The only way you need locked text is if someone is going to copy it as text and paste elsewhere. I am not arguing, just pointing this out. I do not know your translation protocol. Personally, I would hate a bunch of images.


Even if you do not have a reliable macro to find all of your text that you want locked, you would be able to have a macro that would do the placement in a locked content control easily. That could be attached to a keyboard shortcut. Not as easy as something you just run once, but still an improvement.


Again, make sure that the locked content control will meet your needs before you spend time on macros to create them. If this works, it would be a lot less labor intensive than making and importing image files.

Hi again.

I really appreciate the feedback from both of you. Thank you!

I did a little testing. To show what I have, I'm attaching 2 files.

“Old file” is one of the files that were submitted to us last year with the programming text already locked.

“New file” is one of the new files provided without any locking. Using “Rich Text Content Control” and then “Properties” and “Contents cannot be edited”, I manually locked the programming text to do a little testing with the translation application (Trados Studio) being used.

As expected, Trados Studio showed the locked segments as tags (with the tag ID “<contentcontrol type=”Text” locked=”True”/>”).

However, even though the translation memory (populated with files like “Old file”) shows the same tag ID, those “old” tags don't exactly coincide with the “new” tags and hence the needed matching with the translation memory doesn't occur.

I notice that the locked segments in the “New file” appear boxed, which doesn't happen in the “Old file”. I don’t know if that's part of the explanation for the tag's discrepancy.

I believe that this is the right route but cannot figure out this last “tag” issue.

Thank you in advance for any advice you may give me.

Attached Files

	Old file.docx (22.5 KB, 9 views)
	New file.docx (26.1 KB, 9 views)