Satisfying the customer...

While translation is a major part of what I do, the job also involves beating documents into submission, um... the form the customer requires. A typical example of this is the document that is dropped in one's inbox in revision mode, with the instruction "make the translation match the original" (i.e., each respective deletion and insertion in the source should have a counterpart in the target).

This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds.

For one thing, most computer-aided translation tools either don't grok revision mode (crash!) or make deal-breaking assumptions (e.g., revisions are assumed to have been accepted). But leaving this issue aside (as well as the sad observation that there are plenty of revisors out there who really should not be allowed to sit down at a computer keyboard, which is a separate rant), not all revisions need necessarily be reflected, say, if they correct a minor, obvious grammatical error in the original text (this happens most often with Russian declensions).

Then there are times when the strange nature of the universe makes itself manifest.

Earlier today, I ran into a bunch of inserted revisions, the text of which—go figure—is already present in the previous version of the target text. The client's response to my "what-do-I-do-now" query was predictable: "Just make the translation match the original."

This basically means that, in each such case, I was to highlight the text in question and—with revisions turned off—cut the text, turn revisions on, and paste the text. To make the work go faster, I cobbled together a macro:

Sub ReinsertSelectionAsRevision()
'
  Dim myRV As Boolean
  myRV = ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions
  ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = False
  Selection.Cut
  ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = True
  Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdFormatOriginalFormatting)
  ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = myRV
End Sub

To minimize interference with "the Word environment," this macro first saves the state of revision mode in myRV before deactivating revision mode and doing the scut work, after which the state is restored to what it was before the macro was invoked.

While I am on the subject, here's a macro that toggles revision mode, making a noise whenever the mode has been made active:

Sub ToggleRevMode()
'
  ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = Not ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions
  If ActiveDocument.TrackRevisions = True Then Beep
End Sub

Cheers...