Filtering formatted text in Microsoft Office files

 Recently, I shared an approach to selecting text in a Microsoft Word file with editing restricted to certain paragraphs. This feature of Microsoft Word is, alas, not supported by any translation tool filters of which I am aware, so to import only the text designated for editing it is necessary to go inside the DOCX file (which is just a ZIP archive with the extension changed) and use the XML file which contains the document text with all its format markers.

This approach is generally valid for all formats applied to Microsoft Office files since Office 2007, such as DOCX from Word or PPTX from PowerPoint. I have prepared a video to show how the process of extracting the content and importing it for translation can work:

 After translation, the relevant XML file is exported and the original XML is replaced with the translated file inside the archive. If the DOCX or PPTX file was unpacked to get at the XML, the folder structure can then be re-zipped and the extension changed to its original form to create the deliverable translated file.

What I do not show in the video is that the content can also be extracted by other means, such as convenient memoQ project templates using filters with masks to extract directly using various ZIP filter options. But the lower tech approach shown in the video is one that should be accessible to any professional with access to modern translation environment tools which permit filter customization with regular expressions.

Once a filter has been created for a particular format such as red text, adapting it to extract only green highlighted text or text in italics or some other format takes less than a minute in an editor. Different filters are necessary for the same formats in DOCX and PPTX, because unfortunately Microsoft's markup for yellow highlighting, for example, differs between Word and PowerPoint in the versions I tested.

Although this is a bit of a nerdy hack, it's probably easier for most people than various macro solutions to hide and unhide text. And it takes far less time and is more accurate than copying text to another file.

In cases where it is important to see the original context of the text being translated, this can be done, for example, using memoQ's PDF Preview Tool, a viewer available in recent versions which will track the imported text in a PDF made from the original file. This can be done using the PDF Save options available in Microsoft applications.

Translating presentations in memoQ: PowerPoint vs. OpenOffice Impress

Microsoft PowerPoint files can be a real nuisance to translate. One of the biggest challenges with these files is the haphazard formatting that many authors apply when working in that medium: line breaks and paragraph breaks in the most inconvenient places, which can cause some stress when working with many translation environment tools.

The current status of the PowerPoint filters in memoQ (version 6.5 build 10) is not as well developed as the filters for Microsoft Word and Excel files; in particular the inability to configure the handling of "soft breaks" (line feeds) causes me no little grief. However, I can at least join segments to get complete sentences where I want them. That's something you can't do in SDL Trados Studio, though that tool at least represent the breaks as inline tags. Sometimes I prepare my PowerPoint files in Trados Studio and then translate the SDLXLIFF file in memoQ if there are a lot of breaks in the sentences. But then I miss the preview.

Recently I had occasion to look at a presentation created with OpenOffice Impress, a rather nice alternative to PowerPoint. Given the confusion over Microsoft's new licensing practices for MS Office 2013, I would not be surprised if more of my corporate clients begin to use the clever free alternative.

However, when I tried to import the Impress (ODP) files to memoQ, I found that the files were not recognized as a translatable format. However, that problem was quickly solved, and the technique for translating ODP files in the current and older versions of memoQ is shown in the video below. One could, of course, convert these to PowerPoint formats, but you might not want to. With ODP files, it is possible to have breaks treated as inline tags.

Time Description
0:33  Importing the PowerPoint file to memoQ with options
1:10  Examining the segments of the imported PowerPoint file
1:35  Joining segments for "broken sentences" in the imported PowerPoint file
1:43  The presentation as an OpenOffice Impress (ODP) file
2:07  Importing the ODP file to memoQ
2:39  Setting the filter for the "unknown" file type
3:04  Configuring "soft" breaks as inline tags
3:34  Examining the segments of the imported ODP file

I hope to see a few more refinements of the PowerPoint and OpenOffice filters in future builds of memoQ!

Coping with objects and graphics to translate in Microsoft Office documents

About a year ago, I published a series of posts describing a simple way to get at the objects and graphics embedded in Microsoft Office documents, such as Microsoft Word DOCX documents or PowerPoint PPTX presentations. These investigations were inspired by a series of jobs where I had to cope with up to 60 embedded Excel tables in a Microsoft Word document. The four related posts are:

• Translating embedded objects in Microsoft Office documents
• Coping with embedded BIN objects in Microsoft Office documents
• Replacing bitmap graphics in Microsoft Office documents
• Refreshing embedded objects in Microsoft Word (a macro)

The post titles may differ a little from the text in the links here, which is updated for a little more clarity.

I've also added two short videos to my YouTube channel which illustrate how to remove embedded objects from a DOCX for translating separately from the Microsoft Word document and how to put them back afterward.

Here's how to extract the embeddings folder from the DOCX file:



And here is how to put the translated embedded objects into the DOCX file and refresh the view of the embedded objects in your translation:



These and other videos I've produced recently are part of an effort I began recently to develop integrated courses for self-instruction and review with software tools used by many of us. These courses use the Moodle platform and offer text, screenshots, audio, video and data files such as examples of file formats to translate, backups of memoQ practice projects to restore on your local computer for training, configuration resources for memoQ, useful macros to support work with many translation environment (CAT) tools and a host of other resources and learning links.

Replacing bitmap graphics in MS Office 2007/2010

A few weeks ago I published a series of posts about different aspects of embedded objects in DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files and how to translate them a bit more conveniently. When I described this procedure to a colleague this afternoon, he thought it was a solution for convenient substitution of bitmap graphics in these files as well. Well, sort of, but not quite.

If you rename the extension of a DOCX file to ZIP and open the ZIP file using Windows Explorer (in order not to mess up the compression), you will see a folder named word.

 Inside this word folder are other folders of interest:

The embeddings folder has the objects such as Excel tables or PowerPoint slides described in previous posts. The bitmap graphics or pictures are in the media folder, however:

The view inside the media folder above shows one bitmap graphic (the JPEG file) and various other files with images of the embedded objects (an equation, and Excel table and a PowerPoint slide). Only the bitmap files are of real interest. If other graphic files localized for the target language are named the same as the original files in the media folder and substituted there, when the ZIP files is renamed to have its original extension, the substituted graphics will appear in the document the next time it is opened.

This way, for example, screen shots for an entire file can be substituted quickly. One could, of course do this by a number of other means, but this way is fairly convenient and could probably be automated without much ado if your organization needs to make such substitutions a lot.


Addendum: I was curious about those other files in the media folder - the ones with the views of the embedded objects. So I deleted them to see if they would re-generate when the document is opened. Instead, this message was displayed at the location of each object:

Double-clicking the "broken" object display opened the object and restored the view. So clearly, refreshing object views involves updating the content of the media folder.

Translating embedded objects in Microsoft Office documents

Yesterday a colleague sent me a note to say he had been searching my blog for information about translating compound Microsoft Office documents (that is documents with embedded objects) in memoQ and couldn't find any. I presume he was referring to the article about how often one CAT tool is not enough - combined workflows with other tools can frequently help solve many tricky translation problems, and DVX2 or STAR TRANSIT are definitely useful options for preparing compound Microsoft Office documents for translation in memoQ. Some time ago I recommended using STAR TRANSIT as a pre-processing tool to one of my agency friends, and he carried out a very large, complex project successfully using memoQ's excellent integration features for STAR TRANSIT projects.

There is, of course, another simple way to translate the embedded objects in a Microsoft Office document that does not involve purchasing other software licenses. I don't usually talk about it, because there are a few limitations, and until recently I had not figured out how to avoid corrupting the files when I tried to do things the "easy" way. This approach is not limited to memoQ and will actually work with most CAT tools - so SDL Trados Studio users can do this as well, for example.

It is useful to know that the Microsoft Office 2007/2010 file formats (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) are really just ZIP files containing XML and a bunch of other stuff. That stuff includes a folder with the embedded objects in formats that can be dealt with directly.

If you have an older, binary MS Office document (DOC, PPT, XLS) with embedded objects, convert it to a 2007/2010 format.

If you rename the file extension DOCX, PPTX or XSLX to ZIP and unpack the ZIP file, inside the folder you will find a folder called "embeddings". The files in that folder can be copied elsewhere and usually handled directly in your CAT tool. But problems usually arise when you put them back, rezip the folder and change back to the original extension. The compression gets screwed up, and the Microsoft Office file is corrupted and won't open.

The only reliable method I have found for avoiding this is to use the Windows Explorer (under Windows 7) to open the ZIP file:

Here's what the "guts" of one DOCX file with a bunch of embedded Excel tables looks like:

Inside the word folder you'll find the embeddings folder:

The contents of the embeddings folder look like this:

Simply copy the embeddings folder somewhere safe, translate its contents, then copy them back to the ZIP file using Windows Explorer. Then rename the ZIP extension to the original extension for the file.

If you open the file and look at it, you'll get a shock. When you see all the objects in their original language, you might think something went wrong. Nothing bad has happened; you merely need to refresh the objects. This can be done by opening each briefly to edit or using a macro to open each object and close it again quickly. In a job with dozens of embedded objects in a long file, this macro is a helpful shortcut.

Given how easily accessible this embedded content actually is, one has to wonder why other major CAT tool providers like SDL and Kilgray have failed to offer the option of importing embedded content in their filters up to now. Let's hope they do soon. In the meantime, this workaround should enable many people to deal with this complex and irritating file format challenge.

Here's a summary of the procedure once again:

1. Rename the *.???x file to *.zip 
2. Under Windows 7, right-click on the ZIP file and open it using the Windows Explorer. Using ZIP tools of any kind risks corruption by changing the compression ratios. 
3. Find the embeddings folder inside the ZIP structure. Copy this elsewhere and use it as the source for translation. It will contain all the embedded objects as single files. 
4. Copy the translated content back into the embeddings folder in the ZIP structure.
5. Rename the ZIP file to its original extension. 
6. Open the file and refresh each embedded object (which will initially appear not to have been translated) by right-clicking and opening it from the context menu or running a macro to do that.