memoQ vs t09n.com —
The Indian Translator's Honest Guide

memoQ's freelancer licence starts at around $200–$270/year — roughly ₹17,000–₹23,000 at current rates. The project manager licence, which unlocks TQA and full team features, runs significantly higher.

Like SDL Trados, memoQ bills in USD. For Indian translators that means currency conversion fees, exchange rate exposure, and no flexibility — you pay the annual amount regardless of your workload that year.

t09n.com starts at ₹0. No credit card required. The Starter plan is ₹999/month. The Professional plan — with full CAT tool, MTPE Pro, TQA, Review, Translation Memory, and Glossary — is ₹2,499/month.

For irregular workloads, the PAYG wallet from ₹499 gives you complete flexibility. Top up when you need words, pay nothing when you don't. memoQ has no equivalent.

Bottom line: t09n.com costs 60–80% less than memoQ for Indian language freelancers — with INR pricing, PAYG flexibility, and no annual commitment.

memoQ doesn't have its own translation engine. When you use machine translation in memoQ you're connecting to an external provider — typically Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, or DeepL via API. You pay for the memoQ licence separately from the MT usage costs.

None of these engines are built for Indian languages. The output has well-known problems for Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, and Telugu: awkward word order, incorrect honorifics, unnatural phrasing, and a translated quality that experienced readers immediately notice. Post-editing this output for Indian languages often takes longer than translating from scratch.

t09n.com's proprietary multi-layer translation engine is built from the ground up for Indian language quality:

• Correct honorifics — aap/tum in Hindi, formal register in Tamil and Telugu
• Natural sentence construction — correct SOV word order, not English structure
• Gender agreement — handled natively across Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi
• No MT artifacts — output reads as written in the target language, not translated
• Dual-layer approach — compare two outputs per segment, select the better one

memoQ's native format is MQXLIFF — its bilingual package format. If your agency clients send memoQ packages, you'd normally need a memoQ licence to open them.

t09n.com supports MQXLIFF files natively. You can import memoQ packages, translate in t09n.com's CAT editor, and return the completed files — without buying a memoQ licence.

This makes the migration path practical. Start using t09n.com for your own projects immediately while continuing to accept memoQ files from existing clients. No compatibility issues, no client-facing disruption.

For Translation Memory migration: export your memoQ TM as TMX and import directly into t09n.com. For glossaries: export from memoQ as CSV, import into t09n.com Glossary. Both take minutes.

In memoQ, Translation Quality Assessment features are primarily available at the project manager licence level — not the standard freelancer licence. For freelancers who need to run TQA on their own work before delivery, this means either paying for a higher-tier licence or skipping the quality check entirely.

In t09n.com, TQA is available to all users on the Professional plan (₹2,499/month) — not locked behind a separate PM tier. Upload source and target, get a full MQM-style quality report with critical, major, and minor error categorisation, exportable for client delivery.