I am excited to introduce a guest post by Miryam Blum, a seasoned Hebrew<>English translator, who has been translating articles for the financial pages of Haaretz/TheMarker for over ten years and has a freelance business, translating mainly academic articles and PR films and materials for Jewish education projects. Miryam’s first introduction of the AutoCorrect technique, at the Israel Translators Association 2008 convention, won instant accolades. Miryam can be reached at miryam.blum at gmail.com
AutoCorrect
I was at Miryam’s conference session and can attest to the fact that using AutoCorrect in the manner described has…well, I didn’t exactly “find the Lord”, but it certainly has changed my working life. Recommended 1,000 times. Once you start, you won’t believe you ever lived without it.
Miryam’s presented this technique at a meeting of the Jerusalem Translators Group (I think this was even before her ITA Conference presentation).
I would add the following comments:
1. AutoCorrect maintains separate correction/substitution lists for each language you have installed (e.g. US English, British English, Australian English, Hebrew, etc.). These are usually located in C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\Office, and are .acl files. For example, MSO1033.acl is the AutoCorrect file for US English. (If the location is different, simply search for files named *.acl). I have had instances of the .acl file becoming corrupted, and having to start from scratch.
It is important to back up these files regularly, in the same way that you back up your other data (because this is in a system/hidden directory, your backup may not be set to do this).
2. You can also save formatted text – selected the formatted text, choose AutoCorrect, indicate that you are saving formatted text (it should show up formatted in the window), and select a shortcut text for it. (Caveat: if you save the trailing paragraph mark, it may not come back in with the correct alignment).
3. Up to Word 2003, there was no direct way to generate a list of your AutoCorrect entries. There is a macro that can be run to do this. Contact me at (perryza at actcom dot net dot il) and I’ll send it to you.
@Perry – Thank you so much for your valuable input
Thanks for the tips. I’ve been using Open Office up until now and it’s a little lacking when it comes to shortcuts and optimization tools. Here’s to getting more done with MS Office!
.-= Content Writer