Trados is not a machine translation tool; it is a CAT (computer-aided translation) tool, which helps human translators do their jobs more efficiently. It does n

Trados is not a machine translation tool; it is a CAT (computer-aided translation) tool, which helps human translators do their jobs more efficiently. It does not produce translations. Trados may additionally offer MT services, and it probably provides easy access to MT services within the tool, but it's not fair to blame Trados itself for poor translations, as the human must choose what ultimately to output for each input string. > contracts that state that 80% of the translation work will be performed by Trados and the human translator will only be paid for 20% of it This is probably referring again not to MT, but to "leveraging" existing translations. This is basically a lookup (usually with some fuzziness to allow n% matches where e.g. 80% < n < 100%) against a database of existing translations. If you are translating a document that has been translated before, and only x% of it has changed, then it doesn't make sense for the whole thing to be re-translated.