Best of one world, worst of the other

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For my translation work, 90% of the time, I have to use a specialized translation software package by TRADOS (basically, it’s a database system that stores pairs of orginal and translated phrases, and speeds up translation work by making it possible to translate repetitive text only once). This is Windows-only software, and even though it has existed for well over a decade, is just a horrible piece of shit. It does what it is supposed to do, but slowly, and with pitiful to infuriating « ergonomics » (even by Windows standards). Still, it’s the « industry-standard » and my customers require me to use it.

I’ve been running TRADOS under Windows 2000, installed on VirtualPC, which emulates a whole PC, on my iMac G5. Phew! Considering the huge overhead of emulating an Intel processor on a PowerPC Macintosh, it’s a surprisingly usable solution. But as I said, TRADOS is a sloth even on a fast PC so the combination really slows me down when I have to translate multi-megabyte Word files etc.

So late last year, I started thinking I should buy a PC, preferably a laptop, to do my translating. As I started pondering this, with sad resignation, the incredible news hit the airwaves: Apple was switching it’s entire Macintosh line from the PowerPC to the Intel architecture. It quickly became clear that the only (albeit HUGE) difference between a Mac and a PC would be the Operating System (if you don’t care about the hardware design). This meant that in theory, Macs could run Windows. So I decided to hold off on buying that PC and toughing it out with my VirtualPC/iMac G5 combo. I would wait for the Intel-based successor to the iBook (the « consumer », $1000 Mac laptop) to come out. By then, solutions would probably exist to run Windows « on top » of Mac OS X, like VirtualPC did, but this time without the emulation layer, i.e. at native Windows speeds.

Well, the MacBook, the iBook successor, came out about a month ago and it is a very appealing machine.

In the interim, Apple released a free utility called BootCamp that allows you to boot either into Mac OS X, either into Windows XP. Microsoft, who bought up VirtualPC a few years ago, merely said they were exploring the possibility of porting VirtualPC to the Intel Mac. But a relatively obscure company (to Mac users anyway) beat them to market with a similar product, Parallels Desktop, which allows Mac OS X to host pretty much any PC OS, including Windows, at native speeds (except for graphics, but I’m no gamer so I don’t care), with cut and paste and file sharing between the two environments working concurrently. This is exactly what I need, because I run Trados on Windows, and everything else on Mac OS X!

This detailed review compares the two alternatives in some depth, with many little videos.

The irony is that general-purpose Mac software that hasn’t been ported to the Intel architecture now runs in a transparent emulation layer, Rosetta, with their PowerPC code being translated on the fly to Intel code, much the way VirtualPC converted Intel code to PowerPC code on my iMac G5. (More specialzed software, like many of my music-making tools, doesn’t work with Apple’s emulation system, and has to be ported, so for now, I’m hanging on to my iMac G5 for music-making).

So with all the pieces of the puzzle in place, and with some trepidation, I bit the bullet last week and ordered a MacBook, which I expect to receive next week. I already have my copy of Parallels and Windows XP (shudder!) ready to install.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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