Why text automatically becomes bold or italics in a Word file being translated by using Trados (Workbench)?

[21july1962]

Hello friends,

While trying to search for an easy WinAlign manual, I came to know about this website.  I have found that it contains many topics relating to Trados and therefore, I became its member.  It has a lot of material in Greek which I am not conversant with but still I find that it is a very useful and informative site.

I am a new user of Trados (Version 7.0) and I have Win XP Professional and Office 2003. I sometimes face a peculiar problem.  While translating a Word file with Workbench, the text automatically becomes bold, italics or superscribed when I open a new segment.  Sometimes, it is ok when I open and translate a new segment but when I move on to the next segment, the text in the previous segment automatically becomes bold or italics.  It is a very annoying problem.

Sometimes, I select the whole text and press "Clear Formatting" which fixes the problem but this is not a good way to tackle this problem as I have to reformat it after translation.

Could you tell me why it happens and what should be done to avoid this situation.

Regards,
Sanjeev

[spiros]

Hi Sanjeev,

There are many solutions to this. Usually, there is something wrong with the Word document formatting at the first place. You can simply paste your text in Wordpad/Notepad and then back to Word, to see if this fixes the issue.
Alternatively, you can also import the Word document to TagEditor (although you need a slighter later version of TagEditor to do this).

See also:
http://www.proz.com/forum/sdl_trados_support/133529-unwanted_bold_text_in_trados_with_word.html
http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.asp?threadid=13656&messageid=172720

[21july1962]

Hi Spiros,

Thanks so much for the informative links.  I'll read them and try to solve the problem.

Regards,

Sanjeev