How our customers are using Trados Studio

Camille Avila 17 Dec 2020 5 mins read
How our customers are using Trados Studio
With Trados Studio being used worldwide in over 180 countries, our users really are part of a huge translator community. To help you quantify this even more, over a staggering 6 billion words flow through translation memories in Trados Studio on a monthly basis. 
 
You might be one of the thousands of people working with Studio daily, but have you ever thought about how your peers are using it? 
 
Through our Customer Experience Improvement Program we can tell you this! We are looking at how our users work with Trados Studio to monitor industry trends such as machine translation adoption and how new innovations and existing features are used. This data helps us develop the next releases of Trados Studio, along with all of the other research we do with focus groups, surveys, and your ideas on the RWS Community.
 
Importantly, you can be sure that no personal information is collected at all, the data collected is completely anonymous without any identity, content, translation memory and termbase information. 
 
This blog gives you an insight into features currently being used by our user community – some of which you might not know you have at your fingertips! So here is some of the data we have been monitoring this November.
 
 
File types used in Trados Studio
 
Trados Studio supports over 50 file types ensuring you can work on any project that comes your way. We are frequently releasing new file types, recently introducing Adobe FrameMaker and Photoshop file filters, email MSG formats and XML2 file filter, to name a few. 
 
We have made translating files as easy as possible by giving you numerous options for how they are handled, including the choice to include or exclude embedded content, notes, comments, hidden content etc. It probably won’t be a surprise that 31% of files translated in Trados Studio are Microsoft Word files. However, a question we often get asked by customers is “Can I translate PDFs in Trados Studio?” The answer is yes you can – in fact, 11% of files translated in Trados Studio are PDFs.  Trados Studio has been designed to make it simple for you to translate both scanned and editable PDFs. 
 
Information on how to translate PDFs in Studio can be found here.
 
 
The type of projects users are creating in Trados Studio
 
The majority of users, 45% to be precise, use the ‘project wizard’ to start their translation projects, while 29% of users are using the ‘single document’ process. In addition, Trados Studio 2021 has also introduced a new way to create translation projects online with Trados Studio’s cloud capabilities. You now have the flexibility to create cloud-based projects that can then be seamlessly translated online using the Online Editor or Trados Studio’s desktop editor. We are starting to see a trend towards this way of working with 2% of Studio 2021 users already using its cloud capabilities to create projects! 
 
Watch this video to see how you can get started with Trados cloud capabilities.
 
 
Getting the most out of your translation memory (TM)
 
Fragment matches from your translation memory ensure you are always getting the maximum results from your TM.  In November, Studio users benefited from 250 million fragment match words, as well as 120 million concordance words! 
 
This technology also corrects TM fuzzy matches, with nearly 20 million words being repaired in a month. Something we are really excited about is that now Studio 2021 improves upon this feature even more by automatically inserting tags into your translation segments. This helps you to save considerable time and ensures your formatting is correctly replicated from the source through to the translated document.
 
Watch this video to see how you can automatically insert tags.
 
 
Apps downloaded directly in Trados Studio
 
Thanks to the new AppStore integration, over 150 apps are available to download from within Trados Studio. Trados Studio 2021 users have been making the most of this, with 2,340 apps downloaded using the  AppStore integration in November. On an upward trend, now 25% of apps are downloaded through this integration, while the other 75% have been downloaded online through the browser. Some of the top downloaded apps include functionality to easily translate subtitles (now in the top 20 file types translated in Trados Studio!), fine-tune number verification and split or merge SDLXLIFF files. 
 
 
The home of machine translation (MT)
 
State-of-the-art MT from Language Weaver is available to Trados Studio users for free through our 6 million character annual allowance. No matter your language pair, it is more than likely you can benefit, with over 3,000 MT language combinations available through Language Weaver. Over 100 million words of Language Weaver’s MT in Trados Studio a month, accounting for a huge 52% of total MT. You might be interested to know the most used MT language pair is English into Portuguese (Brazilian), and the top language translated into English is Japanese.
 
Trados Studio is also home to over 50 NMT providers. Out of the total MT used in Trados Studio, 23% was DeepL, 10% Google Cloud and 10% Modern MT.
 
These are only a few of the data points we can track, there are plenty more. I hope you found this information as insightful as we did!
Camille Avila
Author

Camille Avila

Senior Product Marketing Manager
Camille is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at RWS, with eight years of experience in the localization industry. Currently, she oversees the Trados portfolio, with a dedicated focus on translation technology for the corporate markets. Her role is to assist corporations in effectively communicating with their customers by ensuring their content is understood, in any language.
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