2012-08-01

Cleaning up messy tags in Microsoft Word documents

Some years ago there was considerable frustration among users of translation environment tools who encountered increasing numbers of irrelevant markers (also known as tags or codes) in the documents they translated. These might appear{1}around{2} words or even in the mid{3}dle of them, causing terms not to be recognized and matches in translation memories to fail or be downgraded. This problem is particularly acute with OCR documents, but it can occur in perfectly "normal" RTF, DOC or DOCX files as well.

Many complained about the problem, and providers of translation tools made excuses and avoided dealing with the matter for the most part until one gifted translator with formidable programming skills for macros in Microsoft Word came to the rescue. Dave Turner's CodeZapper collection has probably been one of the most useful support tools for handling RTF, DOC and DOCX files in CAT tools that the market has seen in many years. It has literally saved me hundreds of hours of trouble since I started using the macros.

If you work often with Microsoft Word documents in Trados, WordFast, memoQ and other environments, it is very much worth your while to learn how to use CodeZapper. It is so useful in fact that Atril integrated it in the release of its latest working environment, Déjà Vu X2, as an import option. I hope that other will eventually follow suit.

The collection also contains other useful macros (for tidying up PDF converted files, temporarily moving bulky pictures out and back into files to speed up import, etc.). No installation as such is required. The template file can be copied to the Startup folder of Microsoft Word or loaded from the templates and add-ins folder.

Detailed information on CodeZapper and how to get it can be found here:
http://www.asap-traduction.com/CodeZapper