To cope with this, they use all kinds of workarounds, from embedding date and stage information in filenames to organizing files in a complicated folder structure. Second, most companies lack tools for tracking and managing all their resources in a centralized way. Standards let us use resources in different CAT tools, but they are no panacea.įirst, there are outdated formats such as TTX or ITD formats, which you need to either convert to newer ones or open with some equally outdated software. Thus came the XLIFF format, which allowed users to exchange both the content to be localized and additional metadata. What a life-saver! But by the early 2000s the industry was calling for a new standard. This allowed translators to use translation memories in different tools and share them on physical media. The late 1990s saw the advent of TMX - the translation memory exchange standard. To make interchanging resources between different CAT tools a bit easier, the translation industry has come up with a few standards. The larger the agency, the more effort it spends to maintain such a huge infrastructure. So, in the end, such “technological diversity” only hurts the workflow. Buying, counting, and distributing them among all your translators is a drag. Finally, you only have so many user licenses. You also have to constantly shuffle translation resources - such as translation memories and terminology bases - between different tools. As handy as it sounds, this makes you spend a great deal of time onboarding new translators. After all, you never know in which format your next order is going to be. Large LSPs often have a whole “zoo” of different translation tools for different file formats. I had simply joined a translation agency. Once upon a time I had to learn five different CAT tools in three months.