Which software is better? Here is a rundown of features and reviews to help you make your decision.
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| Name | Transit NXT Professional+ | MetaTexis for Word |
| Review breakdown | | |
| Most helpful review | Once Top of the Bill I've used Transit for about 15 years. I was once enthusiastic about it, now I think that Transit is no longer up to today's standards.
This tool has always been very expensive to buy. The file format filters are of high quality, but additional filters are expensive too. Other CAT tools offer these additional filters (FrameMaker MIF etc.) for free!
The learning curve is quite steep. The documentation is great.
Transit only supports XLIFF in *one* direction (import), which is quite unacceptable. It missis out on smart editing features like automatic case adaption during Find and Replace, auto-assembling etc. It's not possible to select the whole content of one segment (without defining a macro first) and to perform operations on that selection (like case toggling).
The Access or MS SQL databases that are used to store terminology, respond slow when more than about 500,000 entries are stored. Importing terminology can take a long time.
Support is quite expensive and doesn't always provide a solution.
Transit's tag handling is a real disaster. There are so many tags, many of them grouped, which makes it even harder to insert/move them. It's a dull task to insert the necessary tags. You have to be a keyboard magician, using all kinds of keyboard shortcuts.
By default, you have to overwrite the target text, instead of starting to type in an empty segment. You really have to like that (or not).
Personally, I let my Transit rest in a Virtual Machine and use another tool to process all Transit project files. One that lets me focus on the text at hand, instead on tags.13 out of 13 found this review helpful.
Read more reviews → | Very good tool, user-friendly, Trados-compatible, recommended user-friendly, Trados-compatible, recommended4 out of 5 found this review helpful.
Read more reviews → |
| Product description | Transit NXT is the next generation of STAR's translation memory system. This new version will offer an optimized solution to make your translation teams even more productive.
Translation Memory in Context: What Makes Transit Different?
The sentence is the basic unit of language. However it is not necessarily the basic unit of meaning. Translators read sentences in the source text, but are only able to do a good job of translating them if they are able to derive and understand their meaning from the context. This is a principle which was taken into account in the first version of Transit, over 20 years ago. In contrast to other translation memory systems, Transit does away with a database which is exclusively sentence based; instead the full breadth of the context contained in a document remains available in the Transit reference material. | MetaTexis is not a stand-alone-program. It runs in Microsoft Word®. This means that all MetaTexis functions can be accessed through Microsoft Word®. Nevertheless, MetaTexis is very powerful and offers many functions and options you will not find in any other CAT tool.
The great advantage of the integration in Word is that you do not have to learn a completely new program. You only have to learn some new functions. At the same time, all functions of Microsoft Word® are available.
Technically, MetaTexis integrates itself into Microsoft Word® as a COM-Add-in (file "MetaTexis.DLL", located in the MetaTexis program folder). As MetaTexis is a COM-Add-in, it has a shorter start-up time, and many functions perform faster than in the case of normal add-ins. (Note: The COM-Add-ins technique was introduced with Microsoft Office 2000®. For this reason, MetaTexis is not available for Microsoft Office 97®.)
Besides the COM-Add-in, there is also a normal add-in ("MetaTexis.dot", also located in the MetaTexis program folder). This add-in is the interface between Microsoft Word® and the MetaTexis COM-Add-in. |
| Price | Options include 3, 6, 12 month and perpetual options starting at €240 | Options starting at €39 |
| File formats | No data | All kinds of text documents (all formats which can be imported by MS Word) |
| License type | Perpetual | Perpetual |
| Operating system | Windows | Windows |
| System requirements | 200 MHz Processor, 1 GB RAM, 250 MB Hard drive & 1280 x 1024 SVGA Graphics card | No data |
| Compatibility | Transit NXT product brief | No data |
| Support and upgrades offered/included | Free upgrades for duration of license/Subscription | Check with manufacturer |
| Support and tutorial links | No data | No data |
| Free trial | No data | No data |
| Languages supported | Transit NXT product brief | No data |
