As a professional translator and a Mac user, I’m quite familiar with Parallels Desktop and running a Windows virtual machine just to have access to the biggest, industry-standard computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, like Trados Studio and memoQ. I could spend hours moaning about the woes they cause me, but here I want to talk very briefly about the most recent problem that occurred to me.

After a few weeks of jobs that required web-based translation tools (like XTM, Smartling and Phrase, previously known as Memsource), I received a project to be completed in Trados. I turned on my VM, opened Trados 2021, set up the project and discovered, to my great annoyance, that the main Confirm keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Enter) wasn’t working anymore. Since the Enter key and copy-pasting shortcuts (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) worked correctly, I assumed it was a problem with Trados. After resetting the keyboard shortcuts – which didn’t work – I hastily blamed the software on Mastodon, created a different shortcut (Alt, or Option on Mac, + Plus key, which on an Italian keyboard layout is right next to the Enter key) and set to work.

This week I received another job that required a Windows-based software, in this case memoQ. I checked-out the job from the server, translated the first segment, pressed Ctrl+Enter and… nothing happened. “What the hell…?”.

This time though, right as I was setting up another memoQ shortcut, I remembered that when I tried to solve the problem that occurred in Trados about a month earlier I googled something like “trados ctrl key stopped working”. This time though it wasn’t working in memoQ, so it could only mean that the problem was somewhere else, between Windows and Parallels Desktop.

After a brief Google search, I found a topic on the Parallels forums reporting that a certain Windows update broke some Ctrl key shortcuts, which was corroborated by multiple users. As it happens, the solution is temporary but simple.

From the Parallels Desktop preferences, go to the Hardware tab, then Mouse & Keyboard and click Open Shortcut Preferences. Here, click on the + button and manually enter the MacOS shortcut and the equivalent Windows one.

The software is in Italian, but it’s quite self-explanatory.

Top: the keys that you press on your Mac keyboard. Bottom: the keyboard shortcut that should be mapped in Windows.

Apparently, only some installations run into this problem and fresh Windows installs are immune as well. Though this is a workaround and not a final fix, it’s good to know that for once it’s not Trados' fault. So… sorry Trados, you have many many problems and even pressing Ctrl+Enter twice too fast breaks you to pieces, but I’ll give you a pass this time.