Purple Haze – Overdose of Tags

I think tags are one of the most disliked things in Studio. This is particularly true with those users who previously translated using Workbench in Word because there you never saw tags. Tags can be annoying but it really helps if one understands how they function and how they can be handled in Studio. There’s a good blog article by Paul Filkin about handling tags here and the Studio Help also has some good info on the topic.

What’s really annoying are files that have a huge number of tags that don’t have any real meaning for the document. These are often tags that apply a different formatting to spaces between words or turn the same formatting on and off constantly. If there are only a few of them, it’s relatively easy to see that there’s no need to include them in the translation. However, dealing with a large quantity of this purple haze makes it difficult to perceive the actual text and it slows down the translation process. It’s also easier to miss the real tags and the tag verification feature becomes practically useless when there are hundreds of unnecessary warning messages.

These types of tags are common in files converted or copied from PDF format but they can also be easily produced in Word by applying and changing formatting incorrectly, for example by leaving a different formatting in spaces between words. This is very easy to do without realizing it because you don’t see the tags in Word.

A friend of mine asked me recently if there’s anything she could do to reduce the number of unnecessary tags in her files, so I thought to expand my original reply and share it here as well. I took one of her DOC files (about 1,200 words) and tested various ways to lower the tag count. When I opened the file directly in Studio there were well over 1,000 formatting tags (see Figure 1). I think this was the worst file I’ve ever seen – in most segments there were two pairs of tags between every word! These were mostly font color and spacing tags that applied a different formatting for spaces or turned the same formatting off and on, and obviously were completely unnecessary.

Figure 1. The DOC file opened directly in Trados Studio without any prepping. (Note that the original French source text has been replaced with a Finnish children’s poem to protect the confidentiality of the original text. You didn’t miss anything. It was a really boring text, at least compared to Anni and her trip across the lawn to the cellar to fetch butter, milk and potatoes.)

I tried the following three methods:

1. Save the source file as DOCX and select the “Skip advanced font formatting” option in the File Types settings (Tools > Options > Microsoft Word 2007-2010 > Common). This option is not available for DOC or RTF files, so this works only with DOCX files (and PPTX and PDF files). When I opened the file in Studio, there were 118 formatting tags (<cf>) left. About half of them seemed to be unnecessary but they were easy to see and skip.

Figure 2. The same file saved as a DOCX file and opened directly in Trados Studio.

2. Clean the file (DOCX, DOC or RTF) in Word using CodeZapper. CodeZapper is a Word add-in that includes several cleaning functions. When processing my test file, I used the PDFTidy, PDFFix and CZL functions as a combination and did not test them separately or with any of the other functions. CodeZapper turned out to be clearly the most effective method for this file. There were only 62 formatting tags (<cs>) left in the file and they all seemed to be necessary.

Figure 3. The DOC file opened directly in Trados Studio after it was prepped with CodeZapper. The process removed all tags from the sample sentences.

3.  Clean the file (DOCX, DOC or RTF) in Word using TransTools Document Cleaner. TransTools is another Word add-in that includes a tag cleaning function. This left 156 formatting tags in the file, and most of them seemed to be unnecessary, and as we can see from the previous example, only about 60 formatting tags are needed in this file.

Figure 4. The DOC file opened directly in Trados Studio after it was prepped with TransTools.

 
Of course, one hopes that clients would include a “tag-clearance” as part of their file prep procedure before sending files to translators. That would not only make translators’ lives easier and improve the quality of the translation and the resulting translation memory, but it would also increase fuzzy match leverage because the unnecessary tags wouldn’t be there screwing up the analysis results and fuzzy matching.

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