Do you love your tools?
Like all professionals, translators use various tools to carry out their tasks. And life is much easier when you actually enjoy working with these tools. You have deadlines to meet, thousands of words to translate so clearly, having a crippled laptop and a sluggish CAT tool would keep you away from your desk and would only make you feel frustrated.
I admit, I’m an Apple fan. Ever since I wrote my graduation thesis (on intercultural branding) and I saw the Think different campaign I have been seduced by their impeccable marketing, product and management strategies. So when I chose my workstation I went for a Mac, even though this meant installing a virtual machine in order to run MemoQ and Trados on it (by the way, why CAT tool developers ignore OS X is beyond me…). Anyway, it is not the purpose of this post to advertise their products :D, what I want to stress is that this beautiful machine on my desk makes my working hours much more pleasant. It works like a psychological incentive, it makes me want to type faster and more, which helps me enhance my productivity. And if you add all the useful proprietary Apple apps, things are just great!
On the software side, although I work with both Trados and MemoQ, I find the latter more user-friendly and flexible. Maybe it’s because I like supporting the underdog in a competition, I don’t know, but the fact remains that whenever I have a choice between using Trados and MemoQ, I use MemoQ. I just like it better. Then there are all the social networking apps that make my days brighter: twitter, buffer, feedly… I just love using them across all platforms.
But enough about me. What about you? What tools do you own and love?
