I edit translated documents, most of which were prepared in Asian language (Korean & Japanese) Word versions of several generations. I track changes and add comments liberally, and save the docs in compatible mode so there will be no issues with the author or other editors being able to read them.

Right now, I have a document which was 57K in the original version and has ballooned to 161K in the latest revision. During an editing session yesterday, Word slowed to a crawl, sometimes pausing with the spinning wheel for 20-30 seconds before resuming.

I can't say definitely that the document size and complexity is the cause of this problem, but I wonder if anyone else has run into this issue and (if I'm lucky) found a way to solve it.

I would be willing to scrub the tracking marks in sections of the document that are clean, in an attempt to bring down the document size, if that might help. I would prefer, though, to keep all the changes "live" in case there are questions or squawks from the customer about changes to the text. I'll accept the blame for my goofs, but not for the goofs of a customer's employee who answered one of my questions erroneously.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I would be very interested in comments from people who also see big increases in document size because of change tracking but haven't run into the same problem I have. I may be on the wrong track entirely.

My computer is a modern one with 8 gigs of RAM and a reasonably speedy CPU and hard drive. I check for malware periodically, and did so again after this latest problem occurred.

Thanks.