About the author: Jost Zetzsche is an ATA-certified English-to-German translator and a localization and translation consultant. He co-founded International Writers' Group on the Oregon coast and sends out a free, biweekly technical newsletter for translators (see www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit).
Here is an example of a comment that I have often received from readers of my newsletter:
"I am not a technical professional, just a writer who works with Mac. I
was also in Seattle last week and finally decided to buy Trados
Freelance which is designed for PCs. I am desperate! I know I can buy a
Virtual PC for Mac, but does it make any sense? Is the right decision
to buy products for a different computer? Why does nobody care about
MAC??? Why do we not have any translations tools for MAC???????"
There may be no more emotional computer-related topic among translators
than that of Mac vs. PC. Daniel Benito from Atril had a very pointed
response to exactly that question during the tools forum at the ATA
2005 in Seattle. He called "the quasi-religious aversion to PCs" a real
stumbling block for users for whom it would be so much "cheaper to buy
a PC to run your TM tool instead of buying a super-fast G5 so you can
run Virtual PC properly."
Let me first take a step backwards, though. First of all, there are
some "mainstream" tools that work on both the PC (a computer with
Windows) and Macintosh, including Heartsome or Wordfast, or there is a
variety of Java-based tools that work on various platforms, including
OmegaT or the Sun XLIFF Translation Editor. So the answer is, yes,
there are tools that specifically work on both PC and Macintosh
computers.
Then there is Virtual PC. Virtual PC
is (now) a Microsoft product that allows you to install Windows on a
Macintosh and pretend you are working in Windows. This means that you
can install most Windows programs on that computer, including most of
the PC-only translation environment tools (TRADOS, Déjà Vu, SDLX,
etc.). But here is the catch: you will need a very powerful and very
expensive Macintosh computer (and an expensive version of Virtual PC)
to have the same output that you would have on a much less powerful PC,
and this is especially true when you deal with database processing.
Furthermore (and this is where the "quasi-religious" aspect comes in),
if you work on a Mac with Virtual PC,
for all intents and purposes you are working in Windows, only a less
powerful version of it. So why do it in the first place . . .?
There may be some other options, and one of them was pointed out to me by Daniel this morning. The Microsoft product Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac
is a tool that allows you to connect to a PC from a Macintosh computer
and work in it as if you were working on the PC itself. The drawback of
it is obvious: you still need a PC after all. However, if you have a PC
and just don't like to switch computers all the time because you
typically prefer to work on the Macintosh, this may be a good option.
(And, of course, it also gives you the ability to remotely connect to
your PC from your iBook as you travel.) Note that you will need Windows
XP on the PC.
Of course, at that point, you can also use a so-called KVM switch, a
hardware device that allows you to switch between multiple computers
from a single keyboard, video monitor, and mouse. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch.
I certainly don't want to offend anyone who uses a Macintosh—I
myself have my little iMac sitting right alongside my Windows notebook
-- but I will venture to say that there is a certain element of
irrationality in this long and ongoing discussion.
(By the way, it wasn't Daniel's intention to offend either; in fact, he mentioned that he hopes to port his product, Déjà Vu, to the Macintosh platform at some point.)
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