Hi Richard,
This may well be your personal preference - yet SDL Trados clearly recommend to leave source text and tags visible during interactive translation.
Richard Walker wrote:
Umm...Actually I think the advice is opposite. In Word, go to Tools>Options>Display and turn OFF hidden text if you want to see your final product without the clutter.
Which is exactly what I do as well - but only once translation is complete, and I look at spelling, layout, etc.
While leaving the source text and tags displayed may be one way of translating, I find it distracting, ugly and a disruption to layout. It also interferes with other useful functions, like automatic capitalization at the beginning of a sentence, and it slows Word down in long, complex documents because it gives the software double the amount to position and paginate.
That's precisely why Trados recommend to work in 'Normal' view.
By definition, the only time you can really damage tags is if you're editing at the edge of a unit (ie, the beginning or ending of a sentence), so you just learn to be careful in those situations or make it a general policy to open the translation unit before editing. Quite simple. And if, god forbid, a tag gets damaged (which is depressingly hard with recent versions of Trados), it's easy enough to fix things at the end--search for "hidden text" and bang the delete key. Problem solved.
In that case, you would not incorporate any changes made to the damaged unit (usually, this affects units following in the same paragraph) into your TM.
I have no problem with your preference - after all, everyone must choose the way in which they can work most efficiently - I just wouldn't qualify it as a general recommendation.
Best regards,
Ralf