When I confessed that I paid for all my software, he retorted, “At the rates you charge, anyone could afford it!” Which brings me back to my pirate colleague. If you charge decent rates, you’ll be able to cover the cost of Studio in a question of days with a single medium-sized job. Unfortunately, SDL was not forthcoming when I asked which countries were eligible and what discount was applied: “This is not something that we publicly disclose.” Not a helpful answer.* * See Paul Filkin’s comment below for more details SDL Trados Studio 2014 freelance currently costs €695, but you can pick it up for less in a ProZ Group Buy (40% discount) or through local resellers in certain countries.

Don’t risk infecting your work machine with malware.

Investing in hardware, software and continuing professional development (conferences, webinars) is a win-win situation.

Pay for your software and decrease your taxable income.

Get access to upgrades with new features.

For an annual fee, you’re given full support and free upgrades. If you own a Studio license, you get free basic support.

Get support for any issues that might crop up.

Read my post on SP2 installation issues to learn more.

Developers spend their time (and therefore our money) troubleshooting issues that turn out to be related to pirated versions.

The less translators use pirated copies of a program, the less expensive it will be for the rest of us.

Help keep down the price of the software.

I don’t translate for free (except when I choose to) and I don’t expect software companies to work for me for free either. Why buy legal software if you can get a pirated copy? After all, he said, why should he spend money on software if he could get it free? Gathering momentum, he proudly announced that all his software was pirated: Windows, Office, Trados and all.

We had a brief chat about language pairs and rates, and then to my surprise, the translator said he’d just got hold of a new OCR tool and offered to send me a copy. I was at a translation event recently and met a translator who ran an agency.

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