1. History

2. Account types

3. Monetization

4. Branding and marketing

5. Document formats

6. References

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]

However, Smartcat is not a machine translation tool, since it does not replace human work; it is software that helps in the translation of text documents, through functions that contribute to make the process more efficient and productive, as textual segmentation in units, glossary and translation memory, which enables the creation of a database of translations and generates greater agility in typing. Through the translation memory of the program, translators can save words, terms and phrases that will be used again in the future. ^[6]

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{{Citation needed|date=May 2017}}, 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)^[9] or, in case of hiring companies from the LSP marketplace, 10% of the order price{{Citation needed|date=May 2017}}. Apart from that, the company also offers paid subscriptions for premium support and standalone (non-Cloud) installations.^[10]

Branding and marketing

In 2017, the Smartcat has undergone a rebranding, adopting the tagline of “Connecting Purple” (a pun on Nokia’s “Connecting People”^[11]) 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.”^[11]

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”),^[12] free courses and webinars for translators,^[13] and a peer review-based certification process to elect “Senior Translators”.^[14]

Document formats

Smartcat supports a variety of input formats, including text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, scanned documents and images (including a paid OCR service^[15]) , HTML pages, resource files, industry-standard bilingual formats, and others.^[16]

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,^[17] although the degree of such support has been contested by SDL representatives.^[18]

References

• {{cite web|url= http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/free-use-model-a-risky-step-for-startups/ |title= "Free use" Model – a Risky Step for Startups|author=|date= 14 February 2016|publisher=The Times of Israel}}
• {{cite web|url= http://slator.com/technology/abbyy-ls-smartcat-enters-the-cat-race/ |title= ABBYY-LS’ Smartcat Enters the CAT Race|author=|date= 4 September 2015|publisher=Slator}}
• {{cite web|url= https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/09/01/smartcat-combines-localization-marketplace-tools-freelance-translators/|title= Life just got a whole lot easier for freelance translators|author=|date= 1 September 2015 |publisher=thenextweb.com}}
• {{cite web|url= https://www.taus.net/blog/in-the-land-of-a-low-data-language |title= In the land of a low-data language |author=|date= 31 March 2015 |publisher=TAUS}}
• {{cite web|url= http://samacharvarta.com/news_detail.php?cu_id=9334&news_id=47 |title= Skolkovo resident ABBYY Language Services offers sophisticated translation automation technology for India |author=|date= 18 February 2015 |publisher=samacharvarta.com}}
• {{cite web|url= http://russoft.org/docs/?doc=3085|title= Digital India attracts Russian investors |author=|date= 13 February 2015 |publisher=Russoft}}
• {{cite web|url= http://www.tcworld.info/e-magazine/content-strategies/article/raising-productivity-of-automated-translation-the-factor-of-terminology/|title= Raising productivity of automated translation: The factor of terminology|author=|date= 31 March 2014 |publisher=TcWorld}}

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