Jan N 

Select Include with Text instead. Does it work?

Thank you but that doesn't change anything, works (or rather does not work) the same

Jan N 

The problem is that Trados Studio sees this placeholder at the start of the sentence and assumes (incorrectly in this case) that it's not needed in there as it's at the start anyway.  I'm not sure if this is intended behaviour or a bug, but I do think it should respect the "include" option - Patrik Mazanek fyi/comment?  If you view "All Content" instead of "All Segments" you'll see it and can move it in manually if needed:

One solution to this is to use tag pairs instead... lookahead for the opening and lookbehind for the closing.  For example:

That will get you this:

Not perfect but at least you have it automatically in segment and the content is locked.  Maybe that helps?

 Dear Paul ,

Thank you very much for looking into this. I'm aware about using the "All content" option, but it's not really convenient when preparing multiple languages, and it requires additional manual work either by us, or by our linguists.

The other option - lookahead/lookbehind - is very interesting. We probably won't use it in this scenario, but I was looking for a way to create the locked content for quite some time now, so finally I know how to do that - thank you very much! It's always great to learn something new.

As for the original issue - I think this is kind of a bug, as the option "Include" should simply work, that's why the option is there. But it might be somehow related to the formatting of the source document. If you select all text in Word and change the font to Courier New (for example), the "Include" option suddenly works well. I find it very interesting. We found two other ways how to make it work - which makes me think it has something to do with the formatting:

1. If we remove emojis from the paragraph, the "Include" option starts working

2. If we just type Starry Mice so it uses the same font and colour as the rest of the text, the "Include" option starts working correctly as well

This all seems to be as an issue somehow connected to the formatting of the source DOCX file. But in either case, I still think that the option "Include" should work by default regardless of formatting or other things.

Thank you again for your help with this one. If you come around anything more related to that, please let me know, as I'm curious ;)

With kind regards,

Jan

Without spending more time to debug in code, I would assume this is due the nesting, having tag pairs around which are "may exclude" and there is not text to really attach to.

My suggestion would be to use the "not translable styles" feature and mark the text to be excluded with it - that should simplify the structure, but of course needs to be tested.

Jan N Patrik Mazanek 

Good suggestion Patrik... it does mean having to prepare the source files beforehand which could be a pain, although I imagine reasonably easy to automate.  But it works quite well:

Dear Paul , how are you today?

Thank you again for looking into this. Would you mind explaining your thoughts further, or give me some idea what to look for?

Paul said:

prepare the source files beforehand

Could you please shortly explain what preparation do you have in mind? Is it about formatting? If so, I'm afraid that's not a good option since the client insists on keeping the formatting exactly as they prepared it. Such manual preparation (and then reverting files back) is quite risky and it also means a lot of manual work to make sure everything is fine in all the translated languages.

Styles - NoTranslate

Could you share more about this, please? I've found some topics on help and forums, but I'm not sure what exactly you did to process the file correctly.

Thank you in advance!

Jan

Dear Paul , how are you today?

Thank you again for looking into this. Would you mind explaining your thoughts further, or give me some idea what to look for?

Paul said:

prepare the source files beforehand

Could you please shortly explain what preparation do you have in mind? Is it about formatting? If so, I'm afraid that's not a good option since the client insists on keeping the formatting exactly as they prepared it. Such manual preparation (and then reverting files back) is quite risky and it also means a lot of manual work to make sure everything is fine in all the translated languages.

Styles - NoTranslate

Could you share more about this, please? I've found some topics on help and forums, but I'm not sure what exactly you did to process the file correctly.

Thank you in advance!

Jan

Jan N 

Jan N said:

Could you please shortly explain what preparation do you have in mind? Is it about formatting?

Yes.  It's about applying a style to the words/phrases you would like to be non-translatable.  You can create a style that is nothing more than a name and then use that name in Trados Studio to make it non-translatable.  Like this the formatting generally would not be affected.  For example, if the style was called "NoTranslate" as I used in the example, you would create the style and then select the word/phrase, then in the Styles pane, click on "NoTranslate". This applies the character style over the selected text without altering the underlying paragraph style.  You could of course search & replace the styles for the whole file in one go.

Once the translation is complete and you want to remove the NoTranslate styles just open the document in Word, then in the Styles pane, find the NoTranslate style, right-click on it and select Select All Instances.  Then press Ctrl+Spacebar to clear the character style while preserving the underlying paragraph style.

You could also do this all programmatically with a VB Macro which might be a more efficient approach.

If none of that is useful for you then another approach might be to try and use the Cleanup Tasks plugin from the AppStore - https://appstore.rws.com/Plugin/23

I'm not sure how effective that would be given the formatting already around most of your phrases, but it might be worth investigating if you're worried about the source documents.

Dear Paul ,

Thank you very much! We'll look into this further.

Have a good day,

Jan