Smartcat

Smartcat
Type of site
 Computer-assisted translation, globalization management system, freelance marketplace
Website smartcat.ai
Launched July 2015 (2015-07)

Smartcat is a computer-assisted translation web app that enables collaborative translation.

History

Smartcat was originally developed as a CAT tool in 2012–2015 as an in-house solution by ABBYY Language Solutions, a linguistic service provider within the ABBYY group of companies. The impetus for its development was that ABBYY LS had “felt constrained by translation technologies that had existed for the last 15 years” and wanted a solution that would let them “manage projects with dozens of collaborators, including project managers, translators, editors, and so on” while being “intuitive, cloud-based, scalable, and powerful.”[1]

In 2016, Smartcat spun out of ABBYY LS to become a separate company and attracted $2.8 mln in investments from Ilya Shirokov (ex-CEO at Odnoklassniki and founder of Yandex-acquired social network MoiKrug.ru).[2] ABBYY LS’s founder and CEO Ivan Smolnikov also left the company to fully focus on Smartcat.[3] The main reasons for the separation were that the “translation automation business turned out far from being complementary to that of a language services provider” and that “some translation companies had been wary of using a service being developed by a competitor.”[3]

As of July 2018, the platform has around 200,000 freelancers in its marketplace[4] and provides an “app store” that allows integrating one’s Smartcat account with third-party tools.[5]

Account types

Smartcat has 3 general account types: Freelancer, Translation Company, and End Customer. The similarities and differences are highlighted below (all features are free unless otherwise noted):

Freelancer LSP End Customer
Primary audience Freelancers Translation companies (agencies) and translation entrepreneurs Companies with in-house translation teams, as well as any other companies
24x7 support Yes Yes Yes
Translating one’s own projects/documents? Yes Yes Yes
Translation memories, termbases and quality assurance Yes Yes Yes
Statistical/neural machine translation (powered by Google or Microsoft) Yes

(paid or free[6])

 Yes

(paid or free)

 Yes

(paid or free)

Adaptive machine translation (powered by Lilt) No Yes[7]

(paid)

 Yes

(paid)

Listing in the freelancer marketplace Yes No No
Listing in the LSP marketplace No Yes

(on request)

 No
Multiple project stages (e.g. Translation, Editing, Proofreading) No Yes Yes
Multiple account users (translators, editors, project managers, etc.) No Yes

(unlimited[1])

 Yes

(unlimited[1])

Hiring freelancers from the marketplace No Yes

(at freelancer rate + 10% commission)

 Yes

(at freelancer rate + 10% commission)

Hiring other companies from the LSP marketplace No On request

(at 10% of order price)

 Yes

(at 10% of order price)

Open API No Yes Yes

Monetization

Unlike most CAT tools, Smartcat does not charge for user-based licenses, because it believes that “counting seats just doesn’t fit in the translation business, where more than 90% of the headcount in companies are freelancers and where new collaboration projects with a different number of them are set up on a daily basis.”[1]

Instead, Smartcat’s monetization is mostly based on the above-mentioned 10% commission charged on top of the rates of freelancers listed in and hired through its marketplace (which rates are decided upon and set by freelancers themselves)[8] or, in case of hiring companies from the LSP marketplace, 10% of the order price. Apart from that, the company also offers paid subscriptions for premium support and standalone (non-Cloud) installations.[9]

Branding and marketing

In 2017, the Smartcat has undergone a rebranding, adopting the tagline of “Connecting Purple” (a pun on Nokia’s “Connecting People”[10]) and positioning itself as a “translation ecosystem that makes it easy for companies and talents to connect and collaborate” (emphasis by Smartcat).[4] With the “ecosystem” approach, the company claims to underline that all of its users, whether customers or translators, are “equally important participants of the whole system, a system that can only thrive if all its members thrive.”[10]

Smartcat pays a great deal of attention to working with individual translators through various community initiatives such as a diversely developed community portal (under the tagline of “Let’s talk translation”),[11] free courses and webinars for translators,[12] and a peer review-based certification process to elect “Senior Translators”.[13]

Document formats

Smartcat supports a variety of input formats, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, scanned documents and images (including a paid OCR service[14]) , HTML pages, resource files, industry-standard bilingual formats, and others.[15]

The company also claims to support SDL Trados packages, which allows using it as an environment to work on projects originally intended for SDL Trados, including generation of return packages to be further handled in Trados,[16] although the degree of such support has been contested by SDL representatives.[17]

Help and support

Smartcat offers several ways to learn its basics:

For more sophisticated questions, as well as bug reports, Smartcat provides a 24x7 support service accessible from within the app and via email, as well as community support on its community portal.[18]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Why we don't count seats: On Licenses, Monkeys, and Cognitive Biases — The Smartcat Blog". The Smartcat Blog. 2017-04-05. Archived from the original on 2018-02-14. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  2. ↑ "SmartCAT Raises USD 2.8m Seed Round From Russian VC → slator.com". 2016-07-20. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  3. 1 2 ""Interview with Ivan Smolnikov" → Roem.ru" (in Russian). 2017-03-20. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  4. 1 2 "Smartcat — Translation ecosystem that makes it easy for companies and talents to connect and collaborate".
  5. ↑ "Smartcat Store". www.smartcat.ai. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  6. ↑ "How much for machine translation and image recognition (OCR)?". Smartcat Community. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  7. ↑ "It's Lilt Time! Adaptive MT is now in Smartcat — The Smartcat Blog". The Smartcat Blog. 2017-05-04. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  8. ↑ "FE07. Understanding Smartcat Marketplace". Smartcat Community. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  9. ↑ "Plans and Pricing Smartcat". www.smartcat.ai. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  10. 1 2 ""Connecting Purple" and "Translation Ecosystem": What's in the words?". Smartcat Community. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  11. ↑ "Smartcat Community". Smartcat Community. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  12. ↑ "Smartcat Academy – Crowdcast". Crowdcast. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  13. ↑ "Looking for Talent: 5 Reasons to Become a Smartcat Senior Translator — The Smartcat Blog". The Smartcat Blog. 2017-04-07. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  14. ↑ "How much for machine translation and image recognition (OCR)?". Smartcat Community. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  15. ↑ "Frequently Asked Questions". smartcat.ai. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  16. ↑ "Trados Packages in Smartcat! — The Smartcat Blog". The Smartcat Blog. 2016-09-21. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  17. ↑ "All that glitters is not gold…". multifarious. 2016-12-27. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  18. ↑ "Smartcat Q&A". Smartcat Community. Retrieved 2017-05-12.
  • ""Free use" Model – a Risky Step for Startups". The Times of Israel. 14 February 2016.
  • "ABBYY-LS' Smartcat Enters the CAT Race". Slator. 4 September 2015.
  • "Life just got a whole lot easier for freelance translators". thenextweb.com. 1 September 2015.
  • "In the land of a low-data language". TAUS. 31 March 2015.
  • "Skolkovo resident ABBYY Language Services offers sophisticated translation automation technology for India". samacharvarta.com. 18 February 2015.
  • "Digital India attracts Russian investors". Russoft. 13 February 2015.
  • "Raising productivity of automated translation: The factor of terminology". TcWorld. 31 March 2014.
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