Translating on Linux, the First Steps

Translating on Linux

More than a year since my last post, that's really something! But never mind. Suffice it to say that life isn't always a bed of roses.

In this post I'm going to write about my most recent experience with Linux. This isn't my first encounter with this operating system, more than a decade ago I bought a laptop without an operating system, so I put Linux on it, and I even went through the painstaking process of installing Oracle's Java on it so that I could use one of the more reliable CAT tools that worked on Linux at that time, namely Swordfish from Maxprograms.

But that is history. Some three years ago I bought a low-end Lenovo Ideapad 100 laptop. I needed something for my daily ‘field trips’, and the previous piece of hardware started to fail. The laptop came with preinstalled Windows 10 which ran satisfactorily for about a year or so, even though it came bundled with Lenovo's bloatware and as a translator I also installed my set of tools on it. During the last year I resigned myself to the fact that this laptop is incredibly slow. But then one day I had enough. I got the idea that I would download the Windows 10 installer onto a USB stick and install clean Windows without bloatware on the laptop. Here is where Linux first comes in again. The OEM Windows prevented me from removing its partitions, so that I could install the ‘clean’ Windows. I had to use Linux, which I got onto another USB stick, following instructions from the Pendrivelinux site. Ubuntu did not see a problem with removing the OEM Windows partitions, so I briefly had Linux on this laptop, and even liked it, but then installed the ‘clean’ Windows anyway, and all my translation-related software on it.

However, it soon turned out that the hardware just can't handle Windows 10, with or without OEM bloatware. SDL Trados Studio would spin the wheel for very indecent amounts of time and very often crash. Even with Cafetran, I would have to wait a minute or two before it woke up. So that was the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. You know, I actually often need to do some work when I am not at home and for this I need the laptop, and not for watching the wheel spin or checking how non-responsive it is. Add to that the fact that it would often refuse to connect to my mobile Wi-Fi after waking up from sleep.

So I plugged in the Ubuntu USB stick again and put Linux on the laptop. Sure enough I can’t run SDL Trados Studio on Ubuntu, but Cafetran works just fine, and supports files with the sdllxiff and also mqxliff extension (the other one comes from MemoQ). So that is good enough for me. Remember that it is not my main production machine. I just need something that’s ready for me to do my work in a short amount of time. And Ubuntu Linux does on excellent job on this piece of hardware. It is connects to my mobile Wi-Fi as soon as I open the lid, so that is a big plus for me. I also have a license for Ultraedit, so I was able to install Uex on it – another familiar tool.

One thing I had go about differently are the web browsers. Why the plural? I don't use an e-mail client anymore to download all my e-mails to the local computer. I never used Outlook and I found that Thunderbird would often break. Now I have two Google mail accounts, one for business (that's the G Suite) and the other is personal. So, I need two browsers. On Windows these are Vivaldi and Edge, so I thought that on Linux I would use Vivaldi and Firefox (the latter comes preinstalled with Ubuntu). But both of these are just too heavy for this hardware, and if you leave them running, they can freeze Linux, which happened to me twice. After some research I found their lightweight equivalents: Slimjet (Chrome-based, plugins/extensions can still be installed) and Palemoon (a lightweight version of Firefox). I have yet to see a system freeze after I started using them.

All in all, I am not going back to Windows on a laptop  unless I manage to get my hands o something much more powerful in terms of performance, which does not seem likely at the moment.

So, if you feel encouraged by this piece of writing to try an alternative, you know what to do. :-) Everything is out there on the Internet. I did not want to make it too technical here and spoil the fun for you. Good luck!




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