MET workshops

Advanced Word skills for editors and translators


As an editor or translator, you want to focus on your core tasks: improving or conveying your client’s words. Being adept at using one of the essential tools of our trade will give you more time for the work you enjoy. Often the documents clients send do not display the best formatting, layout or consistency, and once you start editing or translating, the layout goes haywire and you waste time fixing the layout rather than the content itself. In this workshop I will explain some useful but lesser-known features as well as more advanced features of MS Word that will enable you to maintain your core focus by dealing with the non-language aspects of the document more productively. The many exercises built into the workshop will enable you to actively learn to use the features explained.

Developer and facilitator: Jenny Zonneveld

Purpose: This hands-on workshop is designed to illustrate some powerful features of MS Word. In particular, it will cover those aspects that are relevant to professional editors and translators as they improve texts on screen.

Description: The workshop will combine theory, demonstration and hands-on exercises. Topics covered will include
  1. Mastering the many facets of track changes & comments
  2. Understanding page layout and working with styles
  3. Dealing with large documents
  4. Manipulating layout with tables, not tabs
  5. Dealing with pictures and diagrams
  6. Productivity tips for editors and translators
Who should attend? Editors and translators who want to understand MS Word better and use it more productively. Mac as well as Windows users will benefit.

Outcome skills: Participants will learn time-saving skills and gain a better understanding of the MS Word features that are essential to editors’ and translators’ productivity. These skills will enable them to focus on the author’s words and intended meaning without needless distractions.

Pre-workshop information: Participants should bring their laptops to this workshop in order to follow the demonstrations and complete the exercises. Participants will be requested to complete a pre-workshop survey to indicate which version of MS Word they use and to help prioritize the topics to be covered during the workshop.
 
About the facilitator: Jenny Zonneveld has a business background. Before she became a freelance translator, copywriter and editor over 20 years ago, she spent more than 15 years at a firm of management consultants and worked in the UK, USA, Belgium and the Netherlands. She specialized in managing IT and logistics projects. At the start of her freelance career, Jenny compiled and prepared a series of software survey reports in MS Word for print. In 2002, she developed a two-day hands-on MS Word workshop for the Society of English-language professionals in the Netherlands (SENSE), which was presented several times to SENSE members; it was subsequently offered to translation students as part of the Editing Minor run by SENSE and the ITV School of Interpreters & Translators from 2004 to 2006.

Jenny is active in SENSE, was chair from 2015 to 2018, and is currently its webmaster.