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Recommended hardware requirements for a MacBook to virtualize Windows and work with SDL Trados
Thread poster: Emanuele Vacca
Emanuele Vacca
Emanuele Vacca  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 12:14
Member (2020)
English to Italian
Sep 8, 2020

Hi all,

Going straight to the point: are there any recommended hardware requirements for a MacBook to smoothly virtualize Windows AND work with SDL Trados and other translation-related tools without any lag, crashes or issues whatsoever? Here is some context so that you can better understand my needs.

I’ve happily been a Mac user during my studies and now that I’m (hopefully) about to start my career as a freelancer I have a common dilemma: should I switch to Windo
... See more
Hi all,

Going straight to the point: are there any recommended hardware requirements for a MacBook to smoothly virtualize Windows AND work with SDL Trados and other translation-related tools without any lag, crashes or issues whatsoever? Here is some context so that you can better understand my needs.

I’ve happily been a Mac user during my studies and now that I’m (hopefully) about to start my career as a freelancer I have a common dilemma: should I switch to Windows? If I want to keep using a Mac, should I install a native CAT tool or should I virtualize Windows and use it to run SDL Trados and other Windows-based translation-related software? After a few months of reflections, I chose the last option (but please feel free to make me change my mind!). Please note that I’m not willing to use Bootcamp, as I would like to run Windows and macOS at the same time.

Some time ago I tried to virtualize Windows through VMware Fusion on my 2015 MacBook Air; the experience was quite satisfying but Windows as a whole and Trados in particular were quite slow, which made working a really stressful activity. Therefore, I would now like to buy a more powerful Apple laptop and I guess it will need to be a MacBook Pro. Hence my question: are there any recommended hardware requirements for a Mac in order to smoothly virtualize Windows AND work with SDL Trados without any lag, crashes, or issues whatsoever? My budget is between 2000 and 2500€ and I don’t want to buy an expensive machine just to find out that it’s slow (I’d rather keep my MacBook Air and buy a cheaper Windows machine if I had to).

Is any of you actually working with SDL Trados on a Mac through virtualization without experiencing any issues, slowness, or lagging, and having a seamless experience?

Thank you,
Emanuele
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Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 11:14
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Try this Sep 8, 2020

Parellels Desktop. I haven't used it myself but I've seen it in action. It is seamless and very smooth.

https://www.parallels.com/uk/products/desktop/

The main thing is: maximise your RAM.

Screen Shot

[Edited at 2020-09-08 14:40 GMT]


Emanuele Vacca
Adriana-Corina Iotcov
 
Adriana-Corina Iotcov
Adriana-Corina Iotcov  Identity Verified
Romania
Local time: 13:14
English to Romanian
+ ...
RAM size matters Sep 8, 2020

I've been using Parallels for 4 years, intermittently at first, on a 12-in MacBook, which was quite a frustrating experience, very much like yours on the Air.

Last year I switched to a 2017 iMac, and I experienced some crashes before I upgraded the RAM from 8 GB to 32 GB.

I haven't had any issues or crashes since the RAM upgrade though, and I run the VM all the time. So, while 32 GB is probably ideal for me, I think a MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM should be fine in most ca
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I've been using Parallels for 4 years, intermittently at first, on a 12-in MacBook, which was quite a frustrating experience, very much like yours on the Air.

Last year I switched to a 2017 iMac, and I experienced some crashes before I upgraded the RAM from 8 GB to 32 GB.

I haven't had any issues or crashes since the RAM upgrade though, and I run the VM all the time. So, while 32 GB is probably ideal for me, I think a MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM should be fine in most cases. With the regular Parallels version that I use, you can assign a maximum of 8 GB RAM to the VM. I assigned 6, and it's running perfectly. That leaves enough free RAM for MacOS and tens of browser tabs in Safari and Chrome/Opera.
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Emanuele Vacca
 
Emanuele Vacca
Emanuele Vacca  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 12:14
Member (2020)
English to Italian
TOPIC STARTER
How good should my Mac's technical specs be? Sep 8, 2020

Tom in London wrote:

Parellels Desktop. I haven't used it myself but I've seen it in action. It is seamless and very smooth.

https://www.parallels.com/uk/products/desktop/

The main thing is: maximise your RAM.

[Edited at 2020-09-08 14:37 GMT]


Thanks for your reply, Tom! I will surely consider using other virtualization software in addition to VMware Fusion, such as Parallels and Virtualbox. However, my concern is that my MacBook could not be powerful enough to virtualize Windows and run Trados without lagging. As I said, VMWare + Windows + Trados on my 2015 MacBook Air was very frustrating due to lagging, so I have the feeling that if I bought a brand new MacBook Pro I wouldn't have this issue. But I would like to be fairly sure before spending 2500€.

Edit: my bad, I didn't see the picture with the technical specs at first. I'm afraid I'll need to spend much more than expected...

[Edited at 2020-09-08 14:48 GMT]


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 11:14
Member (2008)
Italian to English
$$$$ Sep 8, 2020

Emanuele Vacca wrote:

..... I'm afraid I'll need to spend much more than expected...


Yes- and unlike the MacOS, which is free to download, you have to pay for Windows, and it isn't cheap.


Emanuele Vacca
 
Emanuele Vacca
Emanuele Vacca  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 12:14
Member (2020)
English to Italian
TOPIC STARTER
Which translation tools do you use? Sep 8, 2020

Adriana-Corina Iotcov wrote:
I think a MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM should be fine in most cases. With the regular Parallels version that I use, you can assign a maximum of 8 GB RAM to the VM. I assigned 6, and it's running perfectly. That leaves enough free RAM for MacOS and tens of browser tabs in Safari and Chrome/Opera.

Hi Adriana! Thank you so much for your advice. This is great news! But do you use Trados and other translation tools? If yes, does this affect the overall performance of your virtual machine? I'm asking because Trados' technical requirements are quite high enough even without considering all these virtualization-related issues.


 
Adriana-Corina Iotcov
Adriana-Corina Iotcov  Identity Verified
Romania
Local time: 13:14
English to Romanian
+ ...
No major troubles Sep 8, 2020

Hi Emanuele! I'm not a regular Trados user, but I did use the 2015 version of Studio for a handful of projects in the past couple of years, and all was reasonably fast (by Trados standards). I cannot recall any major issues, or issues that were caused by it running in a VM. Some shortcuts needed a bit of fiddling.

My main CAT tool is MemoQ now, I use it every single day for at least 4 hours, I've delivered thousands of projects without any issues. It works very well in the VM with l
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Hi Emanuele! I'm not a regular Trados user, but I did use the 2015 version of Studio for a handful of projects in the past couple of years, and all was reasonably fast (by Trados standards). I cannot recall any major issues, or issues that were caused by it running in a VM. Some shortcuts needed a bit of fiddling.

My main CAT tool is MemoQ now, I use it every single day for at least 4 hours, I've delivered thousands of projects without any issues. It works very well in the VM with large online and offline projects.
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Emanuele Vacca
 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
MacBook Pro Sep 9, 2020

Emanuele Vacca wrote:

Is any of you actually working with SDL Trados on a Mac through virtualization without experiencing any issues, slowness, or lagging, and having a seamless experience?



I have a late 2012 MacBook Pro with 16 RAM, Core-i7 and an SSD and it's still very fast in combination with VMware Fusion and e.g. Studio 2019.

Having said that, I must add that I translate all my Studio (memoQ, Transit, Wordfast) projects with a CAT tool that's perfectly integrated in macOS and allows me to tune all display settings for better ergonomics. Since this tool doesn't need Parallels or Fusion, all resources are directly available, resulting in optimal performance.


 
Peter Kovacik
Peter Kovacik  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:14
Arabic to English
consider buying a separate Windows 10 machine to save money Sep 9, 2020

I tried running Windows 10 and a variety of Linux distributions on my 2015 MacBook Pro that has Intel i5, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD. Because I study software development at a local college, I was able to use my student account to download Windows 10 and VMware for free and experiment with different setups.

Windows 10 worked great with Bootcamp (except for the size of my SSD), but it was slow and choppy with VMware Fusion even though I allocated about 5GB RAM to Windows. I did not spec
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I tried running Windows 10 and a variety of Linux distributions on my 2015 MacBook Pro that has Intel i5, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD. Because I study software development at a local college, I was able to use my student account to download Windows 10 and VMware for free and experiment with different setups.

Windows 10 worked great with Bootcamp (except for the size of my SSD), but it was slow and choppy with VMware Fusion even though I allocated about 5GB RAM to Windows. I did not specifically try Trados Studio with it, but the lag time gave me trouble using other programs like Visual Studio IDE. On the other hand, the Linux distros ran well on both VMware Fusion and Oracle VirtualBox.

Emanuele Vacca wrote:
Edit: my bad, I didn't see the picture with the technical specs at first. I'm afraid I'll need to spend much more than expected...


Unless you already have a Mac that is powerful enough to run Windows 10 on a virtual machine, I think it would be cheaper to buy a separate Windows 10 computer for Trados Studio. You should also factor in the cost of buying Windows 10 (about $130 USD) and VMware or Parallels if you do not want to use VirtualBox, which is free.


[Edited at 2020-09-09 06:51 GMT]
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Jorge Payan
 
Emanuele Vacca
Emanuele Vacca  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 12:14
Member (2020)
English to Italian
TOPIC STARTER
Which CAT tool do you use? Sep 9, 2020

Hans Lenting wrote:
I have a late 2012 MacBook Pro with 16 RAM, Core-i7 and an SSD and it's still very fast in combination with VMware Fusion and e.g. Studio 2019.

This is actually great news. A 16-GB RAM seems to be an essential requirement (so does having an SSD, but this became the standard for MacBooks), but I wonder how important the CPU is. All MacBook Pros come at least with an i5 CPU, with the cheapest machine with i7 starting from 2,800€. It's a shame that although SDL itself recommends that Mac users use their leading software by virtualizing Windows, they don't specify any minimum or recommended hardware requirements so that you can do it seamlessly.

Hans Lenting wrote:
Having said that, I must add that I translate all my Studio (memoQ, Transit, Wordfast) projects with a CAT tool that's perfectly integrated with macOS and allows me to tune all display settings for better ergonomics. Since this tool doesn't need Parallels or Fusion, all resources are directly available, resulting in optimal performance.

Which CAT tool are you referring to? My main concern with using tools such as CafeTran Espresso or OmegaT is having to convert TMs and termbases into formats that can be read by those platforms.

[Edited at 2020-09-09 10:01 GMT]


 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
Automatic conversion of resources Sep 10, 2020

Emanuele Vacca wrote:

My main concern with using tools such as CafeTran Espresso or OmegaT is having to convert TMs and termbases into formats that can be read by those platforms.


CafeTran Espresso will open the memories and termbases included in Studio packages.


Emanuele Vacca
 
Emanuele Vacca
Emanuele Vacca  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 12:14
Member (2020)
English to Italian
TOPIC STARTER
I'll just wait Sep 11, 2020

Hans Lenting wrote:
CafeTran Espresso will open the memories and termbases included in Studio packages.


That's good to know! Do you think CafeTran Espresso can replace SDL Trados Studio in the eye of a potential client?

Also, for some reason, I am attracted by all the extra features offered by Trados, such as the integration with Multiterm, the plug-ins, machine translation functionalities, etc. For this reason, I am currently trying to figure out which features will be included in SDL Trados Live, the new cloud-based platform that will be released soon. If it's powerful enough, I'll consider buying it alone without having to virtualize Windows at all.

Thank you so much to all those who kindly replied. I guess I'll need to reconsider my purchase and maybe wait a few weeks or months to see how the situation evolves.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 11:14
Member (2008)
Italian to English
have a go Sep 11, 2020

Emanuele Vacca wrote:

Thank you so much to all those who kindly replied. I guess I'll need to reconsider my purchase and maybe wait a few weeks or months to see how the situation evolves.


The client doesn't care what you use. They only want a good translation. But if by "client" you actually mean "an agency that is forcing you to use Trados" - that's another ball game.

Anyway - have a go with the trial version of CafeTran. It won't cost you anything and you can use it to do actual translations.

[Edited at 2020-09-11 09:55 GMT]


Emanuele Vacca
 
Emanuele Vacca
Emanuele Vacca  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 12:14
Member (2020)
English to Italian
TOPIC STARTER
That's my fear Sep 11, 2020

Tom in London wrote:
The client doesn't care what you use. They only want a good translation. But if by "client" you actually mean "an agency that is forcing you to use Trados" - that's another ball game.

That's what I'm afraid of: do agencies actually force translators to use Trados? Or is it just an urban legend? I have the feeling that the extent to which you are actually "forced" to use it depends on how valuable and unique you are to them. But this feeling needs to become a certainty before I make a purchase decision (or I decide to make none).

Tom in London wrote:
Anyway - have a go with the trial version of CafeTran. It won't cost you anything and you can use it to do actual translations.

I will certainly do it. After doing my research and thanks to the valuable advice I received here, I decided that I cannot make such an important decision based on urgency. First of all, I will have a go with CafeTran Espresso, try to figure out how to make it fully compatible with Trados, and then start marketing myself to prospective clients and see how it goes.

Thank you so much!


 
Lucia Messuti
Lucia Messuti  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 12:14
English to Italian
+ ...
MacBook with 16 GB and Parallels Sep 12, 2020

I've been using MacBook Pro with 16 GB for 4 years and I'm satisfied. Everything is better than going back to windows.

Of course, CATs such as Trados and MemoQ need to run in a VM, Parallels, but it is not so difficult, after installing and setting it up.

I understand that you need to buy windows and office to run Trados or MemoQ on Parallels.
I still don't understand why they aren't creating a version for Mac users, as now there are much more translators using
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I've been using MacBook Pro with 16 GB for 4 years and I'm satisfied. Everything is better than going back to windows.

Of course, CATs such as Trados and MemoQ need to run in a VM, Parallels, but it is not so difficult, after installing and setting it up.

I understand that you need to buy windows and office to run Trados or MemoQ on Parallels.
I still don't understand why they aren't creating a version for Mac users, as now there are much more translators using it.

I've both Studio 2017 and MemoQ and I've no doubt: MemoQ is much more translator-friendly, while Studio is more agency-friendly. And you have the same functions of Studio: you can receive a Studio package, open it and return it to the agency, importing and managing TM and TB.

To start you might also use Wordfast 5, which is Mac-compatible. But, there are a few functions of Studio that you cannot use, such as the return package.

That said, if you think there are good perspectives with that or other agencies, I would invest in Studio or MemoQ.
I think there are proposals for both CAT to buy it as a student or beginner.

Before buying one of them, give a look at all CATs and watch videos (there are many in their websites or online) to see which one is better for you and do the one-month trial. Also the layout is important, as it is the tool you'll work with for many hours per day.

Good luck and welcome in the translators world!
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Recommended hardware requirements for a MacBook to virtualize Windows and work with SDL Trados






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