Never underestimate what can be "done" in Word...

[alexpgp]

You would think, after doing this for over three decades, that I have pretty much seen every sort of idiocy committed using Microsoft Word.

And you'd be wrong.

A job came in to make the English version of a document, look like the marked-up Russian translation of that document that had recently been returned by the Russian commenters. There was actually not all that much translation, but a super-tanker load of things to highlight in one of four different colors, perhaps with strikeout applied, or underlining.

Things went fairly smoothly until I began to run into honest-to-Cthulhu revisions (in the sense of having been done with "Track Changes" enabled).

The first problem was that the stuff that was shown as having been added to the Russian document already existed in the English document. That's barely explainable.

The second problem was that some of the stuff that had been added then had the strikeout text attribute applied, which made the text look like a deletion. (I found this out by experimenting with the "Accept Change" button; clicking it after one of these strange constructs had been highlighted by hitting "Next" did not cause the text to disappear—it just changed color to black, the underscore went away, and the text remained with the strikeout line through it.)

But the job is done and out the door. More work has come in, some of which I had to send back.

I've been going at this for far too long, today. I need to take a rest.

Cheers...

Comments

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

Amazing! I've never seen such an idiocy before either...
memoQ is quite good with these font and colour changes, as long as you place the tags correctly.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

That might be something to consider, although in cases like this, it's doubtful I'd have the appropriate source–target segments in a memoQ database.

I'm noticing that memoQ does a great job with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint files.

Apropos of which, I just loaded the current job into memoQ and decided to go with Wordfast instead (perhaps a case of "stick with the devil you know," but there it is).

Cheers...

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

I've found a way to deal with proofreading in memoQ - first, you need to load the file into a TM (it can be a new and temporary TM if you don't want to use your main one). Then load the source language text into the program, and run the pre-translate function. The segments will get populated, and you can proofread them to your heart's content.

I usually do this for dual column (dual language) Excel spreadsheets, especially if there is a lot of text in each cell. It's easier on the eyes.