Words Breaking Up Arbitrarily at Line End? Asian Language Rules May Be the Reason

After spending the better part of an afternoon troubleshooting some files, I'm writing this post both as a troubleshooting record for myself and to help others out there who may be facing the same issue, hoping it will save someone some time.

The Issue
I recently worked on a project involving a large number of MS Word files. The source text was in English, the files needed to be translated into Spanish. Our team used SDL Trados Studio for the translation and everything seemed to go smoothly... until we opened the target files in Word and started seeing some odd word breaks at the end of lines. Words were breaking up arbitrarily, as shown in the example below.

The Source of the Issue
As it turns out, even though the documents provided for translation were in English, the original files had been created in Korean. This means that Asian language features were carried over in the document paragraph styles.

Looking at the style for the odd-looking text revealed three settings I didn't remember having seen before: "Allow text to wrap in the middle of a word", "Don't adjust space between Latin and Asian text" and "Don't adjust space between Asian text and numbers".

Of these, "Allow text to wrap in the middle of a word" seemed the likely culprit, but my usual paragraph settings didn't offer a way to disable it. To be able to do this, Asian Language Support had to be installed on my computer.

The Solution
The first thing I had to do was download an Asian language pack. I chose Korean because that was the language used when creating these documents.

To download a language pack in Windows 10, I went to my computer clock on the taskbar, clicked on it and selected Date and time settings at the bottom, then Region & language in the window that opens. On the right pane, under Country and region, I could see my installed languages, and clicked on the "+" next to "Add a language". Then found Korean and clicked on it. After a couple of minutes, when I could see "Language Pack Available" next to Korean, I clicked on it and then "Options". At this point the language pack is not yet installed on the computer, so the last button to click before this happens is the "Download" button under Language Options.

Once this was complete, I shut down and restarted Word (I'm using Word 2013).

I then opened one of my problem documents in Word, and right-clicked on the "Normal" style (Home tab - Styles group) and selected Modify. in the Modify Style window, I then clicked on Format - Paragraph. The dialog box that opens now has a new tab: "Asian Typography". And the second setting on this new tab is "Allow Latin text to wrap in the middle of a word".

As soon as I uncheck the box, text wraps correctly.

Note: This setting may need to be changed for each individual style that shows this issue.

A Collection of Regular Expressions for the Regex Match AutoSuggest Provider

The Regex Match AutoSuggest Provider app is one of my absolute favorite add-ons for Studio, and it has been a great reason to continue learning about regular expressions.

What does it do?
Based on rules that you can set up on-the-fly, the plug-in offers AutoSuggest proposals, as shown in this example:

Depending on how you set up your rules, the plug-in can:

1. Offer an autosuggestion that is exactly the same as the word or phrase found in your source segment, so all you have to type is the first letter, instead of the whole thing. For example, you can have a rule that will suggest an entire phone number string, such as "1-800-012-3456", as soon as you type the first number.
2. Offer an autosuggestion where the source text has been replaced by its translation. So, for example, when "July 22" is found in the source, "22 de julio" will be offered as an autosuggestion as soon as you type the first "2".

What do you need to use it?

First, you need to download the plug-in from the SDL Open Exchange and install it. The Regex Match AutoSuggest Provider is available for Studio 2014 (and soon for Studio 2015).

Once installed, it is found under the View tab in Studio. Clicking on the button will open the pane where you can start entering your RegEx Entries.

The developer provides a very clear explanation of the set-up here.

You can safely close this pane when you're not entering any new rules, and open it again as needed. I find it useful to have it open as I work, so I can quickly add new rules as I need them.

Some examples

Here are some rules and examples of their application, with a disclaimer: I'm a novice regex user, so please don't expect these to be the most elegant or sophisticated regex rules out there. In venturing into creating regex rules to use with Studio, I decided to follow Paul Filkin's advice about "economy of accuracy" and move past my worry of creating clunky regular expressions, so you may find some clunkiness here, but hopefully these will be useful either as they are, or as a starting point to achieve something else.

Date: First day of the month

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Dates: First of month Ex: July 1, 2015 --> 1° de julio de 2015	(#Months#)\s(1|1st),\s(\d{4})	1° de $1 de $3

 Note: The "#Months#" part of the expression is a reference to a variable from a list, in this case, the names of the months, another very clever feature of the plug-in. You can watch Paul Filkin's video Manipulating Dates with RegexMatch AutoSuggest for a clear explanation of this feature.

Date: Full date

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Dates: July 22, 2015 ---> 22 de julio de 2015	(#Months#)\s(\d{1,2}),\s(\d{4})	$2 de $1 de $3

Date: DD/MM/YY 

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Dates: 8/7/15 to 7/8/15	(\d{1,2})/(\d{1,2})/(\d{2})	$2/$1/$3

Date: Month and Year

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Month and year  Ex. July 2015 --> julio de 2015	(#Months#)\s(\d{4})	$1 de $2

Date: Day and Month

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Month and day w/o year. Ex. July 22 --> 22 de julio	(#Months#)\s(\d{1,2})(?!.*\d{4})	$2 de $1

1x

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Ex: 1x ---> 1 vez	\b1x\b	1 vez

50x

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Ex: 10x ---> 10 veces - excluding "1x"	(?!1x)(\d{1,2})x	$1 veces

5-6

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Ex: 8-10 ---> de 8 a 10	(\d{1,2})-(\d{1,2})	de $1 a $2

1-800 number

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Full phone numbers Ex. 1-800-123-1234	\d-(\d{3})-(\d{3})-(\d{4})	$0

8:00 a.m.

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Time plus a.m. or p.m. Ex. 9:00 a.m.	(\d{1,2}:\d{2})\s(a\.|p\.)m\.	$0

Numbers with backslashes

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Numbers with points and slashes Ex. 36.5/93	\d+\.\d+/\d+	$0

Percentages

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Percentages  Ex. 35%	\d{1,3}%	$0

Trademark names

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Words with TM Ex. AnyBrand™	\w+™	$0

Registered names

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Words with (R) Ex. AnyBrand®	\w+®	$0

Watch a video demonstration of the above here.

And here's the full list of the examples shown above.

Description	Regex Pattern	Replace Pattern
Dates: First of month Ex: July 1, 2015 --> 1° de julio de 2015	(#Months#)\s(1|1st),\s(\d{4})	1° de $1 de $3
Ex: 1x ---> 1 vez	\b1x\b	1 vez
Ex: 10x ---> 10 veces - excluding "1x"	(?!1x)(\d{1,2})x	$1 veces
Dates: July 22, 2015 ---> 22 de julio de 2015	(#Months#)\s(\d{1,2}),\s(\d{4})	$2 de $1 de $3
Ex: 8-10 ---> de 8 a 10	(\d{1,2})-(\d{1,2})	de $1 a $2
Dates: 8/7/15 to 7/8/15	(\d{1,2})/(\d{1,2})/(\d{2})	$2/$1/$3
Month and day w/o year. Ex. July 22 --> 22 de julio	(#Months#)\s(\d{1,2})(?!.*\d{4})	$2 de $1
Full phone numbers Ex. 1-800-123-1234	\d-(\d{3})-(\d{3})-(\d{4})	$0
Time plus a.m. or p.m. Ex. 9:00 a.m.	(\d{1,2}:\d{2})\s(a\.|p\.)m\.	$0
Numbers with points and slashes Ex. 36.5/93	\d+\.\d+/\d+	$0
Month and year  Ex. July 2015 --> julio de 2015	(#Months#)\s(\d{4})	$1 de $2
Percentages  Ex. 35%	\d{1,3}%	$0
Words with TM Ex. AnyBrand™	\w+™	$0
Words with (R) Ex. AnyBrand®	\w+®	$0

And that's all there is to it. What I like about the Regex Match AutoSuggest Provider is that it's easy to use (although some basic knowledge of regex is required) and it's project-independent, which means the entries are available all the time, for all files and projects, so it's a great way to customize Studio's autosuggestions to our individual needs.

Alternating between plain text and WYSIWYG in SDL Trados Studio

Depending on the content we're working with and our own preferences, we may want to see only plain text or fully-formatted text in Studio's editor view. Thankfully, switching between the two is easy. Consider the example below, where we have a Word file with some formatting.

Which Studio view would be more comfortable while working on the file: the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view on the left or the plain text view on the right? Whichever we prefer, we can get there in a matter of seconds.

To choose how the text will be displayed in the Editor, we go to File - Options - Editor - Formatting display style. These are the default settings:

The default is to "Show formatting but hide recognized formatting tags", so we get this (Adapt Font Sizes is disabled in this example to show variations in text size):

I personally don't like having all the tags hidden, as I find that it's easy to accidentally skip or     delete a tag. So, to add the formatting tags to the above view, we can either change to "Show all formatting and tags" in File - Options - Editor - Formatting display style, as shown here...

...or we can simply click the "Toggle formatting tag display" button in the View tab - Options group. This button is only active when "Show formatting but hide recognized formatting tags" or "Show all formatting and tags" have been chosen in the Editor options.

If we find the colored text hard to read or would rather have plain text for whatever reason, then we have a third option: "Show all tags but do not show formatting".

Here's what we get with this setting: plain text with formatting tags.

Increasing Font Size

So far so good, color contrast is no longer a problem in this last view, but the text is still too small to work comfortably (at least for me!). To adjust the text, we can use the "Adapt Font Sizes" button in the View tab and then increase or decrease text size to a comfortable level.

A Word about Tag View Options

Choosing our tag view options is also a matter of personal preference. In addition to the "No Tag Text" options shown above, we have three more, that we can easily switch among from the View tab, Options group.

Partial Tag Text

This is a view I use very rarely, as I find that most of the time it doesn't give me enough information to be as useful as the other views.


Full Tag Text

This view gives us the most information, but it can also lead to a cluttered segment, so I use it sparingly, and will often activate it only for specific checks rather than keeping it on all the time.

Tag Id

This is my preferred tag view. It allows me to quickly check that the tag pairs are correctly placed in the translation. To learn more about tags, don't miss Paul Filkin's article  Simple guide to working with Tags in Studio.

Once we become familiar with these options, we can quickly switch views while we work, to suit our needs and preferences.