Wordfast LLC has been working together with Translations.com for two years now on the development of compatible translation tools. As announced in yesterday’s press release, both companies have decided to strengthen their alliance by merging their marketing programmes, working on tighter product integration and expanding their collaborative efforts to include another new partner, Alchemy Software Development.

As a long-term end-user of Wordfast, this news doesn’t particularly mean that much to me if it’s not going to speed up the release of the new Wordfast version. Ever since Microsoft dumped all Visual Basic support in its Office 2008 packet—at least until the next time around—, Mac users like myself have been forced to trudge along with Word 2004 in order to keep using our Wordfast macros. The new platform-independent, Java-based Wordfast 6.0 version is therefore very warmly welcomed. Originally, the rumour mill had it that 6.0 was to be released in Q3 this year. Yet since the summer, things have been mum with Yves Champollion, head of Wordfast. Let’s hope that the development of 6.0 will be given precedence despite the efforts currently being made in the name of marketing and product integration. Until then, we’ll have to sit back and wait while dealing with the aggravation of working with Word 2004 on a daily basis. Or I suppose we could migrate to Swordfish or Heartsome…