With SDL's announcement not to honor promotion-priced upgrades for versions of Trados 6.5 and earlier come April 2008, many Trados users see themselves faced with tough decisions in these last days of March. Should you pay for an upgrade simply to avoid falling out of the upgrade cycle, or should you start to consider one of the competing products?

There's no better time than now to take a look at the competing TEnT (Translation Environment Tool) products and ask two questions: 1. How do they measure up? 2. Perhaps just as important, how compatible are they with Trados input and output formats that we receive from clients? To answer the first question, a partner and I have recently created a website at www.translatorstraining.com where we compare all the available tools in the form of short video tutorials. This article attempts to answer the second question.