During a recent visit to the website of Wordfast, I noticed that Wordfast 6.0 (“Coming Soon!”) promises to be a “Standalone, platform independent translation environment.” There are a few things that pique one’s curiosity here. 1) “Standalone”: does this mean no more having to use Wordfast from within MS Word? 2) “Platform independent”= as in, Linux-friendly?
Up until about two years ago, I ran Wordfast as my exclusive TenT and I loved it. The only stumbling block was that running Wordfast on a Linux computer (mandatory, as our household owns no Windows machines) requires running CrossOver Linux then MS Word then Wordfast. After a while I just got tired of all of those layers of upgrades, and of the fact that I never used the pricey MS Office other than when working in Wordfast. Now I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the trial version of Wordfast 6.0!
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Hi Corinne,
This kind of thing interests me as I have very recently (last week) left the world of PCs and switched to a Mac. (For info, I continue to use a Windows-based CAT tool running within a virtual environment.)
I suspect that Wordfast will still require Word, but that it will work with Word for Mac OS X as well as Word for Windows. In which case, when they say “platform independent”, what they really mean is, “Too bad if you use something other than Windows or Mac OS X”.
I may be wrong, but that’s my guess…
Rob
I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this!! The *only* reason I use Virtualbox in Ubuntu is to use Wordfast from within Word (way too many layers, isn’t it!!). But as you say, standalone is quite a promise!!! Are they shifting their focus from the translation plugin to a fully capable word-processor, with dictionary, spell-check, docx compatibility, no problem rendering tables etc.? I think it would be more logical if they were making the same plugin to work with Openoffice. Time will tell! Thanks for the heads-up 🙂
As far as I know Wordfast 6 will run on the Java platform and the files will be OpenSource-compatible. So there shouldn’t be any problems with operating systems.