At ATRIL, we have a unique policy of customer relations. Above all, our aim is to increase the productivity of translation tasks while at the same time allowing the translator and/or project manager to use the most comfortable and easy-to-understand workflow and translation environment.

For the most part, this view stems from the origins of Déjà Vu. Déjà Vu was initially developed in 1993 to fulfill our own need for a professional translation tool. Our first experiments with MT (Machine Translation) systems were extremely disappointing, and subsequent experiences with TM (Translation Memory) tools exposed two main shortcomings: all systems ran under MS-DOS and were capable of processing only plain text files.

We began considering the idea of writing our own TM software, and after much testing we discovered a set of techniques that made our ideas feasible and our software very fast. A preliminary version was finished around June 1993, and the first translation tool for Windows 3.1 was born. We immediately began working on an interface for Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0 (another first), which defined Déjà Vu as the most advanced translation tool of its time. Déjà Vu version 1 was released to the public in November 1993. Version 1.1 followed soon afterwards, incorporating several performance improvements and an integrated alignment tool (at a time when alignment tools were sold as expensive individual products), and setting the standard for the translation tool market.

During the first half of 1996, when Windows 95 was in its final stages of beta testing, we began writing a new version of Déjà Vu—not just porting the original code to 32 bits, but adding a large amount of important functionality that had been suggested by our users over the first three years but which we had not been able to incorporate into version 1 because of structural limitations.

By the time we released a beta version to our existing customers in October 1996, we had completely rewritten Déjà Vu. Not only had we achieved considerable performance improvements, but we'd also provided an integrated environment in which the translator could work on a number of different file formats without having to learn each of the program's UIs, and without running the risk of damaging the formatting of the documents. It soon became apparent that working with the Word interface imposed too many limitations, so the interface was dropped entirely in favor of the integrated environment.

The first TM tool available for 32-bit Windows, Déjà Vu shipped with a number of filters for DTP packages—including FrameMaker, Interleaf, and QuarkXPress—and provided extensive project management facilities to enable project managers to handle large, multi-file, multilingual projects.

Over the next few years we added a large number of features. As we continued research into the techniques that drive Déjà Vu, we have steadily added new translation features and refined existing techniques to increase both speed and output. And we have also added a large number of filters, both for documents and for database importing and exporting.

With our latest release we believe that we have now set a completely new standard for the industry. Déjà Vu X is an application that meets the needs of the freelance translator as well as the corporate client. It is as batch-oriented and reliable as ever, but at the same time it's become much more customizable and efficient, with virtually no limitations to size, combination of languages, or number of files and formats.

Atril and its customers

Our understanding of the translation business has always kept us in very close contact with our customers; in fact, we are proud to say that we have formed strong friendships with many of them. We rely on our customers to provide feedback and ideas for new features, and they have come to rely on our prompt and knowledgeable support. This symbiotic relationship is reflected in the fact that virtually every feature we have added since version 1.0 has been developed to address the needs of our customers and prospective buyers. Whenever new features have been requested, we have carefully consulted our users on the best way to implement them, and then produced solutions to benefit all of them