Wordfast: seeing other platforms

Today I attended the ATA Translation Company Division conference in Denver. Despite the fact that I’m not a translation company, this conference has been well worth attending due to the quality of the presenters and the opportunity to get some perspectives on the industry from the agency viewpoint.

Wordfast is one of the exhibitors at the conference; over lunch I spoke with Kristyna Marrero, Wordfast’s Director of Sales and Marketing, and she filled me in on the upcoming changes in Wordfast 6.0. Beginning with that release, Wordfast will have two versions, a “classic” version that will work from within Microsoft Word as the software currently does, and a standalone version that will be Java-based and therefore relatively platform independent, meaning that it will run on at least Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix operating systems. This seems like an exciting direction for Wordfast and for tool independence in general. Kristyna said that Wordfast 6.0 will be released later this year, so I’m hoping that it’s available for demo by the time of the ATA conference in Orlando in November.