Organizing two language versions within one document

[Michael Müller]

There should be a way to keep two versions in one word document. The main
rule would be only use paragraphs pair wise. For every headline style a
pair, for all body text a pair. For the output language A you get a macro to
make language B as hidden text and for the other language the other way
around.

My question is, if there already is some kind of VBA application to handle
that kind of task?

Michael Müller

 

[Robert M. Franz]

Hello Michael

There should be a way to keep two versions in one word document. The main
rule would be only use paragraphs pair wise. For every headline style a
pair, for all body text a pair. For the output language A you get a macro to
make language B as hidden text and for the other language the other way
around.

What kind of benefits are you seeing in such a setup?

Greetings
Robert

 

[Michael Müller]

What kind of benefits are you seeing in such a setup?

I think it makes no sense at a straight through translation, but when I work
in the future on updating one editions I see the changes in the Word
tracking mode in one paragraph and I think it would be very transparent to
make the necessary changes right to next paragraph.



Michael

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I think it makes no sense at a straight through translation, but when I work
in the future on updating one editions I see the changes in the Word
tracking mode in one paragraph and I think it would be very transparent to
make the necessary changes right to next paragraph.

I should think that if you type the dual doc, in a linear fashion, then you
should be able to use macros to do what you want. Wouldn't the macro
PrintLanguageB just need to find text formatted as language A, format it as
hidden, print, then undo the formatting? And vice versa?

Find and Select Found material should also let you easily export each
language to a new doc.

This sounds quite doable in Word as is, unless I am missing something.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Michael,

Another possibility would be two sets of styles (one for each language).
Then create two templates in which one set is formatted as "hidden", and attach those templates as needed (Tools > Templates and
Add-Ins).

Greetings,
Klaus

 

[Robert M. Franz]

Hi Michael

I think it makes no sense at a straight through translation, but when I work
in the future on updating one editions I see the changes in the Word
tracking mode in one paragraph and I think it would be very transparent to
make the necessary changes right to next paragraph.

OK, I see your line of thought. Interesting thread, in any case. I just
don't like the idea of keeping everything in one Word document (the way
Klaus describes with hidden text: effectively the content is n-fold with
n languages), since DOC is sometimes fragile enough.

I have vague ideas of using XML "text files" for the content and load
them with Word, but I have never implemented a setup like that so far.

Greetings
Robert