Tech Tip: Converting Smart Punctuation to Straight Punctuation in MS Word

Welcome to MS Office tech tips: quotes and apostrophes edition!

As this blog has discussed before, different clients have different document formatting and commenting requirements. Most of us probably have some clients who require all “smart” punctuation and others who require all “straight” punctuation.

So, what do you do if you don’t want to turn Word’s auto-formatting on and off every time you switch projects?

Well, it can be tricky. But if you’re struggling, I hope you can use the solution I’ve found to make life easier.

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Tech Tip: Changing the Commenter Name for Comments You Already Made

Many of us translators work with clients who have very specific privacy requirements. If we don’t start our projects exactly right for those requirements, it can be quite time-consuming to fix everything individually later. But I’m happy to report that I’ve found a great solution for changing commenter names, so I’d like to share it for anyone who may have encountered the same thing.

I have one client who requires translators to leave comments in various situations, but the comments in Microsoft Word must be labeled “Author” (instead of my name) with initial “A” (instead of my initial). This is no problem if Word is set up that way before I start, but what if forget to check that, I do the whole assignment in memoQ or another TEnT, and then discover only when I export the document that it has my name in all the comments instead of the anonymous “Author”?

I could delete all personal data from the document, which would make all the comments labeled “Author,” but this would also delete document properties saved by the original author whose work I’m translating. That shouldn’t be done without asking the client first. So, do I have to manually replace all of those comments?

Happily, no! Allen Wyatt has a macro which allows you to change just your name and initial in the comments. Here’s the link:

https://wordribbon.tips.net/T008614_Changing_the_User_Name_in_Existing_Comments.html

Happy comment editing!

memoQ Light Resources, and a Freebie

Apologies for the delay in the next installment of the emergency series–I have not forgotten about it, I promise! It just turns out tech-related emergency planning takes a lot of research. But, speaking of technology and emergencies, here’s a Tech Emergency Quickie for memoQ users!

Do you have all your term bases and all the little hacks to your TEnT tools/CAT tools backed up? (And your invoices? See Backing Up Your Records in TO3000 Version 10; the first half of that post also applies to Version 11.) I’ve gotten pretty good about backups, but there are always a few little things that I miss for my memoQ setup. Term bases? Check. TMs? Check. Light resources? …Well, shoot, I didn’t think of that!

Luckily, others can learn from my mistakes. If you, too, hate having to figure out complicated “memoQ Web Search” settings and whatnot for each new computer, read on. These are more complicated to back up than you might think, but it can be done!

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Life Happens

I’d planned to end the week with a tiny update of miscellanea on emergency planning. I’m still doing that, but originally it was going to be upbeat, and it hasn’t quite turned out that way. Still, here’s your emergency planning quickie:

1. And lo, planning works!

Almost a year ago, I had a hard drive fail on me that left me without a computer for a day or two. Luckily, I was not mid- freelance assignment, and the awesome IT department at my workplace helped me out with the full-time assignment! Still, it left me realizing I needed to plan for catastrophic computer failure. What if this had happened on the due date of a freelance assignment? So, I immediately ordered a relatively inexpensive, non-customized backup laptop, which later became my main laptop for non-video use. I installed a new hard drive in the old laptop with help from IT, and I resolved to keep BOTH laptops up and running, just in case.

At the beginning of the week, Main Laptop’s screen failed! Luckily it was under warranty, so the fix is free, but it will still take a week. Am I freaking out? Nope. Thanks to having a second laptop that I’ve kept most of the same programs and templates on, when a client came along with a $750 job, I was able to accept with no problems. Yay planning!

2. Life happens. (Also, here’s a PayPal tip.)

Like I said at the beginning of this series, emergencies can and will happen to anyone at any time. This morning, I got the call that an emergency is happening, and I need to get my butt on a plane tomorrow morning. I think many of us have been there. So yep, this isn’t just something I blog about. It’s all real!

Also, here’s a fun fact about plane tickets: American Airlines will now let you buy tickets via PayPal if you buy through their site. This is important because if you have PayPal Credit added to your PayPal account, purchases above a certain price generally have suspended interest for six months (check at time of purchase). So as long as you’re responsible and keep track of how much you’ve paid each moth, you can pay for that expensive ticket in installments instead of all at once. Which, in cases of emergency, is pretty awesome.

3. A timely video.

Remember how last time I was talking about finding a trusted colleague for emergency backup? That would sure be useful right now for this $750 project that’s getting interrupted by my second emergency of the week. I think I’ll still be able to finish it, but this is a good reminder to me of why having trusted colleagues is so smart. And here’s a video Corinne just posted on exactly that. Go check it out!

memoQ & OmegaT Shortcut Unification

**Note 10/2/2023: There is a bug in OmegaT 6.0.0 that causes a loss of functionality if you edit the gotoNextUntranslatedMenuItem shortcut. The ability to go to the next untranslated segment will be lost until you reinstall, even if you revert to the default. Therefore, I recommend against modifying gotoNextUntranslatedMenuItem in 6.0.0.

Like a lot of translators, I use more than one CAT tool (TEnT tool) in my work, deciding which one to use based on the type of project I’m translating. In my case, it’s memoQ and OmegaT.

I don’t know about other translation tool combinations, but the one thing that drives me CRAZY switching between these two is that the important shortcuts are completely different. But after some digging around and experimentation, I have achieved shortcut paradise.

All I wanted was for the “go to next untranslated segment” and the “add term to glossary/term base” shortcuts to match so that I wouldn’t keep using the wrong one in the wrong program, but memoQ only allows certain shortcut customizations, so I couldn’t get its shortcuts to match OmegaT’s. Happily, if you’re willing to venture into the bowels of your file system, you can get your OmegaT shortcuts to match memoQ’s. Here’s how.

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Two Quick Word 2013 Tips

If anyone out there is like me and just now switching (or just about to switch) from a previous version of Office to Office 2013, you may find yourself wanting to flip the table at a few of the seemingly random tweaks. Here are quick notes on two problems I’ve learned to make better so far:

1. The View shortcuts in the status bar (that’s the bit at the very bottom of the window) no longer include the button for the Draft View shortcut.

Yep, for no apparent reason, they now have a button here for every view but Draft. And you can’t add it. However, you can add a Draft View button to the Quick Access Toolbar (that’s the upper-left corner), which at least gives lets you switch with one click instead of going into the Ribbon every single time you want to use Draft. To get this shortcut:

  • Go into the Views tab of the Ribbon.
  • On the far left, you’ll see three big icons and two tiny icons for different views. The bottom tiny icon is Draft View.
  • Right-click that icon and select “Add to Quick Access Toolbar.”

For screenshots of this process, see The first nine things I do to default settings in Word 2013. (If you want to get crazy and you know how macros work, there’s a thread here about setting up a macro to make Draft your default view.)

2. The Word 2013 cursor animation makes me crazier than any cursor animation has ever made me before, ever.

The motion of the cursor in Word 2013 made me seasick just watching it, and it seemed to slow the program down, too (or maybe it just felt that way because I was dying). Luckily, there is a very clear explanation of how to get rid of it right here: Office 2013: Disable transition and cursor animationsUpdate 3/3/2017: Need to know how to do this in Windows 10? Here you go!

I’m still in the process of settling in, so there are plenty of frustrations still to fix. These two have helped a lot, though–so if any of you have gone through the same trauma and would like to share your Office survival tips, you’ll find a willing ear here!

Backing Up Your Records in TO3000 Version 10

Most of us translators realize that one of the worst things that could happen to our businesses is a hardware failure, theft, or other event that wipes out all our data. We’ve all been told, “Back everything up, because you never know.” We know we need backups for our business security and our own peace of mind. Some of us are even paranoid enough to have both a physical backup and a cloud backup (of any data not too sensitive for one).1

I’m not a perfect person (ask my family), so when my computer’s hard drive died recently, I didn’t have everything backed up, but I had the essentials: my term bases, my translation memories, my personal photos, my financial records… However, when I got a new hard drive, reinstalled all my programs, and attempted to restore everything, I hit a couple of snags.

Quicken data? Fine. MemoQ resources/projects? Fine, if you know where to put everything. TO3000 Version 10? Tears of blood.

So here’s what I learned about backing up and restoring those records… Because it is a whole world of not-fun to be missing them at tax time.

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