SDLX Review

SDLX is one of the leaders of the translation software market, but still has many deficiencies. One of them is it's poor support for different formats. For example, translation of pdf file in SDLX is almost impossible due to problems with different fonts and styles. For example, if you have subscript or superscript, SDLX will convert them to usual characters. Also one aspect of SDLX that I can not overlook is that it is too expensive. Translation software should not cost so much.

If we think about different things than price and translation of formats other than Microsoft Word, SDLX is quite a good product, but not for so much money as it cost. SDLX user interface is from nineties, and doesn't look especially modern. They don't have integrated environment where you can do all the things from one place, you have to run as many as five program to edit glossary and translation memory entries. SLDX glossary support is particularly inadequate, due to poor support of left-to-right languages. If SDLX was a niche player, we could overlook it, but not for one of the market leader in translation.

Translation desk in SDLX is not outstanding in any sense. Of cause, you can edit entries one by one, but doing it in a Microsoft Word is much easier in any sense. Most translators know Microsoft Word, but if company decides to translate in SLDX they will encounter culture shock, because learning curve is quite steep. Usually it takes at lease several weeks to begin production work in SDLX and several month or years to master it.

Also SDLX is not very good candidate for translation system because it is not very stable. Usually we experience several crashes in a week. I know it's not much, but you should consider, that we loose a lot of data in the course of this crashes. By the way, several times we even encountered data loss due to incorrect saving of project file with translation. We lost at least days work due to that fact. So, I would not recommend SDLX for translation of text. You should consider other alternative, for example, Lingobit Localizer.