If you're a professional freelance translator like me you'll probably agree that just about all the work you get is in electronic format. At least: the words are typed, not handwritten. But I have translated handwritten German words recently.
Anything with typed is likely to be something you can run through a machine translator, or a machine translation tool like Trados, in just a few short minutes. No wonder Trados is popular. Of course, I have recently been offered work that is not really translation at all; it's editing the product of machine translation English... I hope I'll have access to the original.
But thanks to the overwhelming prevalence of typed documents over handwritten ones these days, it looks as if Trados is here to stay - not that I can remember its benefits being explained to anyone who is not a translator in a bona fide specialist field. Give me a break.
