And what's the problem with changing the format only after translation?!

And no, the requirement for pictures being linked as external resources is not strange at all, it's perfectly legit requirement. For publishing purposes, pictures embedded in text should be rather considered a sin...

Excellent... don't know why I didn't think of that!!

Excellent... don't know why I didn't think of that!!

Thanks to you both for responding, and yes, I'm using Trados 2019. I have been trying out your suggestion, Paul, and it's fine, just requires quite a bit of manual formatting because the plain text needs to be copied and pasted into Word, i.e. can't just be saved as Word format. And then line spacing and paragraphing need to be re-established. (One learns something new every day!) 

And I guess, Evzen, I wasn't thinking of changing the format after translation as a first option because I thought that would take longest of all - for me, the choice now is between using Trados for this project and not using it. But I'll give your suggestion a go as well, maybe it won't take as long as I feared. The pictures are not to be linked as external resources, rather, they are not to be linked at all - I guess the translated version may be intended to look quite different from the original.

Interesting to come across a situation where one of the great strengths of a CAT tool is exactly what isn't wanted - the reason I commented 'strange' - but maybe a future version of the program might even include this option... !? 

Next conundrum will be that the author wants translators' notes directly in the file rather than as separate document... am guessing that this will also need to be transferred manually into the target file - and may ultimately be the reason not to use Trados for this...

Thanks again for your time! :-)

Why not use "Export for external review" then? It creates a simple Word file with 3 columns. So you would need to remove the first 2 columns, then convert table to text and maybe run a simple search & replace for the codes (tags) in text. As the tags are red and the whole other text is simple plain black, the S&R will take seconds... This way you will have a plain text in a Word file, which is then very simple to reformat as needed, if needed. As for the comments - these would remain as comments in the Word file too.