No data | No data |
| Languages supported | Transit NXT product brief | Wordfast Pro supports any language that is supported by Microsoft Word. This includes Eastern European, Cyrillic, Asian, Right-to-Left, and various other languages. |
