Smartcat is a cloud-based environment enabling the translation workflow of companies (including translation companies) and individual translators. As such, it falls under several software categories, such as computer-assisted translation, globalization management, and freelance marketplace.
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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."
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). ABBYY LS's founder and CEO Ivan Smolnikov also left the company to fully focus on Smartcat. 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."
The company has been gradually developing since then, now claiming to have more than 110,000 freelancers in its marketplace (as of May 2017) and providing an "app store" that allows integrating one's Smartcat account with third-party tools.
Smart Cat Video
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):
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."
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) 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.
Branding and marketing
In 2017, the Smartcat has undergone a rebranding, adopting the tagline of "Connecting Purple" (a pun on Nokia's "Connecting People") and positioning itself as a "translation ecosystem that makes it easy for companies and talents to connect and collaborate" (emphasis by Smartcat). 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."
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"), free courses and webinars for translators, and a peer review-based certification process to elect "Senior Translators".
Document formats
Smartcat supports a variety of input formats, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, scanned documents and images (including a paid OCR service) , HTML pages, resource files, industry-standard bilingual formats, and others.
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, although the degree of such support has been contested by SDL representatives.
Help and support
Smartcat offers several ways to learn its basics:
- Help pages for freelancers and corporate users.
- Weekly induction webinars.
- A 10-minute "Freelancer Essentials" crash course.
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.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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