Under Community Review

Allow columns in Word document tables to be specified for Studio source and target

I am often presented with Microsoft Word documents for translation, in which there are two or more columns, with the source in one column and a semi-translated "target" in another column. Translating only the source in Studio does not present a problem - you can hide columns and so on to get what you need. 

However, it is difficult or, in many cases, impossible to wrangle both the source and an existing "target" Word column (which already contains some translations), into the source and target columns of Studio respectively, especially if you want to preserve the formatting.

 

There is a well known workaround that consists of converting the Word file to a Microsoft Excel file, but if you have multiple sentences per table cell, these usually end up as different rows in Excel, which causes its own problems. Formatting also gets lost.

I envisage a dialog box (or a filetype definition) whereby Studio allows you to specify the source and target columns, in a way similar to that used by the existing Bilingual Excel filetype. There would probably have to be restrictions, at least initially, such as only the first table in the file being processed, but it would still I think be of considerable value.

This is an issue that comes up frequently on ProZ.com, as well as on SDL's forum. I think it would be very useful addition to the toolbox.

  • Indeed, some clients and some tool manufacturers prefer DOCX tables over XLIFF (for bilingual text exports) for "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" reasons, where layout is immediately visible without XSL stylesheet.

    So this new "Bilingual Word" filter might be an option for some clients. For instance, the e-learning software 'Articulate Storyline' also offers a DOCX export option (although a monolingual table only).

    The risk is that people might start to edit Studio DOCX Bilingual Review documents this way, which would be somehow weird.