My new Software Setup for Translating

As part of switching jobs I'm now (happily) in a position where I only use one single operating system, MacOSX. The drawback was that I used to do most of my translation work on a PC laptop, and I dreaded moving over to the all-Mac setup due to having to switch tools and other software packages.

Well, I found a really interesting solution:XCode. This is the Apple developer tool system that I use every day at work. But it could easily be used for translation work, provided you are not in need of layout work or Tibetan fonts (in this case I just do all that work inside Microsoft Word as a final touch).

Meanwhile, what I do is to setup a couple of text files with the contents, and also place the Rangjung Yeshe dictionary plus my own dictionaries in the global search path. Then if I need to do word lookups, I just select the Wylie string, and hit a magical key and I see the hit results in a corresponding window.

I'm even collecting the existing translation into another text file where the search is done, so I could see how I translated the same term earlier.

If I want to save a translated term, I just open up another text file and drop it in, and it's part of the global search later.

It's mostly the search feature that makes me happy, I don't now need to move between multiple appliations, just stay within a single one.

As a bonus, Xcode is free, all you need is to register as a developer at developer.apple.com. Now, it requires a little bit know-how how a developer tool works, so you need to look around and figure out how to import files into the project, and so on (hint, drag-and-drop).

I would think Visual C++ might also work in a similar context.