MemoQ Reviews 

As a professional translator, a CAT tool should streamline my workflow, not hinder it. Unfortunately, memoQ feels like it is stuck in the past and built by software developers who have never actually translated a page in their lives.

Here are the main reasons why this software is incredibly frustrating to use:

Lack of Automation: Features that should be fully automated and effortless—such as concordance searches, auto-propagation, and inserting matches—require tedious manual input or constant workarounds.

Clunky & Sluggish: The software feels incredibly heavy and slow, which severely impacts daily productivity.

Counter-Intuitive Interface: The menu structure is overly complex, cluttered, and completely unaligned with the logical progression of a real translation workflow.

Instead of helping me work faster, I constantly find myself fighting the tool. memoQ badly needs a modern overhaul that actually prioritizes the user experience and modern translation habits. Highly disappointing.

I have worked with MemoQ for about 10 years. It's been a love-hate relationship. Some elements are much better than the established competition, some things will make you pull your hair out. The unbelievably cluttered and un-intuitive user surface is just one of them. It's a nerd's paradise. After all this time and maybe about 100 versions, each with another "improvement" (for the average translator usually meaningless), the spellchecker is still the same old buggy, amateurishly implemented, confusing feature.
I made my living with it and it was a helper for sure and I am certain that other CAT tools aren't really designed for the translator either, but mainly for the LSE, so it is still three stars worth in the end. The entire translation industry is upended by machine translation now, so I am getting out of it and it doesn't matter anymore, but this may still be helpful for those that have found their niche and continue finding enough translation work. Good luck!

One thing that may be confusing to a reader of memoQ translation management system reviews is that not every reviewer is talking about the same thing. There are software configurations for use locally on individual computers (which are capable of connecting to remote projects), and their are server configurations where many of the translators might be using a free browser interface which is not particularly capable. Add to that the fact that companies organizing projects on a memoQ server very often fail to train their staff properly and train the translators and reviewers working on their online projects even less, and you have a situation ripe for dissatisfaction and conflicting reviews. That's a lot of what I see in the four prior reviews of this "product".

If I have to call out a major fault of memoQ, it will be the failure to do more to promote good user education at every level. I am experienced in most of the major translation project support tools like memoQ, and for general functionality of the product and good attitude of its support staff, memoQ, for all its faults, earns the best marks. And having been an active educator for translation technology myself for over 20 years now, I have doubts that one should be so harsh regarding that failure of education, because I see much the same problem with similar products as well as most other software. Try to do better and that will work with some, while others remain thick as bricks.

memoQ is simply the best general purpose organization tool to support translation and localization work, with a range of possible workflows that is more extensive and flexible than any competitor. And the quality assurance tools that are part of the package are equally unmatched.

The real challenge for individuals and organizations is the learning process to achieve memoQ's full potential. The software is deceptively easy at the surface, and one can get a lot of uncomplicated work done very easily with little or no instruction. But this superficial ease sometimes imparts an impression of less sophistication than more archaic, cumbersome tools (like Trados Studio or Wordfast), or the available sources of training information gloss over the details and strategies needed to do more.

I would blame the Hungarian company little for all of that. They have educational strengths in certain areas, not in others, usually reflecting the experience and interests of the staff in those departments. Translation and localization are very broad fields, and nobody really masters all of the challenges in fields as well as they or others assume. But with the flexibility and scope of memoQ's toolkit and the simplicity of its basic use paradigms, one can concentrate better on getting the hard parts truly right more so than is possible with any alternative.

Thought I would add my 2 cents, especially after reading the two negative reviews.

I am a technical/patent translator, terminologist and CAT tool expert, and have tried every single CAT tool under the sun, over many, many years, and memoQ is my daily driver. Trados Studio, the so-called ‘industry standard’, is a disaster; nothing but bugs and terrible programming. However, memoQ just works. It also has the best UI design of them all, probably copied from Atril's Déjà Vu. Incidentally, which Memsource (now Phrase) also copied.

Anyway, there are so many things about memoQ that just work better than most of the other CAT tools, but one thing that makes me always prefer using it over Trados is how terminology recognition is rock solid. If you add a term to your termbase in memoQ, it is always recognised. Very frustratingly, this is not always the case with Trados Studio, due to a longstanding bug, which they seem unable to track down and fix.

Segmentation rules are not stored inside the TMs, like in Trados, which just makes so much more sense.

You can add abbreviations and other stuff to segmentation rules on the fly.

You can easily merge and join segments.

It's auto-assemble function work pretty well. Maybe not as well as Déjà Vu X3, but then Déjà Vu died long ago and is currently on life support.

Support is amazing. They always answer me quickly and have always solved my problems.

Their subscription pricing model seems fair to me, as it pays for continued development.

Works great. Customer support fixed my licence migration within one hour - for free. MemoQ is the same price as Trados and easier to use. Only downside is that MemoQ spammed me with customer satisfaction survey email.

The software is not great. It's written by non-native English speakers so not only is it not intuitive it's also hard to figure out what they're trying to say in the menus. The app itself is very slow and there are frequent issues as you have to be in constant contact with the server. Every sentence comes with a lag of a couple of seconds. You have to back pay for the very expensive support so if you have had no issues for a year and something comes up getting even a small fix costs hundreds of dollars.

Probably one of the worlds most tedious, slow, user-unfriendly CAT tools. Combined with a totally useless support, that sends standard replys to your issues.

Avoid it at any cost

(I solely use it, when a valuable client forces me to)