|
It's been close to three years since I last wrote in some length about Wordbee (Premium subscribers with access to the archives can look it up under April 12, 2010). At that point, the EU bid for a new translation environment tool was starting to heat up, and the makers of Wordbee had high hopes. Since the bid went to SDL (again), we know that future funding for Wordbee's development will not be coming from that source, so it's high time to re-visit the tool and its makers. (In addition, I forgot to mention Wordbee in the last newsletter's list of tools that freelancers can use to build real-time freelance workgroups.)
Here is some of what I said in 2010:
The basic concept behind Wordbee is a) the assumption that the future of TEnTs is web-based and b) that the "control over data and process should be provided in one tool" (a quote from one of the developers I talked to), i.e., a TEnT with a translation environment that includes robust project management capabilities which should not be overwhelming and can be learned on the fly. These are fairly high aspirations, but in some ways I can see why they are saying this.
One feature that is amazingly strong in this tool is the translation user interface. As most of us know only too painfully, online interfaces are notoriously hard to build. They often rely on the mouse, have very few or no shortcut menus, or are so filled up with random options and buttons that they are very hard to navigate. Wordbee's translation interface is different. Keyboard shortcuts can be assigned and customized to a total of 26 different commands; you can find right-click access to shortcut menus in many different areas of the program; and the translation view (in tabular format) along with the TM, dictionary (many preconfigured online dictionaries), preview (presently only implemented for HTML), comments, and revision history panes are also freely configurable.
Most of that still holds true. The only claim I would change is that the project management capabilities can be learned on the fly. Why? Because these capabilities are now a fully functional project management system. So much so, in fact, that Stephan Böhmig, the CTO and co-founder of Wordbee, admits that the tool "may be a little bit too much" for a small LSP.
I'm not sure that this is true, but Stephan's opinion seems to be reflected in the pricing: the Freelance edition costs $323/year (or $452 if you want to build the workgroups mentioned above) and the next step up, the Premium Pack, costs $3,610/year. The target groups for this tool are also reflected in those tools Stephan describes as his main competitors. Rather than XTM and MemSource, other cloud-based TEnTs, Wordbee is competing against Across, memoQ, and sometimes Multicorpora. And SDL Trados? That's usually the tool that potential clients are trying to replace, so it's not a competitor per se. (As far as positioning itself among its competitors, Wordbee like to see itself as the ultra-successful Salesforce.com of the translation industry. I always like glass-half-full kind of people!)
In fact, aside from larger LSPs, one important group of customers for Wordbee consists of large corporations such as Manpower, Time Warner, Opera, and Nikon -- all of which use Wordbee as their translation environment and project management tool. In many ways, the makers of Wordbee have found it more economical to cater to those large clients than to many smaller customers. It may not sound particularly pleasant to small fry like you and me, but it's probably an honest reflection of reality. And it's fairly safe to argue that only SDL and its relatively large staff and budget (and maybe memoQ with its inimitable Hungarian flair) are able to cater to all segments of the translation market.
The project management component that is so strongly emphasized by Wordbee truly is more than a "component." It's a large system that in itself is made up of a number of components, including vendor management, a planning tool for jobs and projects, calendar views that are reminiscent of MS Project, and, maybe most interestingly, a business analytics tool that allows you -- "you" as the business manager -- to analyze virtually every aspect of your translation business. Rather than "running reports," you can drill down on the live data -- remember that all translation is happening on the actual cloud-based system -- and dice and slice it to get to such detailed information that you can make precise adjustments in your workflow to work more effectively. Such details might include information like "exactly how many words per hour translators (or: 'this particular translator') translate" or "how many characters you have in a word in your source and target languages."
Like many of its workflow competitors, Wordbee unfortunately also lacks a pre-made interface to a financial system such as QuickBooks. Instead, data can be exported via a workaround into an Excel or XML format that can be reimported into other systems. Also there is a full API (application programming interface) that can be used to "talk" to other systems.
And as far as the translation goes, the general interface is very much like I described it in 2010. Some additional features that I noticed this time and found interesting include the ability to save any translation project (which can be any number of combined files) out of the cloud into a Word table or an XLIFF file (this XLIFF file can also contain termbase hits and up to 20 translation memory matches per segment that are exported alongside the actual translation data), work on it offline, and later load it back into the system. According to the folks at Wordbee, this feature is especially used by editors and proofreaders. (When I talked to Stephan, he mentioned that in his experience, the younger generation of translators and editors embrace an online user interface much more easily and willingly. While this sounds like something one could expect, I was actually surprised to hear it. Based on my experience, age often makes less of a difference when it comes to openness to translation technology than popular opinion might have you assume. However, cloud-based technologies might be an exception to that.)
As in other systems, you can assign penalties to less trusted translation memories. You can also use a coloring scheme that reflects trust status, giving you a nice visual aid that highlights the matches from TMs from a reliable source. I thought that was pretty clever.
Much to the probable chagrin of terminologists, Wordbee does not use a concept-based system for its termbases. In fact, the termbases are stored in an identical manner to the TMs and the actual projects (in relational databases). I like this because they can all be viewed in a similar interface and searched simultaneously.
Rather than continuing to go through individual features one by one, I thought it would be helpful to shine some light on the tool from a translation buyer's perspective. Since I happen to know Andy Jones, the fellow at Nikon who was responsible for the purchase and implementation of Wordbee, I asked him a few questions that he was kind enough to answer. Here are some excerpts from his answers:
How important was the fact that it was a cloud-based tool?
Funny you should ask. We had to avoid the word "cloud" throughout our review of tools because the word strikes fear into the hearts of upper management here and in Japan. [I can't help interjecting: What does this tell us about the much-hyped cloud-computing when it still inspires dread in the management of a major company?]
However, one of our main criteria was that it be entirely web-based.
How important were its project management components and how did they compare to other tools?
The PM components were very important for us. We actually favored memoQ for much of the evaluation period but eventually could not use it because (at that time at least) it had no integrated PM features and the add-ons we tested did not work well with Japanese, despite rigorous and heartfelt attempts.
How has your experience been after you implemented it?
It has been good, if sometimes a little too exciting.
On the good side, Stephan and his group are crazily supportive -- especially considering the time difference.
In part because of our requests for custom touches, we have had to deal with minor bug fixes along the way, and they are often fixed as we describe them.
The too exciting side is that they are always making improvements to the system, almost all of which are very useful, but they do not have the bandwidth to write up the changes so they are easy to train our staff. (They use a blog, which is pretty useful if you are a nerd, but a lot of our translators have no time or inclination to read blogs, and so we end up telling them what is going on.)
It is kind of what you would expect from a small and dynamic company, and our nerds love it. I wish they would hurry up and hire someone who could explain stuff to the nerdly challenged. However, I would not register this excitement as a complaint because once they understand a new feature, the translators and project managers tend to really like it, and the few hours of frustration are quickly left behind.
What has the response of contractors been like?
Almost universally they say they like Wordbee better or much better than Trados (we used SDL TeamWorks prior to Wordbee). Wordbee provided a three-hour training for contractors, and most of the people could use the system immediately afterward. Now we use the video of that training and an hour-long webinar to introduce the system to new contractors and internal people. The same goes for project managers who start using the system, as well as the several hundred Japanese engineers who use Wordbee to search for terms/translations.
| 
