Tag Editor: corrupted .doc file Thread poster: Cristina Cajoto
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Hello everyone,
I have been using Trados 7 Freelance for only three months, and last week I had a problem with a .doc file that I am very worried about. The document was quite large (1 MB) and contained lots of text boxes, so I translated it with Tag Editor instead of Workbench. After I had translated the whole document, I saved the target text as a .doc file, which seemed to work fine, but when I opened this file the text was a complete mess: it was all out of place and there was e... See more Hello everyone,
I have been using Trados 7 Freelance for only three months, and last week I had a problem with a .doc file that I am very worried about. The document was quite large (1 MB) and contained lots of text boxes, so I translated it with Tag Editor instead of Workbench. After I had translated the whole document, I saved the target text as a .doc file, which seemed to work fine, but when I opened this file the text was a complete mess: it was all out of place and there was even some text missing. When I was checking the file, I suddenly got a message saying that the file was corrupted and it had to be closed. I repeated the whole process several times, and I even used a different computer, in case this was the problem, but it didn't work. Do you have any idea why this could happen? I am worried about my future translations: I regularly receive very large power point documents, which I was planning on translating with Tag Editor, but I obviously don't want this to happen again.
Has this ever happened to you? Do you think the size of the document might be the reason for this?
Thank you very much for your help.
Cristina. ▲ Collapse
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Pavel Blann 
Czech Republic
Local time: 09:30
English to Czech
SITE LOCALIZER | ms office version | Jan 30, 2008 |
hi cristina,
pls. have a look at FileFormatsRef_en.pdf in the Doc folder under your Trados installation directory and check if you use a compatible version of ms office.
good luck,
pavel
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Cristina Cajoto
Local time: 09:30
Member
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | No, I'm afraid it's not that | Jan 31, 2008 |
Hi Pavel,
Thank you very much for your post. I've done what you've told me and yes, my Trados version supports Microsoft Office files, so that's not the answer. I think the reason must be the formatting of the word file, with lots of text boxes, but how do I know where the limit is? I mean, what can and can't I translate with Tag Editor?
Thank you.
Cristina.
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Pavel Blann
Czech Republic
Local time: 09:30
English to Czech
SITE LOCALIZER | file preparation | Feb 1, 2008 |
hi cristina,
ok, let's assume you have trados 2006 (v.7.5) and word 2000 (v.9), xp (v.10), or 2003 (v.11) supported by it.
have you read chapter 9 of the reference I mentioned before, i.e. have you prepared the .doc file before using the tageditor?
cheers,
pavel
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| The best way to know is testing in advance | Feb 1, 2008 |
Thank you very much for your post. I've done what you've told me and yes, my Trados version supports Microsoft Office files, so that's not the answer. I think the reason must be the formatting of the word file, with lots of text boxes, but how do I know where the limit is? I mean, what can and can't I translate with Tag Editor?
How do you know where the limit is? Following the advice included in the document that Pavel has mentioned:
"Test the Word documents by performing a round trip from Word to TTX and back to
Word in TagEditor."
Having said that, I must say I have recently have a similar problem.
We had to translate an MS Word document with lots of text boxes. I did the test conversion and in the resulting Word file some of the text boxes were placed in different pages, making the document look very messy.
I could not determine the reason why this was happening, so I will have to contact SDL support if I want to know...
Daniel
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| lots of text boxes ... | Feb 2, 2008 |
dgmaga wrote:
We had to translate an MS Word document with lots of text boxes. I did the test conversion and in the resulting Word file some of the text boxes were placed in different pages, making the document look very messy.
When I read "We had to translate an MS Word document with lots of text boxes" I'm wondering about the "history" of such a document. In most cases where I see such terrible word documents that do not work with TRADOS (or any other translation memory system) properly, the doc was created from a PDF. That is, the client or - unfortunately too often - a project manager in a translation agency simply accepted the PDF the client send and saved the PDF as DOC. This is usually why there are tons of text boxes in a doc, because Acrobat Plug-ins try to "rebuild" the PDF layout as close as possible with the tools Word provides. And as word is a running textflow orientated application and not a page layout and dtp software, the only chance is to fake layout using words terrific text boxes too.
However, Word is not QuarkXPress, Word is not InDesign, Word is not PageMaker, FrameMaker, CorelDRAW or whatsoever. I'm always "really surprised" (well, ...) to see that some clients seem to think, that such horrible word documents can survive the translation supply chain. Everyone in the industry who tries to rely on a workflow like "Source App -> PDF -> Doc -> TMS -> Doc -> Source App" is either completely unaware of the technical possibilities and best practices, has far too much time and money, or there is a fundamental problem in partner communication (beside the few cases where only PDFs exists due to Source Application Document (SAD) loss).
My suggestion is always, to ask the client for the Source Application Document (SAD), e.g for the original InDesign document. Then process the files with the application specific Trados workflows. However, we and the clients should not expect that there is any reliable chance that e.g. a Mac QuarkXPress Document that was saved to PDF, converted from PDF to DOC on a PC, translated with a TMS will result in a re-usable translation and a project success.
Kind regards,
Stefan Gentz
[Bearbeitet am 2008-02-02 03:48]
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Cristina Cajoto
Local time: 09:30
Member
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Thank you very much for your help | Feb 4, 2008 |
I'll now be careful to test and re-test every file before using Trados.
In my case, I think the file did not come from a .pdf but was an original .doc file: I suppose I could advise my customer not to use Word for this type of files, with text boxes, etc.
Regards,
Cristina.
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| Text boxes as design feature | Feb 4, 2008 |
Stefan Gentz wrote:
When I read "We had to translate an MS Word document with lots of text boxes" I'm wondering about the "history" of such a document. In most cases where I see such terrible word documents that do not work with TRADOS (or any other translation memory system) properly, the doc was created from a PDF.
Yes, I have seen quite a few of them, unfortunately. Another nice feature they often have is the incredible number of different styles that the conversion creates.
In my case, the author was just using MS Word as if it was a DTP application to create a nice page layout. That's why they put all the text in text boxes...
Daniel
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