A little Word scripting

As you may know, I'm a technical translator by trade these days, so I work under Windows with Word documents a lot. Word has a scripting mechanism that I've often considered to be Microsoft's way of making it technically possible to program whatever you need in Word, without actually making it sensibly easy (making hard things possible and making easy things hard, thus ensuring grist for a robust consulting mill), but back in a previous life I spent a lot of paid time writing Word macros to do text processing. Profiting from that grist, I suppose.

Anyway, this week I have a huge pile of process definitions to be placed into Word, each consisting of a table on each page with a list of steps in a process to be carried out manually (many with barcodes for acknowledgement and so on). Each step has a unique identifier - by which I mean that each type of step has a unique identifier and there can be any number of tokens of each type of step.

And it's all in German and my job is to translate it to English. And the originals are all scanned PDFs, so I can't actually just use a regular translation tool to find repetitive text, or even cut and paste into Word; it all has to be typed. I do have properly formatted blank tables to start with for each document.

What I've ended up doing is putting each type of text into a table in a dictionary document, then writing a macro that looks up the unique ID I've typed into the given target document's first column and, if it's found, copies the already-translated row into the target document. If that type hasn't been encountered yet, then I translate it, and copy the row into the dictionary by hand.

I'm writing about it here, because at a semantic level that Word dictionary document is a database (a NoSQL database, if you want to be all cool-kids about it). If this macro were expressed in Decl, it would be much easier to get a lot of implications of that construal and work them into new ramifications.

In other words, construing one thing as another (a semantic mapping) is a form of recognition that could explicitly underlie the programming process in a semantic language. Also, I think I like the word "construal" as a technical term for this kind of mapping.