I have a client who sends me work in the form of a single large table in Microsoft Word. (No, I cannot influence them to do otherwise, before anybody asks. They are not CAT tool users.) Typically this is a three column table with an identifier in the first column, the source in the second column and the target text in the third column. The table may contain empty cells and rows, and the first column is only sparsely populated.

In most cases the text the client would like me to translate is highlighted in the source column. The target column already contains much text that has been translated. The client would like me to put my translated text in the target column to replace the Japanese text already there.

As far as I can see, copying this to Microsoft Excel does not help, partly because I seem to lose all the highlighting, and partly because tables with cells containing returns end up becoming separate rows in Excel. So using the Bilingual Excel filetype route doesn't seem viable.

The "hide target column text and copy source to new target column" trick does not work here either because the source and target columns are different, so the existing translations in the target column will be lost.

So, I am stumped. Ultimately I think I'm just going to have to use the column copy trick and leave it to the client to copy and paste things back and forth. This is obviously not going to please the client too much and, longer term, I will probably have to think about how I work with them going forward.

The broader issue is that I have googled this and there are dozens of people asking similar questions about importing Microsoft Word tables, on ProZ and elsewhere. I don't know what SDL's focus groups are saying, but it is clear there is a common problem and it is also clear that in some cases the existing workarounds don't work around.

I, and I believe many others, would be very happy to see an import filter that allowed me to pick columns in Word as part of the Studio import process and use them in a project.

My question to SDL is this: why this isn't already a feature in Studio. Is there some kind of technical problem that makes the importing of tables from Microsoft Word challenging? I know that when SDL looked at the "filtering by format" issue they found it was much more complex than they had initially expected, and certainly the add-on that resulted from this laudable effort just doesn't work for me most of the time. Is this a similar case, in that it is just such a can of worms that the likely costs are not perceived to justify the benefits?

My question to other forum participants is whether they can see anyway for me to work around the document I need to translate...

Regards,
Dan