#memoQ on Trustpilot!

Have your say about the quality of the company and its products....

This morning I went onto the review site Trustpilot to report an improper charge on my credit card by Voices.com, the Ontario-based site for freelance voice actors, which has yet to be resolved. (Update: the company finally refunded the improper charge, but my Portuguese bank has yet to credit the balance after a week. Typical.)

And while I was there I decided to have a look and see if my favorite productivity platform for translation work, memoQ, was included in the ratings and what people were saying.

There were a couple of good reviews, one particularly well written by a colleague whom I know is very well versed in other tools, and though he and I probably still have different viewpoints on how monstrous quantities of data should be dealt with, his analysis is completely correct and on point; I couldn’t have stated the case better myself. As for the other positive review griping about customer satisfaction spam, well, yeah, I think something like that myself every time I put a trial version of memoQ on a fresh laptop to make a new “getting started” video, but marketers gotta blow the trumpet, so I just put in my earplugs if that bothers me too much.

The harsh reviews I saw there were a bit short on facts but one seems to me to be a common sentiment by a wordworking slavelancer “forced” by an LSP to use an unfamiliar environment without proper orientation and training - a common enough problem for many CAT tools and nothing at all to do with the tool provider, memoQ Ltd. in Hungary.

Chris Alvar’s negative review, in which we read the statement “Every sentence comes with a lag of a couple of seconds,” sounds to me like he works on online projects from a memoQ TMS Server-using company that hasn’t trained its PMs on best practice for project configuration, or he simply needs to learn to switch off the automatic synchronization and cache the heavy resources locally. (I’ll share tips to do that with TMs and term bases even in cases where the online project wasn’t set up that way later.)

In any case, readers of this tips column have their own experiences, good and bad with memoQ as a working platform, so I suggest that you also share these on Trustpilot to give potential users a more complete and balanced perspective of the products in this tool suite. In doing so, I think it’s important to be very clear about what platform, maybe even what versions you are describing.

On YouTube, for example, I’ve seen videos by one ignorant git masquerading as a tools expert and top trainer, where he slams memoQ for missing a lot of functions I use all the time in the tool. It took a while for me to realize that he was talking about the mostly useless Webtrans browser interface for slavelancers, not the desktop interface for the Translator Pro version, which anyone can use if they have their own license or one granted by the company managing the online project.

Spread the word to friends and colleagues who might also be able to tell useful things about their experience:

And lastly,