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Translation Project Management. Which Software?
Thread poster: Baptiste Languille (X)
boostrer
boostrer  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 07:20
Member (2007)
English to Russian
+ ...
Integration Apr 26, 2012

Can someone tell about the degree of integration of various modules in these programs?

TO3000 and Projetex look like a pile of independent modules. You have to register the vendor here, the customer there, to select the translators in a separate module, to mark the project as complete in another one, etc. It is a lot of monkey job.

I haven't had any experience with Plunet, but I can assume from their videos that this program is much easier: you enter information on a pr
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Can someone tell about the degree of integration of various modules in these programs?

TO3000 and Projetex look like a pile of independent modules. You have to register the vendor here, the customer there, to select the translators in a separate module, to mark the project as complete in another one, etc. It is a lot of monkey job.

I haven't had any experience with Plunet, but I can assume from their videos that this program is much easier: you enter information on a project, then you can analyze the files, select translators, etc. based on the info you entered in the very beginning.

I know nothing about XTRF and very little about TOM. Can someone evaluate various PM programs from this point of view?



[Editada em 2012-04-26 18:03 GMT]
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Radian Yazynin
Radian Yazynin  Identity Verified
Local time: 14:20
Member (2004)
English to Russian
+ ...
Experience with XTRF Apr 27, 2012

Have been using it for about 2 years and am quite happy. The support staff is always prompt to reply and provide any help. The experience with TO3000 was positive and the only reason why I stopped using it was because I expanded my business.
In a matter of fact, all "advanced-level" software of this kind are modular, but the ease of use is surely vital, though you have to get used to it at first, like to any new stuff -- more complex isn't necessarily more difficult.
What I like in
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Have been using it for about 2 years and am quite happy. The support staff is always prompt to reply and provide any help. The experience with TO3000 was positive and the only reason why I stopped using it was because I expanded my business.
In a matter of fact, all "advanced-level" software of this kind are modular, but the ease of use is surely vital, though you have to get used to it at first, like to any new stuff -- more complex isn't necessarily more difficult.
What I like in XTRF is that you can adapt it to your needs -- from document templates to email templates, work flows, numerous filters (use of particular language/price/etc. for particular clients/providers) and all that jazz. Sometimes I find it unbounded (joking). In one of the latest releases you can not only send emails but copy your messages using SMS, to make sure your contacts don’t say they had problems with communication
Another cool feature is a quote page that I integrated into my site (if interested, you may find it either in my profile or by going directly to my site, its link is also available in my profile).
The installation isn't just a one-click step like that in simple applications but their instructions are clear enough and you can do it yourself, if you wish (what I have actually done already), not only with the support staff help. Plus I added a commercially available SSL certificate (not a self-signed one) to avoid browser warnings about untrusted connection (XTRF supports both http and https, the latter being a secure protocol).
And maybe last but not least: it is vital to have a server in all such systems which runs without interruptions, what may be the case with some other systems.
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Nicholas Pizzigati
Nicholas Pizzigati  Identity Verified
Local time: 05:20
Spanish to English
Integration with accounting software May 3, 2012

I would like to learn if there are project management solutions for translators that also integrate well with accounting software. For example, Quickbase and Basecamp have project management tools integrated with Quickbooks, but these are expensive and also not specifically tailored for translation (although they can be customized).

Does anyone know of any other solutions that would have a similar integrated functionality, but at a better price?

The problem I see is tha
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I would like to learn if there are project management solutions for translators that also integrate well with accounting software. For example, Quickbase and Basecamp have project management tools integrated with Quickbooks, but these are expensive and also not specifically tailored for translation (although they can be customized).

Does anyone know of any other solutions that would have a similar integrated functionality, but at a better price?

The problem I see is that translators or agencies would like to be able to input their data from their PM tool straight to accounting software, or vice-versa, and for example also be able to access their bank info quickly from their PM software. This would save a lot of work!

Any suggestions?
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AlterEcoTran (X)
AlterEcoTran (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 04:20
English
Cloud based project management and TM tools May 3, 2012

HI!
I'm just joining in the discussion to ask about recommendations for cloud-based software that other agencies may have. Alter Eco is a small (but growing) translation agency specializing in "green industry" translations. We are looking for cloud-based software that does three things effectively:
1. Manage projects, clients, and outsourced freelancers effectively
2. Build Translation Memory for multiple language pairs
3. Manage all accounting, invoicing, and payments.<
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HI!
I'm just joining in the discussion to ask about recommendations for cloud-based software that other agencies may have. Alter Eco is a small (but growing) translation agency specializing in "green industry" translations. We are looking for cloud-based software that does three things effectively:
1. Manage projects, clients, and outsourced freelancers effectively
2. Build Translation Memory for multiple language pairs
3. Manage all accounting, invoicing, and payments.

So far, I have not found one single SAAS that does all three, so I am interested in finding out your recommendations for each of the three
-For Project Management we are considering Projetex and Plunet
-For TM we are looking at Translation Workspace and XTM
-We currently use Quickbooks for our accounting

Any thoughts/recommendations/warnings are welcome!

Sheylan with Alter Eco
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lidolang
lidolang
Poland
Local time: 12:20
English to Polish
+ ...
Accounting software and TMS May 4, 2012

Hi Nicholas,

XTRF is fully integrated with QuickBooks. Once the customer profile is created in XTRF it will appear in QuickBooks. In addition, it is much easier to register payments and charges in both systems as the information is automatically synchronized.

Scheylan – I would I recommend also familiarize yourself with the system XTRF – it’s always good to check all possible option And XTRF is also integrated with XTM.

regards
Wioleta


 
Maria Janum
Maria Janum
Local time: 11:20
English to Danish
+ ...
New translation project management system for small agencies -TranslationProjex Feb 28, 2013

Hi all,

Apologies for the long email but I thought I'd add my thoughts on how we tackled this issue

Background
We're a small UK agency with 4 in-house staff and around 300 freelance translators.
We began with post it notes and then graduated to Projetex which made a massive improvement to how we worked!
However.... we found it overly complex for what we needed, a little clunky and more importantly at the time we needed something that was web-ba
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Hi all,

Apologies for the long email but I thought I'd add my thoughts on how we tackled this issue

Background
We're a small UK agency with 4 in-house staff and around 300 freelance translators.
We began with post it notes and then graduated to Projetex which made a massive improvement to how we worked!
However.... we found it overly complex for what we needed, a little clunky and more importantly at the time we needed something that was web-based.

Our main requirements were that it had to be:
- Web based - i.e. I want to be able to manage projects from the web/mobile, also we're not technical so we didn't want the hassle of installing and managing our own server
- Simple to use - i.e. no complex integrations with CAt tools etc and no need to attend a training course to use it
- Unlimited users - an all you can eat licence not one based on how many users you have
- Good client and freelancer dbases - i.e. being able to find a resource quickly
- Good management of all accounting, invoicing, and payments
- A simple workflow that mirrored our translation process (client request, setup project, assign job, issue PO, issue invoice, mark PO as paid, Mark invoice as paid)

We looked at the following options:

Project Open - great concept (who doesn't love free) but not user friendly and customisation was very expensive
XTRF - looks great but again too much for us at this stage of our development and we didn't like the per user licence options
LTC Worx - again good looking system but too expensive and per-user licensing again
Beetext flow - way too complex for us and i think has now been bought by multicorpora so you can't used it on its own
Plunet - lovely looking system but again for us it was like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut - just too many features for our current needs

So in short we decided to build our own - TranslationProjex. It took us 3 years and now we're offering it to the market. It's aimed at micro/small/medium-sized agencies.

We're currently doing a soft launch so any comments welcome (but go easy on us).

If you'd like a demo please email us sales[at]translationprojex.com
Rgds

Maria
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Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 12:20
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
As a translator, I dislike Plunets invoicing interface... Feb 28, 2013

afford wrote:

We are a middle sized translation and localization agency who have been using
Plunet for almost two years now for project management successfully.
Its interface is clear, functions are easy-to-use and the navigation is obvious.
CAT application (Trados, MemoQ), file server and e-mail function are integrated which makes our job much quicker. CRM is also supported.
Although there are a lot of pre-defined features you can still tailor-make your own profiles, queries, views according to your need.
I would highly recommend to test it.


It may be fine internally for the agency's own functions, but...

I don't remember the details, but I changed my rating on the Blue Board for an agency that went over to Plunet. I think I went from 5 - a really nice agency to 3 - one I work for when I have nothing else to do, simply because they used the invoicing interface and it was a pain for translators!

PLEASE do NOT ask translators to upload their invoices through Plunet.
In fact that applies as far as I am concerned to all those horrible systems where we have to log in and mess about with different passwords, renew passwords every three months and type in a lot of reference numbers.

Half the time the results do not produce acceptable invoices that we can show to the tax authorities, and if I create a pro-forma invoice that meets their requirements, how do they know I ever sent it? It looks suspicious if I cannot match the invoice received by the client with the invoice I show the tax authorities.
_____________________________
Another thing:
We translators are not always IT geeks.
Please choose a system that is as flexible as possible about which CAT the translator can use.

We invest a lot of time and money in using them efficiently, and it isnot always easy to start using a different CAT. Apart from that, one gets less benefit from it if the glossaries and TMs do not link up.

I work with Trados Studio, and really use its features. So I get very annoyed if I am suddenly cut off from all the work I have put in.
You would never tell your car mechanic not to use his favourite spanner, so why should translators suddenly be forced to drop their favourite tools?

I know it is a problem for agencies, but it is even more of a problem for translators who work with a dozen different agencies each month - and different ones the next month! Each with their own system...

Sorry, but it's the end of the month, and I spend a LOT of time each month making out my invoices, tailoring them to different agencies.

Time I would rather spend translating or out getting some much needed fresh air, and it is the same every month!

But best of luck with your growing agency - there are some really nice ones who absolutely deserve a 5-rating on the Blue Board.
And efficient system management is definitely the way to get there!


 
John Moran
John Moran  Identity Verified
Ireland
Local time: 11:20
German to English
+ ...
GlobalSight Jul 15, 2013

Definitely do not go with Across. As you can see, translators hate the CAT tool and only a small number of agencies can accept files using it. This is a large impact on the word price (+.02 cents is the offer we normally get and refuse).

GlobalSight is free to license and, most importantly, open-source.

www.localizationsmart.com provide quite reasonable support and training. Als
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Definitely do not go with Across. As you can see, translators hate the CAT tool and only a small number of agencies can accept files using it. This is a large impact on the word price (+.02 cents is the offer we normally get and refuse).

GlobalSight is free to license and, most importantly, open-source.

www.localizationsmart.com provide quite reasonable support and training. Also, GlobalSight support OmegaT in its next release, which is a free open-source CAT tool that has been around for donkeys years but is now gaining much traction amongst translators.

Feel free to contact me jmoran "at" transpiral "dot" com is you wish to know more about OmegaT / GlobalSight.






[Edited at 2013-07-15 13:22 GMT]
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stealth_trans
stealth_trans
United Kingdom
Local time: 11:20
Member (2009)
Quahill review Feb 24, 2014

We've recently went with Quahill after reviewing a number of systems and we've found it to be very very cost effective.

Very happy with the performance and anything we feel that needs tweaked a little for our own systems, Quahill support are on the case to provide a suitable solution to our problem.

Installation and setup were completed within a few weeks and so far we've seen some positive impact on the efficiency of our business.


 
Sofiamm
Sofiamm
Portugal
Translation project management software confusion Aug 12, 2014

Hello everyone!

I'm posting this here, because I really need updated information on this topic, since there are responses in this thread that go back to 2010.

I work in a team of translators and we are aiming to expand the business and are looking into web-based translation project management software (we already use an in-house software, but it became too limiting for us after a few years), but there are just so many of them and so few "real" reviews (I don't really li
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Hello everyone!

I'm posting this here, because I really need updated information on this topic, since there are responses in this thread that go back to 2010.

I work in a team of translators and we are aiming to expand the business and are looking into web-based translation project management software (we already use an in-house software, but it became too limiting for us after a few years), but there are just so many of them and so few "real" reviews (I don't really listen to testimonials or reviews on a given software's website, I take more into account independent reviews). So, any help is very much appreciated!

Here is some information on our business:

- We manage about 100-150 projects per month
- We use about 5-7 freelance translators (excluding our in-house)
- It would be necessary to have, at least, 2 user licenses for the software
- The software would have to offer not only project management, but also client access, invoicing (is it only possible to have individual project invoices or can we also create one invoice with all projects from one month? Some agencies ask this, but I can't find info on this in the softwares' websites!)
- A good quality-price ratio. For instance, I really like the XTRF website, but 99€ per user/per month (Professional Plan) just seems so excessive to me, specially since we need 2 users, because the managing work is done by 2 people in our team. Is my reasoning wrong?

About Quahill, I also liked it, but there is so much information on the website and setting up of the system seems complicated to me. For Quahill users, was the installation process and subsequent learning curve complicated? Please, bear in mind we would have 2 users using the system.

Any OTM users that can give feedback on this system, please? It seems interesting and fairly priced, but are there "huge" cons to it?

Any Translation Projex users? Is the system reliable or is it too "young" and in need of big tweaks still?

Is Kilgray as interesting as people make it out to be?

Sorry for all the questions (I have so many more, lol), but this is a topic that's pretty complex.

Thank you in advance for your time

Kind regards,
Sofia
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LingCom
LingCom
Argentina
Local time: 08:20
English to Spanish
+ ...
Translation Projex Dec 31, 2014

Hello!
Any current users of Translation projex? We have just subscribed to it and would like to have someone else's feddback-.

Thanks!


 
Miroslav Jeftic
Miroslav Jeftic  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:20
Member (2009)
English to Serbian
+ ...
:) Mar 17, 2015

LingCom wrote:

Hello!
Any current users of Translation projex? We have just subscribed to it and would like to have someone else's feddback-.

Thanks!


Do you have some feedback after two and half months?


 
yavaway
yavaway
Panama
Local time: 06:20
French to English
+ ...
Translation Projex got us back in control Jul 15, 2015

I came across this discussion about translation business management systems and was surprised at the lack of feedback about the Translation Projex platform which we have been using since the beginning of 2015.

I don't usually have time to post into forums like this but I wanted to give Translation Projex credit for being what they advertise themselves to be: a cost effective simple translation project management solution.

Our business experienced sudden growth last ye
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I came across this discussion about translation business management systems and was surprised at the lack of feedback about the Translation Projex platform which we have been using since the beginning of 2015.

I don't usually have time to post into forums like this but I wanted to give Translation Projex credit for being what they advertise themselves to be: a cost effective simple translation project management solution.

Our business experienced sudden growth last year and we were losing control over tracking jobs and invoicing them. We were desperately looking for a program and the ones we tried just added to the problem with their complexity. Too many features made them an overkill for us.

Then I saw this post here saying "So in short we decided to build our own..." (which is what I wished at times when testing overly complicated platforms) and after getting a demo of the upgraded version of Translation Projex, we ended up subscribing to it.

Took us a while to retroactively enter the data into it but today I can say we are happy and satisfy with the platform. Naturally, it is not perfect and we are hoping to see some missing features soon with importing and exporting data. Overall however, Translation Projex was key for us to get back in control with tracking jobs and getting paid for all of them.

Chris
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John Fossey
John Fossey  Identity Verified
Canada
Local time: 07:20
Member (2008)
French to English
+ ...
Translation Projex Jul 15, 2015

We have also been using Translation Projex for some months and are reasonably satisfied with it. It has a few quirks that take some getting used, but the developers are responsive and fix or change things quickly.

One thing we like about Translation Projex is the integration with Dropbox. This means that all documents are hosted on our own Dropbox account, not on Translation Projex's servers, which means we are much more in control of our data. It probably also helps to keep the
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We have also been using Translation Projex for some months and are reasonably satisfied with it. It has a few quirks that take some getting used, but the developers are responsive and fix or change things quickly.

One thing we like about Translation Projex is the integration with Dropbox. This means that all documents are hosted on our own Dropbox account, not on Translation Projex's servers, which means we are much more in control of our data. It probably also helps to keep the price down, since many competing systems charge according to how much data storage you need.
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Tradophenia (X)
Tradophenia (X)
Spain
Local time: 12:20
Spanish to English
+ ...
Quahill Aug 12, 2015

Hi,

We're currently reviewing Quahill, which seems pretty complete and good value for money.

I was just wondering if anyone who uses it knows how to add other business costs, such as utility bills.

This would be particularly useful to see our monthly costs.

Thanks,
Nick

P.s. We're also reviewing Gespoint - has anyone had any experiences with this software?


 
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Translation Project Management. Which Software?







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