Hide / Unhide Text – Documentation

Hide / Unhide Text tool icon Hide / Unhide Text tool makes it easy to hide text from your CAT tool when only parts of your document need to be translated.

Detailed information about Hide / Unhide Text tool

Introduction

Most CAT tools provide a way to import only parts of Word documents by ignoring all the text formatted as ‘hidden’. This is very handy when you translate dual-language documents with two languages appearing side by side, or when you translate new text added in a previously translated document.

Hide / Unhide Text command offers a number of options to mark text as hidden prior to importing documents into CAT tools, or to 'unhide' all text in a document after the translated document is generated.

How Hide / Unhide Text tool can help you in your work

The tool allows you to do the following:

  • Hide text from your CAT tool when only parts of your document need to be translated.
  • Prepare documents for dual-language translation by hiding original text.
  • Unhide text after translation.

Where to find the tool

To run Hide / Unhide Text tool, click Hide / Unhide Text button on TransTools ribbon in Word:

Hide / Unhide Text button on TransTools ribbon

The following dialogue will be displayed:

Screenshot: Hide / Unhide Text dialogue

Using Hide / Unhide Text tool

The tool has the following options:

  1. Hidden formatting: While hidden text attribute is supported by most CAT tools, some CAT tools do not. In addition to hidden text attribute, you can choose Marching Red Ants and Double Strikethrough formatting, which are supported by Wordfast Classic.
  2. Scope: Select "Entire active document" to apply the command to the entire document, including headers / footers, comments, footnotes, etc. Select "Selection" to apply the command to the selected text.
  3. Action: select one of the following:
    • Hide everything except colored text: choose this option to translate colored text only. You can choose which highlight or font color marks the text to be translated:
      1. If you select an option prefixed by “Highlight Color:”, the tool will search for text colored with the Text Highlight Color tool ( ). To translate text marked with any highlight color, choose [Highlight color: Any].
      2. If you select an option prefixed by “Font Color:”, the tool will search for text colored with the Font Color tool (). To select the correct color, it is recommended to select the colored text in the document, select [Selected text color] option and click the dropper button to the right of the list.
    • Hide colored text only: choose this option to translate everything except colored text. You can choose which highlight or font color marks the text that you do not want to translate.
      1. If you select an option prefixed by “Highlight Color:”, the tool will search for text colored with the Text Highlight Color tool (). To avoid translating text marked with any highlight color, choose [Highlight color: Any].
      2. If you select an option prefixed by “Font Color:”, the tool will search for text colored with the Font Color tool (). To select the correct color, it is recommended to select the colored text in the document, select [Selected text color] option and click the dropper button to the right of the list.
    • Unhide everything: use this option after the translated document is generated to unhide all the text in the document.

Click Continue to execute the command. Click ? button to go to the online reference page (this one, actually).

Tools for partial (selective) translation

TransTools+

  • Hide / Unhide Text – mark text as non-translatable in order to hide it from your CAT tool or convert it into tags (provides more capabilities compared to this tool)

Tools for dual-language translation

TransTools