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Swordfish III is an advanced CAT (Computer Aided Translation) tool based on XLIFF 1.2 open standard, designed for demanding professional translators.
Swordfish III supports exchanging TMX (Translation Memory eXchange), the vendor-neutral open XML standard for the exchange of Translation Memory (TM) data created by Computer Aided Translation (CAT) and localization tools, originally published by LISA (Localisation Industry Standards Association).
Swordfish includes a super fast Internal database server and integrated support for RemoteTM in its two editions: LAN Server and Web Server. You can also use third party database engines like Oracle 10g, MySQL 5.x and Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 for storing TM and terminology data
Abiword Adobe InDesign Interchange (INX) Adobe InDesign IDML (CS4/CS5) DITA Maps HTML Microsoft Office 2007/2010 Microsoft Visio 2007/2010 MIF (Maker Interchange Format) OpenOffice/StarOffice 1.x and
License type
Perpetual
System requirements
Operating system
Windows, Linux
System requirements
Java 1.6/1.7 from Sun Microsystems or Oracle on Linux/Windows. Java 1.6 from Apple on Mac OS X. WebKitGTK+ 1.2.x is required to run on Linux systems.
Compatibility
XLIFF Supported natively. Accepts version 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 Uncleaned RTF Accepts uncleaned (tagged) RTF produced by Trados or Wordfast and generates uncleaned RTF from regular RTF files. TTX Seamless
M. Anna Kańduła . I use Linux to work, so my choice of CAT tools is quite limited. While there are more tools available for Linux now, as opposed to when I started working a few years ago, Swordfish is still my main and favourite software, used most frequently.
It's a great tool, fairly easy to learn to use and for a reasonable price. It works well with other open source programs and has full functionality on Linux.
2 out of 2 found this review helpful.
2 out of 5
How easy is it to learn?
You can find far better tools for this money.
Review by
Gyula ErdeszI hold a license for this tool but use rarely. Some of my problems:
1, Segments are not displayed as a continuous text but in a small window with scrollbar. Really annoying.
2, Although it has a built in TTX filter, it is rather unreliable. 3, Termbase module is simply close to useless for agglutinative languages like Hungarian (it does not recognize the stems of the inflected words properly)
3, Threshold value for fuzzy term search is hardcoded.
4, Existing terms cannot be edited right in the term window
5, Importing of larger (>200 000 entries) TMX takes hours.
6, No options for external exclusion dictionaries for spell check
To be fair, here are some advantages:
1, The software bundle contains TMX Validator and Xliff Checker, which are pretty good tools for eliminating the non-standard characters from your tmx and xliff files.
2, The best multiplatform tool on the market.
Conclusion:
It is a pity that its freedom does not come along with all of the useful functions that I need to my work. On the other hand, I can imagine that some of my colleagues would live with its drawbacks. Give it a try and see for yourself.
4 out of 10 found this review helpful.
4 out of 5
How easy is it to learn?
Great tool, worse support ever
Review by
Michael Bosch . I have been using this tool with great joy and it was my go-to tool since it was taking care of a lot of different file formats and even could open Trados projects at a certain point.
I bought Swordfish together with Stingray in 2013 for £313.33 and I think it was worth every penny I paid for it, really great product.
However the time came that my MacBook was at the point to retire and I bought a new one recently, just before the old machine stopped working.
So I tried to register it on may new MacBook and it gave me error after error, I contacted the company for support to get my copy activated on my new MacBook and explained the situation.
The response was that they have now started a new business model and do not work with perpetual licenses anymore and I could use the GitHub source to use it or have to buy a subscription.
So that is where it stops for me and I can recommend the program, but the company behind it is not supportive too their clients and it looks like they just want to pull people in to their new subscription model so I would never recommend Maxprograms anymore.
The least they could do is let me register a copy or offer some kind of option to still be able to use what I have paid a reasonable amount of money for.
Anyway I hope that other people will read this and be informed about the unsupportive way this company deals with their clients.
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