Yes, you, I and, to judge from forum posts, 99% of other Word users turn the automatic language detection off because of the annoyance it causes during normal text editing.

That makes it doubly annoying that the functionality cannot be accessed for one of the few circumstances in it would be genuinely useful! I have a large document with alternating German and Polish sentences, and I need to hide the Polish parts (so that they are ignored by translation software). So it seems that the only way to do this is to manually identify and mark each Polish sentence even though, theoretically, Word has the functionality to detect language!

Hi,

as the whole document is set to German languageID, you can use the spellchecker to have all 'incorrect' words/sentences/passages marked. Than you can select theses passges and set the language to Polish. IMHO that seems to be the fastest way to do that manually.

NP

Well, yes, that was what I was hoping to avoid. There are hundreds of alternating German / Polish sentences in the document, and it'll be a right pain to go through and mark them all manually. What a shame that Microsoft's automatic language detection can't be used for this purpose!

Stupid work, I see ...

Maybe there is a VBA based solution: Looping through all paragraphs and counting misspelled words. Whenever - lets say - five misspelled words are found at the beginning of a paragraph the language ID will be set to Polish.

NP

Yes, that's an idea. Or maybe it's possible to access the language detection functionality from a VBA macro. Thanks!

http://gregmaxey.com/word_tip_pages/..._document.html

HTH
NP

Another possibility:

Search for typical Polish words (VBA). Set range on paragraph where .Found = True, set languageID to Polish, continue search.

That's not too tricky - if you know typical Polish words .

Cheers
NP