Word file type excluding placeholder even with the "Include" settings

Question

Hello everyone, 
 I'd like to ask for your help. I have a source DOCX file with a product description. I have set the product name as a placeholder in the Word file type settings for embedded content, and made it "Include" the placeholder, as I need it to be a part of the text in all occurrences. Everything words OK when the placeholder is in the middle of a sentence, but there's one place where the sentence starts with the placeholder and despite the settings, Trados excludes it from the whole sentence. Please see the reference screenshots below. 
 Embedded content settings 
 
 Screenshot of the source DOCX file with marked problematic words 
 
 Trados preview - note that the "Starry Mice" placeholder is excluded in segment 6 
 
 Any ideas what went wrong, and how to achieve that the placeholder is treated under "Include" settings? 
 Thank you in advance for your help! 
 Jan 
 Sample source file 
 sample-text-starry-mice.docx

Jesús Prieto · Answer

Jan N 
 Select Include with Text instead. Does it work?

Paul · Answer

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?

Paul · Answer

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:

Paul · Answer

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.

Trados Studio > 5. Regex and XPath

Word file type excluding placeholder even with the "Include" settings