I've been testing Trados studios for a month now, and frankly, I'm underwhelmed. I'm a freelance literature translator, and as of now, the only good thing that comes out of it for me is the user interface, which is slightly more comfortable than translating from page to page.
Are there any literature translators here using Trados studios?
As of now, it has only made life harder for me.
It starts with input: I usually translate from pdf master prints (so the pages look like the pages in a printed book); it's a hell of a lot of work to clean them up, and about a quarter of the time, the segments still don't match up with the sentences or are broken by page numbers. Combining segments is a pain (having to press Ctrl.+enter for every single line).
Similarly, the shortcut for accepting a translation needs both hands, which slows me down extremely.
Trados hides the structure of the text: I can't see paragraphs. Often, that makes it hard to understand who is speaking in dialogue.
After translating a few hundred pages, I still get only very few matches, and the ones I get are useless - okay, it's great that Trados can confidently translate "Chapter 5". But really, it's not such a great help. Even worse, matches for short sentences like "Come on!" or "I don't know" are usually presented as 100% confident, but in context, most of the time they are just wrong. And when I change them, next time trados doesn't offer me a list of possible matches (which would actually be useful), but instead only the last translation I used. Again, this is worse then useless. As is offering me partial matches - changing them is more trouble then just translating the sentence myself.
Worst of all is trados insisting on formatting the output like the original file. I don't want any formatting in the output. I just want text. The formatting gets in the way and creates mistakes downstream. But if there's a way to tell trados that I just want text output, and that I want paragraph control, I can't find it.
Basically, I'm wondering if I don't understand trados at all, or if I should just get rid of it and warn all literary translators away from it.
Removed AI Suggestion
[edited by: Jakob Schmidt at 10:44 AM (GMT 1) on 13 May 2026]

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