Polish Translator’s Blog

Macros, scripts, coding In the early years of my freelancing I worked mostly in Microsoft Word. I either did not use any CAT tool or I used the free version of Wordfast (now called Wordfast Classic) which is a set of macros in itself. I was looking for ways to make my tedious work of translating in Microsoft Word a bit easier. Soon I found out about macros. Initially I created them by recording, then I learned more about coding them. Now, though most of my translation work is done outside of Microsoft Word, in CAT tools, I still have most of the macros I created more than 10 years ago. Many of them fell into disuse, but there is one that I use regularly when I need to do some work in Word. It is the macro I called ‘TextFieldFit’. When I draw a text box, I run the macro to reduce the inner margins, remove the border around the box and reduce the font size. I use text boxes to translate drawings that did not get imported into my preferred CAT tool, the SDL Trados Studio. I