When text boxes are used in the documents I translate, it's always purely for layout purposes. The author just wants these words to be grouped off over here. The problem is that Word doesn't treat them like part of the document. When I Select All (to change language, to restore any formatting that has been altered by copy-pasting or translation memory) and when I search and replace (to save time, to ensure phraseological consistency, to fix any suboptimal translations I made early in the text for which better translations occurred to me later on), it doesn't include the text boxes in the process. This wastes my time and increases the likelihood of human error. I really would like Select All to mean All, including text boxes.
I don't know if there are actually legitimate uses for text boxes where the user would specifically want them to be treated as though they weren't part of the document as a whole, but I've never seen one in the wide variety of texts my clients produce, in two years doing tech support, or in all my years in school. If people do need text boxes to be treated separately, they should at least have a "Select All including text boxes and everything, really" option.
4 comments:
It would be useful. It could be a special option like "paste as unformatted text" (which more people should use).
I don't know if this would be helpful, because you have to do this for each text box in the document, but at least in more recent versions of Word, you can right-click the edge of the text box, select Format Object, select the Text Box tab, and click the Convert to Frame button. This lets you keep the text sitting in a box, but the text is now inline and will be included when you Select All and when you do a global search.
It might make it worth investing a few minutes before you start working on a document to go through and convert all text boxes to frames.
Though I agree there is absolutely no reason for Word to make this distinction.
L-girl: paste as unformatted is the only thing I've ever felt the need to make a macro for. Lots of translators have armies of macros, but that's the only one I've ever needed.
M@: That could work in some cases, thanks! In some cases it wouldn't be worth it because we have to change it back at the end (changing client formatting is a no-no, even if realistically the client wouldn't care), but I think it would be useful in some cases.
L-girl: paste as unformatted is the only thing I've ever felt the need to make a macro for.
The newest version of Word that we use at work has a button for it. I love it.
Post a Comment