Almost all of the translation jobs I do are for translation agencies located somewhere in the
world, but I have done some for private clients or companies in one sector or another directly;
I have also on occasion been involved in translation work offered by a group who call
themselves “Motaword” – they call themselves a “collaborative translation platform”, which
pretty much fits the bill. In my personal experience, they are quite unique: essentially an
online translation portal using their own translation technology, which also functions as a
translation agency, offering translation work to anyone who creates an account with them.
This is professional translation work in the 2010s and 2020s, apparently.
More than nine times out of ten, when I am first awarded a new job, the work I am asked to
do is just scanned (if it’s not a Word, Excel or Powerpoint file to begin with) and sent to me
in standard email attachment form. Some local clients have given me work to do in hard
copy, which compels me to give an overall lump-sum quote rather than a rate with a per-word
basis (usually in the original material, if I can do an automatic word count). Then there’s
CAT tools – Google it and see how they differ from the likes of Google Translate. They are
not one and the same. There have been times where I have been sent files whose content one
could view only on certain CAT tool software because of their filename extensions, like
*.sdlxliff. One really fascinating thing is how an experienced CAT tool user can determine
not just the number of words in a given document but also “fuzzy matches” (there’s a
Wikipedia article explaining what those are). The Motaword crew just can’t not know that,
when someone is doing a job for them on their system, the experience resembles doing a
translation job using a CAT tool – not that I use CAT tools regularly; even now I have never
bought a full licence for Trados or MemoQ, but I have used Memsource, if only for a couple
of specific clients who will allow me to access the Memsource account I have with them only
for the duration of a specific project.
Motaword have tried; they have their merits. If you go to the official Motaword website and
view Our Team, you will see that it includes a list of professional translators – people who,
after someone has completed a translation job for them, are responsible for editing it (and
providing them the reasons why). So it has been with me. Although most translation agencies
I have worked for do the exact same thing. And they have digital multilingual glossaries
which will, to a certain extent, help immediately provide suggestions when you are
translating the text in a given row. Kind of like “educated machine translation” which will not
just grasp at anything to provide a range of possible answers like I know Google Translate
does (considering all the information you can access with Google; but even Google Translate
has kept on improving. I’ve mentioned that before.). And I suppose it’s also true that, in the
case of the Motaword method, there is less reason to be worried about your computer security
being compromised compared to when you download and open email attachments from
someone you may not even know.
Still, it encourages multiple people to work on a single translation job before the full list of
who is included in it is properly worked out, and translation agencies do not work like that!
This might well likely mean inconsistency in the final output. Anyone who gets involved in a
translation job on a Motaword can literally just decide to do whatever individual rows they
feel like – one or two here and one or two there, leaving the rest for someone else – I have
seen them do it! That’s not how I work – I’m skeptical about it. In practice, I have
encountered sentences running over many rows while the number of words in each row
varied enormously – sometimes it’s one or more whole sentences, but it can also be just a

couple of words. Even a single word. It can be awkward when this happens – not least when,
if you’ve got a sentence in a foreign language which runs over multiple rows and it’s a
sentence which you feel it best to apply a whole new sentence structure and wording in your
creation of the translated version, you might otherwise be inclined to put translation words
for certain words which are in one row, in another row in your translation product. But
doesn’t anyone think that that will confuse Motaword’s glossary/assisting translation
software aspects? And there are reasons why I call it impractical and not user-unfriendly. If I
want to look up a foreign term on Google then, for some reason, I cannot copy and paste
words from the original language if they are in a to-be-translated document in Motaword, the
way I can with files stored on my computer; I have to type them up again manually (although
I can type very quickly). And I don’t understand why all the HTML-like tags I see from time
to time (such as <g2> and </g2> etc.) are important – but I dare not leave them out when
writing up the translation in the Motaword system; I have to just guess where in my
translation they will all be best put. Also, consider this: sometimes the text might refer to an
image or something, which won’t be visible in what Motaword offers you to work with – that
might complicate matters as you try to think of what you are going to write at this or that
point, and I don’t know about you but I would say one thing about being professional is
trying to keep the “hoping for the best” element to a minimum!
Systems like Motaword, and CAT tools in general, do leave me wondering about one thing:
how many translation clients, those who are actually willing to pay for good translation work
(or not so good, as the case may be) – how many people outside of the professional
translation community – actually have any kind of appreciable knowledge about translation
software such as that used by Motaword? I find it hard to believe that they won’t, at least
most times, provide the material that is to be translated (if it is in written form) in standard
text files of some sort (typically Word, Excel or Powerpoint). Then the agency will take it
and copy and paste it into some sort of translation software tool – the question is, what is the
extent to which they really take things for granted, and how much do they really miss in
terms of valid points (like the one about images I mentioned earlier)? Technology is supposed
to not just make things easier, but also allow one to do things more quickly and often at
higher quality. But, as is the case with CAT tools, that doesn’t mean it never poses
complications for those who struggle to keep up with the times.
If you want my final verdict, I could only really give Motaword two stars out of four. I would
use them again, though.
PS At the time of writing I have also recently accepted to do work with a translation agency
that uses Smartling software. From what I’ve seen, the Motaword platform is similar to that –
just that Motaword operate as a translation platform and a translation agency all in one. Like I
said, they are quite unique.