Word 2003 spontaneously changes language on specific text

[CAP]

Working with a large document (> 400 pages) written by many authors over
several years. Broke file into pieces and am now putting those pieces back
together again in a new file.

Track changes is enabled. For reasons that elude me, the language selection
for specific text (sometimes paragraphs, sometimes words/phrases, sometimes
table cells) spontaneously changes from English to another language (e.g.,
German) or from another language (e.g., French or German) back to English. It
doesn't happen on everything, only on the same specific text again (and again
and again).

One place this is happening is at the start of the document which has the
word "Contents", a blank line, then the TOC. The formatting codes at the
start of the file start with the Contents line and cover about 15 of the
first 30 lines in the 3 level TOC. This happens without updating the TOC,
adding/deleting anything on the referenced pages, etc.

I've tried clearing formatting and then reselecting my styles, but that
doesn't stop this behavior.

Thanks for your help.

 

[grammatim]

Did you select the entire document (Ctrl-A) and Set Language to, say,
US English? (Tools > Language > Set Language)

Maybe some of the pieces were written by authors in other countries
with different default language settings.

Maybe that really annoying "Detect language automatically?" thing is
turned on.

 

[CAP]

Grammatim,

Thanks for responding.

I have selected the entire document and set the language to US English.
Then, I changed specific things to other languages. "Detect language
automatically" is enabled and the strange updates appeared to stop when I
purposely disabled that (it is hard to tell for sure since my doc is so
large).

What is driving me crazy is that some of the things which I have
intentionally set to German, French or Spanish spontaneously change back to
English and some things that I have intentionally (and repeatedly) set to
English are changing (generally, to French). The TOC part of that is really
annoying.

Thanks, CAP