Translating and correcting whole documents

What these features do

Task menu ▸ Translate Text/Files or Correct Text/Files

Instead of selecting section by section, you hand over a whole Word document or a folder full of them. Every file is processed in full.

You also reach the translation through Translate when you have nothing selected.

The original stays

Nothing is ever written into the source file. Beside each original a new file appears with a suffix in its name:

• For translation, a suffix for the target language, for example Contract_english.docx.
• For correction, the suffix _corrected, so Contract_corrected.docx.
• For correction, additionally a file with tracked changes so you can see what was changed.

The add-in shows you the naming scheme beforehand with an example.

The selection

.doc and .docx are processed. For a folder the add-in asks whether subdirectories should be included.

For translation you then choose the target language.

When results already exist

Run the feature a second time over the same folder and it finds last time's files and tells you how many. You then have two answers:

• Skip these documents – both the base file and its existing translation are skipped. Nothing happens to them.
• Delete translations and redo – the existing result files are deleted and produced again.

The second answer really does delete. If you have already made manual improvements to last week's translation, that work is gone. When in doubt, skip and move the old files out of the way first.

Result files with no original

If the add-in finds files that look like results but whose base file is missing, it asks whether those should be processed too – that is, whether an already translated file should be translated again.

That is almost never what you want. No, skip them is the right answer unless you know exactly why not.

The final confirmation

Before the start: "Ready to translate N document(s) into …. Continue?" Check the number. If it differs sharply from what you expected, you probably included subdirectories.

During the run

The display names the progress file by file. The operation can be cancelled; files produced up to that point remain.

Expect it to take time: each document is its own job, and long documents are processed in sections.

At the end

You get a summary: how many files succeeded, for translation the target language, whether comparison documents were created, and how many failed. The detailed log is in the clipboard.

Save the log if any files failed – it says which.

When individual files fail

• "Invalid DOCX structure" – the file is damaged or not really a DOCX.
• "No processable text found." – the document contains only images, tables with no text, or is empty.
• "Corrected, but the comparison document could not be created" – the corrected file is there, only the side-by-side view is missing.

What to check

With a whole folder the temptation to pass the result on unread is strong. Look at at least one file all the way through before you use the rest – above all headers and footers, footnotes, tables and captions. Those are the places a batch run typically misses or garbles.