Transept vs Trados desktop CAT vs document-first

Segment-grid CAT vs document-first workspace

Trados prices checked on October 5, 2026 against its published pricing. Trados sets its own plans and prices, and they may have changed since. View Trados pricing

Trados is for professional and enterprise CAT work: mature translation memory, deep interop, a plugin ecosystem, and a place in LSP and public-sector supply chains that nothing else fully replaces. Transept is for document and content translation that needs to ship now, in the browser, with no segment grid to learn first. Use Trados for the professional CAT program and Transept for the document.

When Transept is the better fit

FAQ

• When does Trados make more sense than Transept?+

  When your work sits inside a professional CAT setup: SDLXLIFF packages moving between an LSP and its vendors, deep plugin dependencies, government or public-sector supply chains, or a mature TM built over years of segment work. Trados is the industry standard there for good reason, and Transept doesn’t replace it.

• Can I move my Trados translation memory into Transept?+

  Yes. Export your TM from Trados as TMX and import it into Transept. It’s searchable right away, and the AI uses it as reference while it translates. You can export back to TMX or XLIFF at any time, so moving a memory across doesn’t lock you in either direction.

• How is Transept’s translation memory different from Trados’s?+

  Trados is the best of classic CAT memory, with exact, fuzzy, fragment, and upLIFT matching perfected over decades. Transept differs in two ways. First, matching: it adds semantic (meaning-based) search on top of exact and fuzzy matches, so a sentence you reworded still comes up. Second, what the memory does: Trados offers matches in the editor and grounds its generative translation in your TMs and termbases, while Transept feeds your matches into the AI draft and the QA pass and also remembers the reasoning behind an approved translation. For deep professional CAT, Trados is excellent; for document and content work, Transept’s memory is the better fit.

• Do I still need a CAT tool if I use Transept?+

  For document and content work, usually not: translation, memory, glossary, QA, and formatted export all happen in one browser workspace. If you’re part of a supply chain that exchanges Trados packages, or you depend on specific Trados plugins, keep Trados for that and use Transept for document-heavy work that doesn’t need a segment grid. TMX and XLIFF move memory between the two.

• Is Transept’s quality comparable to a Trados-based workflow?+

  For the translation itself, Transept runs on frontier models (currently Google Gemini), enforces your glossary on every pass, and runs a QA pass that re-reads for drift, which works well for documents and content. Trados’s strength is the mature CAT environment around the model, whether that’s RWS’s own Language Weaver or an LLM you connect through AI Bridge. They are different tools for different jobs, and neither simply beats the other on quality.

• Is Trados better than Transept for professional translation?+

  For classic professional CAT work (SDLXLIFF packages moving through an LSP supply chain, deep plugin dependencies, a TM built up over years, public-sector interop requirements), Trados is the industry standard and hard to beat. For document-first, AI-native work done in the browser, with no segment grid to learn first, Transept is the better fit. The two are built for different jobs.

• How does Trados pricing compare to Transept?+

  Trados publishes prices for its two freelance plans: Trados Go at £24/month and Trados Freelance at £34/month, excluding VAT, each with a 14-day trial. Studio Pro and the Team and Business cloud plans show no price on the pricing page, and Enterprise is sold through sales. Transept’s pricing is public and self-serve: Free, Starter at €29/month, or Pro at €79/month, with credit packs that never expire. There’s no sales call and no desktop license to buy.

• Can a client review a translation without installing anything?+

  Yes. Send a review link: the client opens the document in a browser, with no account and no software, and sees the source and the translation. A view link is read-only; a comment link lets them comment under their own name, and they see only that one document. Mark a thread internal to keep your team’s notes out of their view. Links expire after 30 days, and a guest reviewer never takes up a seat.

• Does Transept run on Windows only, like Trados Studio?+

  No. Transept runs in any modern browser on any operating system (Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS), with nothing to install or license. Trados Studio, the flagship, is a Windows desktop application. Trados Go and the cloud plans run in the browser, though some work, such as opening project packages or using the AI Assistant, still needs Studio.

• Can I see which past translations the AI used?+

  Yes. When memory matches went into a translation, the block’s header shows a Memory chip with a count. Click it to see each remembered wording with its match percentage and the document it came from, along with any alternative you rejected for that segment and the reviewer discussion behind it. Each entry is marked Reused, when the output measurably adopts that wording, or Referenced, when the model saw it but wrote something else.

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• FeatureDocument translation that holds together→Upload a DOCX, EPUB, Markdown, or PDF file. Transept splits it into blocks and translates each one with the whole document as context, so…
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