ah.. found it

It is not related with the Merge

It is the problem of "some kind of MS Word vertical arrangement", I guess..

It is a TABLE, the height of CELL has restriced with unknown reason.

Just let it go, then you will be happy again

Bye..

hmm, I am not good at this kind of tedious manual job - I prefer to use VBA.

You'd better do it "One Go" style, I mean...  find "All Select TABLE" something and do the procedures I mentioned above.. OK ?

Good Luck To You

if you want..

Dim myTable
If ActiveDocument.Tables.Count > 0 Then
For Each myTable In ActiveDocument.Tables
myTable.Rows.HeightRule = wdRowHeightAuto
Next
End If

Unknown said:

It is a TABLE, the height of CELL has restriced

That's EXACTLY what I thought when I saw the original post the first time...
And that's what also Jerzy asked right away...

So the whole story is rather about lack of user Word skills than a Studio problem.

SDL Trados Studio's translated final docx has lots of "<w:trPr><w:trHeight w:val="someFigure" w:hRule="exact"/></w:trPr>" element.

I my opinion it is NEEDLESS.

And it is the root cause of SDL Preview's unusual behavior too.

So, if possible, it should be disappearead. 

If that is in the source file as well, Studio MUST NOT remove it.
And yes, if that is in the source file, the source file is formatted stupidly not localization friendly, as also already mentioned in this thread.

So again, not a Studio problem in fact.

This is entirely a Studio problem, since

1. a) the original source xliff/project was made by Studio and
2. b) the target file, also produced by Studio, is also coming out wrong when segments are merged.

To say "the whole story is rather about lack of user Word skills than a Studio problem" shows a complete ignorance of the process:

• As with many projects worldwide, a pdf was machine translated and the bilingual file sent to me for post-editing.
• IE at no stage was there ever any "user Word skills" involved in the xliff file sent to me.
• The machine translation was obviously done by machine and the file created was created by Studio.

Second, DL Trados Studio's translated final docx is also necessarily nothing to do with a user and everything to with Trados.

Equally, if the source file [created by Trados] has these errors, why were thy not flagged up by Trados when the source xliff was created?

If "the source file is formatted not localization friendly", why?

Why has Trados not caught this?

Finally, regardless of all this, the fact remains that while the merged segments work in most cases, the translator will see the translation as perfect in the editor view of Trados, but will only know about this problem by generating a preview.

Clearly this fact alone is entirely a Trados problem and nothing to do with the user or with word: Trados [not the user, not Word] shows the translation as complete in the editor view, but not in the preview.

easy, my friend

you are quite right

"Machines are idiot" including the most advanced DeepLearning and AbyssLearning WhatSoEver...

It needs smart people's touch, just like you.

And never mind biased opinions, just ignore it.

Regards

it is hard to say as a BUG, but it is very clear that something should be done form SDL side not from user side. 

John Kingsmore

Thanks for the "sample" file.  I created the sort of file I was looking for from your file by saving the source, editing the source and then using that.  File attached so you can see what I was getting at:

small_test.docx

The conclusions I can draw from this are these:

1. The docx is really poorly prepared so I 100% agree with Evzen here.  You for example see that these two rows are on completely different table rows... separate paragraphs:
   
   
   
   And here, the second part of the sentence is a header and also part of a separate table row and different paragraph:
   
   
   
   
2. Studio should still be able to handle the preview in my opinion.

You can sort of see what's happening since a merge with the initial preview shows the highlighted segment of the first one even after the merge took place and it doesn't pick up the fact that there is more text there.  So the link between the original source file where this is a completely separate table row is still there and the preview associates the merged text with the second row in the table and not this segment.  As soon as you refresh the preview it won't see this additional text at all:

So yes, the document that has been presented is a terrible (or really good) example of a file given to anyone to localize when they are using a CAT tool that really does care about formatting to the extent Studio does.  But sometimes I think Studio needs a "lenient mode" where it's a little more forgiving to make the translation process easier for the translators since we will never change the ability of our clients, or many translators (by this I mean technical ability AND the time they have available to turn the translation around), to be able to fix a document like before translating.  Might be worth looking at the tools being used for the PDF conversion though as there may be much better ones available that don't put things into lots of tables like this.  I think I've seen some free online PDF converters do things like this and in these cases it would be simply better to hand the PDF to the translator since most CAT tools can do a better job handled the right way.

It's also another very good example of why we never supported merge across paragraphs before as it can present some challenges because of the way Studio handles paragraphs to provide additional information to the user that most CAT tools don't.

I'll log this example as a bug and let you know when I have some comment on this from the deveopment team.

John Kingsmore said:

This is entirely a Studio problem, since

1. a) the original source xliff/project was made by Studio and
2. b) the target file, also produced by Studio, is also coming out wrong when segments are merged.

Sorry man, but this clearly indicates that you have no idea about the technicalities behind the whole story and therefore make totally wrong conclusions.

First of all, if you would mention right at the beginning that the source was a PDF, the entire discussion would have been MUCH shorter!

It's notoriously known that PDF as a source is evil and very bad idea.
PDF was ALWAYS meant ONLY FOR VISUAL CONSUMPTION and NEVER meant for editing... therefore it lacks some information needed for editing... therefore the applications attempting to edit PDFs have to GUESS these information since they have no way to know the original intentions of the creator of the actual source format from which the PDF was created... and therefore the result is way too often just as sh*tty as in your case.

It's also notoriously known that Studio uses 3rd party automatic PDF-to-DOCX conversion behind the scenes.
Since it's automatic, the above paragraph applies...
And since it's 3rd party, Studio has no way to influence the result... hence it's NOT Studio problem.

Second, it's also notoriously known and mentioned everywhere that the intermediate DOCX file coming from the automated conversion should be manually edited and cleaned from the sh*t before stuffing it to any localization software (i.e. not only Studio!!!).
So yes, it's indeed about lack of user knowledge (either knowledge about the required cleaning, or the knowledge WHAT and HOW to clean)....

And third, the entire problem has nothing to do with merging segments in fact, the same issue - caused by the sh*tty Word source! - can be seen without merging as well.
The preview DOES contain the entire text, indeed... it's just not/hardly visible due to the fixed table row height.
The following screenshot shows the hard-to-see artifacts of the remaining text without any merging, just previewing the SDLXLIFF you posted.

John Kingsmore said:

This is entirely a Studio problem, since

1. a) the original source xliff/project was made by Studio and
2. b) the target file, also produced by Studio, is also coming out wrong when segments are merged.

Sorry man, but this clearly indicates that you have no idea about the technicalities behind the whole story and therefore make totally wrong conclusions.

First of all, if you would mention right at the beginning that the source was a PDF, the entire discussion would have been MUCH shorter!

It's notoriously known that PDF as a source is evil and very bad idea.
PDF was ALWAYS meant ONLY FOR VISUAL CONSUMPTION and NEVER meant for editing... therefore it lacks some information needed for editing... therefore the applications attempting to edit PDFs have to GUESS these information since they have no way to know the original intentions of the creator of the actual source format from which the PDF was created... and therefore the result is way too often just as sh*tty as in your case.

It's also notoriously known that Studio uses 3rd party automatic PDF-to-DOCX conversion behind the scenes.
Since it's automatic, the above paragraph applies...
And since it's 3rd party, Studio has no way to influence the result... hence it's NOT Studio problem.

Second, it's also notoriously known and mentioned everywhere that the intermediate DOCX file coming from the automated conversion should be manually edited and cleaned from the sh*t before stuffing it to any localization software (i.e. not only Studio!!!).
So yes, it's indeed about lack of user knowledge (either knowledge about the required cleaning, or the knowledge WHAT and HOW to clean)....

And third, the entire problem has nothing to do with merging segments in fact, the same issue - caused by the sh*tty Word source! - can be seen without merging as well.
The preview DOES contain the entire text, indeed... it's just not/hardly visible due to the fixed table row height.
The following screenshot shows the hard-to-see artifacts of the remaining text without any merging, just previewing the SDLXLIFF you posted.

Evzen Polenka said:

John Kingsmore said:

This is entirely a Studio problem, since

1. a) the original source xliff/project was made by Studio and
2. b) the target file, also produced by Studio, is also coming out wrong when segments are merged.

Sorry man, but this clearly indicates that you have no idea about the technicalities behind the whole story and therefore make totally wrong conclusions.

I don't disagree with you that the source is poor, but in general I agree with John and I think we should be able to handle this better.  I don't think it is the job of translators to understand the technicalities in the same a way a seasoned localization engineer would.  If Studio was sold as a tool designed only for these specialists I think you might have a point, but it's not.  So I personally think we should fix this.

I beg to disagree a bit. The translators must know, how the tool works and they MUST know, what happens with a PDF file, when it is simply thrown on Studio without taking care about the post processing. The life has changed and we live in 21st century. But TBH the "translators not understanding technicalities" was never valid. Even as we translated from paper, you had to know how formatting in Word works. Now things got more complicated and we have to deal with many more formats than just plain paper. Understanding how your tool works is a necessary prerequisite to deliver high quality translation. Otherwise you deliver crap - even if the translation as such is lingusticaly OK.

There is no excuse for translator not to know the tool used. Exactly as there is no excuse to a nurse not knowing how to enter the data of the patient in her computer. If other processions can learn using computer to their need, I do not see why should translators be excused here.

Jerzy Czopik said:

I beg to disagree a bit. The translators must know, how the tool works and they MUST know, what happens with a PDF file, when it is simply thrown on Studio without taking care about the post processing.

Well, this is an interesting twist ;-)  Translators telling us we don't need to fix something!!

It is certainly a good idea for everyone to learn as much as they can about their software, but that doesn't excuse the software from being able to make this easier and reduce the effort required to mirror the source files provided.  Just because the source files are a poor conversion does not excuse the software from being able to handle them.  We can extract the text ok, so it seems logical that we should be able to preview it and save the target too.

Let's keep this to a discussion on this specific problem... I doubt we disagree about the rest.

IMO, SDL made a kind of mistake when they implemented this "easy for translator" process for translating PDFs.
Something what perhaps originally looked like a competitive advantage turned very quickly to a pain-in-the-ass...

If I would be a product manager, I would seriously think about removing this feature....

Paul Filkin said:

Translators telling us we don't need to fix something!!

But well, there is really nothing to fix... everything works just fine, as I just showed...

Paul Filkin said:

it seems logical that we should be able to preview it and save the target too

But you DO show it in preview and you DO save it in the target too...
It's all about just the bad formatting of the source and the VISUAL(!!!) result...

Evzen Polenka said:

If I would be a product manager, I would seriously think about removing this feature....

I doubt this would happen as there is a healthy volume of these type of files coming through the software and prior to this capability it was always one of the most requested features.  I think a text only extract might be a good idea so we strip out all formatting and leave it to the user to reformat in Word to get the look and feel prior to translation... if they have the time to do it.

I fully agree that we don't disagree.

Just a last remark: if the problem is caused by a fixed line or table cell height, than it is NOT in slightest way a problem of Studio, but entirely the problem of a badly formatted source and in the end the problem of the user not being able to notice and correct this in the target file. Any CAT tool MUST retain the source formatting, otherwise it will be useless.

If you strip all formatting from the PDF after the conversion, the vast majority of the users producing the target file will not even be able to format it... And here is the whole problem: people cannot use the software they are expected to use.

Paul Filkin said:

it was always one of the most requested features

Sure... from people which don't have the faintest idea about why it's 'not possible'... from people who don't understand that PDF is NOT just another document format... from people who hardly have an idea about the technicalities behind.

I believe that "one of the most requested features" from, let's say, often traveling salesmen is a teleport ;-)... but still no transportation company does not do any research or implementation in this regard...
...simply because someone sensibly evaluated the request and found it unreal or not worth the trouble...

Jerzy Czopik said:

Any CAT tool MUST retain the source formatting, otherwise it will be useless.

I agree... and as you can see the content perfectly well in the source we must be able to do this in the target too.  This means not taking the approach we do today (in my opinion) as we simply add text into a row where it won't fit.

So it's perhaps not so much of a bug, but rather a problem with the way in which we have resolved this issue of not being able to merge across paragraph breaks.  It might even be something that we cannot avoid with the current capabilities, but let's see what the development team have to say about this first as the change may not be trivial to achieve this.  If this is the case it probably won't get fixed at all since this is (as you mentioned earlier) a rather rare occurrence and definitely avoidable by preparing files for translation properly.