Word-fu...

[alexpgp]

Problem: You have a one-column table having a fixed and large number of rows, where some of the rows contain information to be translated. The row above each row with information to be translated has been left blank. The final product shall display the translations in the row immediately above the row in which individual pieces of information are located (i.e., the final product shall be bilingual).

Using a translation memory tool such as Wordfast, one can easily arrive at a result consisting of a translated table, i.e., given the following source table:

source A

source B

source C

it is easy enough to obtain this:

target A

target B

target C

The question is, how to get this:

target A

source A

target B

source B

target C

source C

Solution: Remove the blank row at the top of and add a blank row at the bottom of the target table. Copy the result and paste it as a column next to the source column. This is the result:

	target A
source A
	target B
source B
	target C
source C

Then convert the table to text, making sure there are no paragraph marks in the table (if there are any, search and replace with some innocuous character, e.g., '^') and separating text with a character, e.g., '@', to get:

@target A
source A@
@target B
source B@
@target C
source C@

Now convert this text to a single-column table, separating text at paragraph marks, and then use search-and-replace to get rid of the '@' characters. The result will be the desired table.

Half of this job isn't knowing the language, it's using the tools.

Cheers...