Case Study: SDL Trados users achieve up to 39.5% higher translation throughput while maintaining quality with Lilt

SDL Trados - Customer Case Study

The case study compares Lilt with SDL Trados by testing whether Lilt’s adaptive, predictive CAT tool can boost translator productivity over the incumbent SDL Trados Studio 2011. SDL Trados served as the baseline (relying mainly on translation memory), while Lilt — the vendor — provided an interface driven by an adaptive machine translation system that offers real-time predictive suggestions and mixed-initiative completions to help translators work faster.

Lilt’s solution was evaluated in a one-hour, controlled pilot with five in-house English–French translators on two client datasets. Lilt increased quality-adjusted throughput by 21.9% on UI strings and 13.6% on hotel copy versus SDL Trados, produced the highest observed raw throughput (1,367 source words/hour), and delivered comparable final quality scores to SDL Trados; translators also reported that Lilt’s predictive suggestions boosted their speed.

SDL Trados