Musings from an overworked translator

Workaround for Trados? February 17, 2024

There’s nothing like working for hours on a file in Trados and going to save it as Target – only to get an error message saying “<ErrorMessage>Failed to save target content: Extra tag ‘<bookmarkstart id=”91″ name=”lt_pId098″>’ found after segment ‘869’.</ErrorMessage>” and being unable to save the file. I’m aligning files for a client (beggars can’t be choosers – you do what you have to do to pay the rent) and running them through Trados to identify the new text. I’m sure there is a better way, but I use what I have. It was 4 in the morning, and I was panicking. A little Googling found a Trados forum that gave me a couple of ideas. I updated the translation memories with the file I had (German and all – the heck with the continuity of the TM, I’ll just trash it later) and pretranslated the source file again. It still wouldn’t save. I ran it through again, same problem. At this point I was panicking. Then I got the bright idea to save the file as an RTF and run it through. It worked like a charm because it stripped out the end client’s corrupted tag and formatting that was causing the problem. I let the middleman who is doing the updated translation know. It’s up to him whether to use the RTF file or copy and paste over the original source. So the problem is solved on my end after hours of stress and frustration. I’m putting this out there to see if one of you has a better solution in case someone else runs into this error message. Surely there is a more elegant solution. If you have one, please share it in the comments for future readers. Thanks!