As a Trados user, you may want to clean a bilingual Trados-tagged *.rtf file "manually" for some reasons.

One such reason is that Trados, both the version 7 and earlier, may alter file formatting when cleaning the file from the source language segments with the Trados "Clean up" functionality.

(This might be due to Trados interacting with WordPad components. MFC WordPad components do not guarantee 100% preservation of styles/formats when re-saving files.)

The following is a step-by-step instruction on cleaning Trados-tagged *.rtf files in a plain editor with support for macro commands.

You will need to open your *.rtf file in a plain text editor.

(An example of a plain text editor is Notepad, a Windows built-in utility; however, its function may not be enough for the described procedure. I use GNU Emacs.)

An *.rtf file looks intimidating in its plain textual form to an unexperienced user, due to abundance of special tags.

Luckily, the relevant ones have been sorted out for you in the following description.

With a bit of care, you can save hours on erasing fragments "by mouse".

Make sure to leave out a backup copy before you start, in case you are lost in editing.

In the described instance, the source language is Russian (Russia), and the target is English (US).

Examples of Trados tags:

{\cs19\v\cf12\sub \{0>}

93\{>}

{\cs19\v\cf12\sub }

0\{>}

{\cs19\v\cf12\lang1049\langfe1033\sub\langnp1049 } (a 93% match marker)

A divider immediately follows the source closing tag. After the step 2, your cursor should be just before the divider string.

Define a macro to accommodate for the variable length of the divider (one, two or three digits). I recommend relying on the "{>}" ending substring.

5) Delete source (Russian) fragments, beginning with type (b) opening tags

{\cs19\v\cf12\lang1049\langfe1033\sub\langnp1049 \{0>}

and ending with the closing tags

{\cs19\v\cf12\lang1049\langfe1033\sub\langnp1049