Paul,

You know troubleshooting with specific files ain't easy in this industry due to NDAs. All I can say is the file was really straightforward, with mostly just plain text in .docx (not a PDF conversion, to my knowledge).

How about we just jump back in time to 2015:

www.proz.com/.../280517-generated_translation_half_in_source_text_half_in_target_text.html

Same problem (with Studio 2009 - so, wow, it's been 10 years with the same unresolved problem now!). You posted in that thread then. Did the devs investigate into the problem at all throughout all those years? You know the problem has been occurring for many people, as it has for me (numerous times throughout the years, and always taking quite a lot of time to fix). I remember reading other peoples' posts some years ago with exactly the same problem. What conclusions did the devs arrive at?

Adrian Komiński 

Nothing is so straightforward.  These things are always due to something unexpected in the file and just because you see this same error message again it doesn't mean it's for the same reason.  If only life was that simple.

I have offerred to investigate this for you and can't do more than that.  For the development team to be able to fix anything we need to be able to verify that this is a really a problem that the software can be expected to be able to handle, this isn't always the case, and we need to be able to cut down the file to something that can do this for us so the dev team know where to focus their attention.

In reality it would probably be trivial for you to at least try the following if you would like us to investigate this:

1. Split the file until your left with a small section that behaves this way, then anonymize the text, or

2. Run a pseudo-translate on the file so the text is nonsense, save the target then anonymize what's not handled and send us the file

But it's your call Adrian.  We're trying to help.

Trados is what, 20 years old now? And you're telling me "there's always something unexpected" in files that you haven't been able to sort out for at least 10 years now? Jesus, how many scenarios can there be? Do you fire your entire dev team every year and then hire a new one, preventing the staff from gathering experience and keeping debugging records?


The thing is I don't really need your help per se - I had to do a time-wasting and disadvantageous workaround to meet the deadline, as always. Even if you helped me with this particular file, I would probably need help again some time in the future, when I run into "something unexpected". And this time, instead of wondering whether this is something "that the software can be expected to be able to handle", I'll just switch to more reliable competition (MemoQ), without looking back.

Tried to pseudo-translate the project but nothing came out of it. Do the segments need to be cleared first? 

Adrian Komiński 

A lot more scenarios than you might think. Studio is made up of millions of lines of code and we are always dealing with moving parts that can come from the operating system, third party software, the files you handle, and also from Studio itself. Just because you get the same headline message doesn't mean anything. I don't expect you to understand this as you are clearly not a developer, but I would ask you to keep the conversation more civil.

You brought up the problem. I responded and offerred to help you find the source of it. If you are not interested then fair enough.

Yes... if you have already got translations in there then you nneed to clear them first.

There is no headline message - there is only one symptom, and that is text suddenly going original mid-file, for no apparent reason. Had there at least been an error message… but no, Trados leaves you with a worthless export and that's it. Good luck with fixing that. Super frustrating.

Of course there can be different scenarios, files, etc. but there are also patterns, as with any software - and there's the dev team that's supposed to determine and troubleshoot them. This is not early 1980s, for heaven's sake, and this is not noobish freeware.

Find attached the problematic (target) file. I deleted almost all the original text left behind in the target file, leaving only two or so segments for proof.

troubleshooting file.docx

Adrian Komiński 

Please can you tell me how to reproduce this problem. I opened the file, pseudo-translated again but this time used dollar symbols so any missing text would stand out and the entire contents of the file gets translated.

You probably need to clarify a few things:

1. Which version of the Word filetype are you using?
2. Did you do anything like try to reuse an old project template from a previous version
3. Which part of the file is being left untranslated?

It might be helpful for someone else to verify this to avoid any thoughts I might be doing something special. It's clear to me that the problem is not a general one and in many ways illustrates the sort of problems we have to filter out. We need proper steps to reproduce so we know exactly what you did to cause this effect.