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Type of site | Computer-assisted translation, globalization management system, freelance marketplace, payment automation platform, legal automation platform |
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| URL | www |
| Launched | July 2015 |
Smartcat is a cloud-based translation and localization platform that connects businesses, translators, and translation agencies in a single Connected Translation delivery loop. The platform positions itself as an "all-in-one" translation platform, combining CAT, TMS, and other translation technologies.
Smartcat was originally developed as a CAT tool in 2012–2015 as an in-house solution by ABBYY Language Solutions (ABBYY LS), a linguistic service provider within the ABBYY group of companies. The impetus for its development was that ABBYY LS had "felt constrained by translation technologies that had existed for the last 15 years" and wanted an "intuitive, cloud-based, scalable, and powerful" solution that would let them manage projects with dozens of collaborators, including project managers, translators, editors, and other professionals.” [1]
In 2016, Smartcat spun out of ABBYY LS to become a separate company and attracted $2.8 million in investments from Ilya Shirokov (ex-CEO at Odnoklassniki and founder of Yandex-acquired social network MoiKrug.ru). [2] ABBYY LS’s founder and CEO Ivan Smolnikov also left the company to fully focus on Smartcat. [3] The main reasons for the separation were that the "translation automation business turned out to be far from complementary to the services of language services providers" and that “some translation companies had been wary of using a service developed by a competitor.” [3]
As of September 2020, the platform has more than 350,000 freelancers in its marketplace [4] and provides an “app store” that allows users to integrate their Smartcat account with third-party tools. [5]
Although Smartcat has an in-built CAT tool that helps translators work faster and more efficiently, its reach and functionality are much broader than that of a CAT tool. It is an all-in-one translation platform connecting businesses and translation professionals while offering additional services like payment automation, a combination the company brands as “Connected Translation”. For example, it allows translation agencies and LSPs to manage their businesses, including everything from searching for new vendors to managing international teams and centralizing international payments.
Unlike most industry tools, Smartcat does not charge for user-based licenses, because it believes that counting seats just doesn’t fit in the translation business, where more than 90% of users in companies are freelancers and a varying number of them collaborate on projects on a daily basis.” [1]
Instead, Smartcat’s monetization is primarily based on a percentage-based service fee on top of vendors’ own rates. Smartcat also offers paid subscriptions with some additional features, as well as vendor management and localization engineering support. [6]
Since early 2019, Smartcat has been using the term Connected Translation to refer to a connected localization ecosystem where businesses, agencies, and translators are combinedinto one content delivery loop. The connected translation model is made up of five key concepts: connectivity, translation, scalability, management, and automated payments: [7]
Smartcat’s built-in CAT editor supports 70+ input formats, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, scanned documents and images (including a paid OCR service), HTML pages, resource files, industry-standard bilingual formats, and others. [8] The platform also supports SDL Trados packages, which allows users to work on projects originally intended for SDL Trados, including generation of return packages to be further handled in Trados. [9]
Smartcat is the organizer of the #LocFromHome online language industry conference. The conference is mostly focused on translation buyers and agencies and deals with up-and-coming challenges of the language industry. As of September 2020, there has been two runs of the event, each attracting around 2000 live attendees and featuring around 30 speakers.
A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”. Individual words are handled by terminology bases and are not within the domain of TM.
Accounts payable (AP) is money owed by a business to its suppliers shown as a liability on a company's balance sheet. It is distinct from notes payable liabilities, which are debts created by formal legal instrument documents. An accounts payable department's main responsibility is to process and review transactions between the company and its suppliers and to make sure that all outstanding invoices from their suppliers are approved, processed, and paid. The accounts payable process starts with collecting supply requirements from within the organization and seeking quotes from vendors for the items required. Once the deal is negotiated, purchase orders are prepared and sent. The goods delivered are inspected upon arrival and the invoice received is routed for approvals. Processing an invoice includes recording important data from the invoice and inputting it into the company's financial, or bookkeeping, system. After this is accomplished, the invoices must go through the company's respective business process in order to be paid.
Computer-aided translation (CAT), also referred to as computer-assisted translation or computer-aided human translation (CAHT), is the use of software to assist a human translator in the translation process. The translation is created by a human, and certain aspects of the process are facilitated by software; this is in contrast with machine translation (MT), in which the translation is created by a computer, optionally with some human intervention.
A translation management system (TMS), formerly globalization management system (GMS), is a type of software for automating many parts of the human language translation process and maximizing translator efficiency. The idea of a translation management system is to automate all repeatable and non-essential work that can be done by software/systems and leaving only the creative work of translation and review to be done by human beings. A translation management system generally includes at least two types of technology: process management technology to automate the flow of work, and linguistic technology to aid the translator.
The name Wordfast is used for any number of translation memory products developed by Wordfast LLC. The original Wordfast product, now called Wordfast Classic, was developed by Yves Champollion in 1999 as a cheaper alternative to Trados, a well-known translation memory program. The current Wordfast products run on a variety of platforms but use largely compatible translation memory formats, and often also have similar workflows. The software is most popular with freelance translators, although some of the products are also suited for corporate environments.
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memoQ is a proprietary computer-assisted translation software suite which runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is developed by the Hungarian software company memoQ Fordítástechnológiai Zrt., formerly Kilgray, a provider of translation management software established in 2004 and cited as one of the fastest-growing companies in the translation technology sector in 2012, and 2013. memoQ provides translation memory, terminology, machine translation integration and reference information management in desktop, client/server and web application environments.
Across Language Server is a software platform for computer-assisted translation (CAT) that includes additional features for the management of projects. The software is produced and sold by Across Systems GmbH, a company located and founded in Karlsbad in 2005 as a Corporate spin-off of Nero AG and which maintains an additional site in Glendale, California.
Lingotek is a cloud-based translation services provider, offering translation management software and professional linguistic services for web content, software platforms, product documentation and electronic documents.
Stepes is an online translation and localization service which pairs a business in need of translation with professional translators in over 100 languages. The company was founded in San Francisco, California, in December 2015 and introduced the world's first chat-based mobile translation technology. The Stepes platform is powered by an AI-enabled Translation Management System with cloud-based translation memory searches, continuous terminology management, and workflow automation. It can match in various industry and domain fields and works with a variety of content formats like documents, videos, websites, and software.
Blue Prism is the trading name of the Blue Prism Group plc, a British multinational software corporation that pioneered and makes enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) software that provides a digital workforce designed to automate complex, end-to-end operational activities. In March 2022, Blue Prism was acquired by SS&C Technologies.
Crowdin is a proprietary, cloud-based localization technology and services company. It provides software as a service for commercial products, and it provides software free of charge for non-commercial open source projects, and educational projects.