A few weeks ago an agency client sent a German-English project with a few big Word files. In the job order, they specifically asked me to make sure to not delete any fields in the Word documents because that had happened in the past with other translators and it is a big pain for them.

Since I am using Trados Studio, I assumed that would not be a problem since the tags are displayed clearly and the QA Checker would catch any mistakes. I finished the job, ran the QA Checker and exported the documents without any problems. Or so it seems...

I wrote a simple C# program using the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word assembly and compared the fields between source and target docs. There is a way to count the fields in a Word document like this:

using Word = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;
using Document = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document;

var oWord = new Word.Application

string fileName = Path.GetFullPath("source directory" + "file name");

Document oDoc = oWord.Documents.Open(fileName);

// oDoc.Fields.Count is the number of fields in the current Word document
Console.WriteLine("oDoc.Fields.Count:" + oDoc.Fields.Count);

Unfortunately in many of the documents, there were less fields in the target docs compared to the source docs! I spent some time trying to figure out where the problem could lie. Maybe SDL Trados just deleted some junk fields? I couldn't find anything relevant that was missing between the files.

It turns out there is another way to count fields in a document inside of Microsoft Word by searching for "^d" (hidden text must be displayed for this to work). Using this counting technique, I found the same number of fields in the source and target docs.

My question: Any idea what is happening here? What fields could have gone missing? I deleted a lot of non-breaking hyphens, but that does not seem to be related.

Thanks!
Gary