M L 

The Trados Studio Starter Edition was phased out in August last year, recognizing the evolving needs of our user base. The decision came after careful observation that a significant number of users were opting to upgrade to the Freelance edition anyway, since they needed the more extensive features to match their growing project requirements. This move allows us to concentrate our efforts on enhancing the solutions that best meet the majority of our users' needs.

The “replacement” for the Starter Edition is effectively Trados Studio Freelance Subscription which has the added benefits of the full Trados Freelance functionalities as well as the cloud capabilities of Trados Studio which are not part of the Starter Edition licence and provides our customers with a better user experience than the Starter Edition.

I appreciate your taking the time to respond.

Respectfully, I can't relate to a single of the stated justifications for discontinuing Starter.

I am a bare-bones Trados user and I only want/need the basic functionalities of the program: the ability to import Microsoft Office files and PDFs, translate/edit them segmentally, and export them back into their original formats (or into DOC files in the case of PDFs).

It's been this way throughout my 7.5 years of using Trados and I don't expect it to change in the future.

It would astound me if Trados' customer base did not have a considerable number of other users like me, who are not particularly served by any of the features in the fancier Trados versions, and only want the minimal basics.

I very much hope that Trados will (sooner rather than later) take such users into consideration, and restore an affordable option to their catalogue.

Regards,
ML

M L 

With respect, and while not specifically addressing the decision regarding Starter, it's important to highlight that Trados Studio encompasses a broad spectrum of functionalities, offering at least 95% more than the specific features you've mentioned. If your needs are concentrated on these particular aspects, exploring alternative tools might be worthwhile. Trados Studio has extensive capabilities, aimed at supporting a wide array of translation and localization projects. Therefore, if the features you require represent just a fraction of what Trados Studio offers, it might be advantageous to consider solutions that align more closely with your specific requirements.

You should seriously consider doing a survey of your users to see how much the fancier features are actually used.

For example, you could provide a list of functions ("Basic translation/editing", "Translation memories", "Termbases", "Web glossaries", etc.), and ask people to estimate how frequently they have used these in the past year. (The scale could be "Extremely often" → "Very often" → "Moderately often" → "Rarely" → "Almost never" → "Never" on the other.)

I'd predict that if you get a representative sample of your users, you will see that the fancy features are used rarely if at all by over half of them. And even if the result is slightly under 50%, it will still show that there is clearly a demand for a stripped-down but affordable version of Trados.

M L 

No need… we have enough results from the telemetry to know that you’re wrong.

Notwithstanding that, the whole idea of a stripped down version of Trados is something we have discussed many times and actually providing something that would be used by enough users to make it worthwhile, never mind getting consensus on what that even means in practice, make it an impractical venture.

We even tried making the online editor something that more casual users might benefit from but that never took off either.

I’m afraid that your idea, whist it may seem like a good one to you, doesn’t really have enough legs to make it a viable proposition.

Since I don't have access to the same data as you, I don't see much point in continuing this discussion.

All I can say besides this is that Trados has just priced one of its customers out of the market for their products, until and unless an affordable option reappears.