Word Macros for Translators

This page has a number of Microsoft Word macros of particular use to translators, especially those working between English and Japanese.

FindNextJ

Finds the next  Japanese character in the document. Useful for finding "invisible" Japanese characters (such as full-width spaces and punctuation), and for finding small amounts of Japanese text in a mostly European-language document.

Wide2Narrow

Converts double-byte letters, numbers, and symbols (e.g. parentheses/punctuation) into their single-byte equivalents. This is useful if you are translating a Japanese document into English, and need to remove double-byte characters. The built-in "Change Case - Half-width" feature has the side effect of converting Katakana into half-width characters as well.

WordCount

Note: This macro has been largely superceded by Count Anything.

This macro counts all the words in a Microsoft Word document, including the words in text boxes (the standard Word Count feature does not count words in text boxes). It can also do batch word counts for multiple documents.

New -- Updated 18:50 2007/03/08: Fixed the macro so that it correctly counts text in textboxes. Thanks to Nathan Konrad for pointing out the bug.

Doc2Html2Doc

Converts Word document text into html text, and vice versa.

PageNum

Adds auto-numbered, formatted page-number headings to a document. Useful when translating from a hard copy, and you need to add page-number indications.