Bureau WorksReviews of bureauworks.com

As a professional linguist, I find Bureauworks to be highly counterproductive compared to other industry-standard CAT tools. The platform is hindered by persistent bugs, a counterintuitive interface, and severe functional limitations. These are not minor inconveniences; they directly impact a linguist's ability to deliver the quality and efficiency that clients demand. The platform’s instability is so severe that I felt compelled to stop working with a long-term agency solely because they transitioned to Bureauworks. It simply compromises the quality of our work. Until the developers address these fundamental stability and feature gaps, I cannot recommend this platform for professional, high-volume translation.

This is the worst tool I have ever worked with and I've been a translator for more than 10 years. Confirming each segment takes a minute or so, cause you have to go through all the false positives from the qa. Then you have to justify each change you make, even to your own translation. The spellchecker is useless and its very easy to make a mistake (it does not underline the mistakes). It is the opposite of user-friendly... There are so many functions that are not really useful, and the AI recommendations are far from ideal, at least in case of my language... Would not recommend.

I realise this tool wasn’t built to improve anyone’s work but to generate profit at the back of AI hype, but surely it didn’t have to be this bad? It’s excruciatingly slow – all online tools are, but this one is the worst I’ve experienced. It’s really difficult to keep consistency, especially if you have many files within one project. Not possible to search e.g. for one term across multiple files. It’s impossible to search even within one file, there’s no such feature… And if you use browser search, it only searches the part that’s visible on the screen. TM/legacy segments/glossary/TM search are spread across multiple tabs, which makes it very cumbersome and time consuming to use. In any other decent CAT tool it’s all combined and readily visible. What’s worse, even if there’s a high-ish TM match, the tool doesn’t pull it up into the segment but pushes AI slop instead. Repeatedly, even in recurring segments. And it’s not consistent, it can put one thing in segment 2 and something completely different in segment 28. I don’t know if the engine I used was customer-tailored or general CH-GPT, but on the whole it was very poor linguistically. There is no segment merge feature, which creates some interesting results if a sentence gets cut in half, and the syntax of your language goes the other way than e.g. English. You end up polluting the TM with translations that don’t follow the source. Good luck to whoever might be dealing with 101% locked matches later! Who on earth thought that putting spell check below the actual segment, and in minute font, is a good idea? It takes extra time to load and doesn’t work well, making it easy to overlook typos. Glossary integration feature is a joke. Say your client put a fairly common word there, like ‘service’ and your language uses inflection -- so the translated word might have different endings/forms (or you simply want to skip that word for stylistic reasons). After trying to Ctrl+Enter the translation there's a notification that you violated the glossary. And you can’t just get rid of it by hitting Enter. You need to click. Every. Single. Time. At the end of my project I felt like a monkey trained to use a mouse. No QA features as such and no, AI doesn't help with that. There is a good reason why other tools enable you to run a thorough QA check for glossary, consistency, tags, redundant spaces, etc. All those colourful blinking widgets that must look impressive during a sales pitch are useless and create a lag with every segment. They generate 'helpful' insights that are mostly bollocks, but presented in a very self-assured way, Chat GPT style. All in all, a simple translation that would be a breeze in a standard CAT took me ages to finalise -- about 30% longer? If anyone needs AI inspiration, it would be much faster to use a typical CAT tool and an AI engine in the browser. Oh, did I mention that you can't see the wordcounts, only percentages? So, if you're running late (because it's so painfully slow), you have no way of telling how far you progressed and how much is left. Hope there's a special place in hell for creators of this thing, where they get to use their product for eternity. To tight deadlines.

The worst translation platform ever! I'm forced to use Bureau Works through an agency and it cannot deliver what it sells. The functionalities are very limited, the machine translations for post editing are unusable and the platform is slow.

Out of the blue, I received an email from Bureau Works asking me to define a password: 'Hi (my correct name)! It's a pleasure to have you on our platform. In order to gain access to Bureau Works, please set your password by clicking on the link below:' I have never visited the site or registered. This behaviour is suspect.

BEWARE! POSSIBLE SCAM! They "SEEM TO" pretend to recruit for translation jobs and make you fill out a "skilltest" with some translations. You will then receive an email that you: alas, "failed the test" (Scientology style) but you can have a go again in 2 weeks. "So you shouldn't feel hurt". They "PROBABLY" then use the work you did for them by doing the test to sell to their "customers". -or maybe just harvest your name and other details for ID-theft. Is this criminal? I don't know yet, but I'll find out and it's 100% BS that's for sure. If you're looking for a job, don't waste your time applying there. That's my opinion.