Create bilingual documents: English on left, French on right

[jmt356]

I am trying to create a bilingual document with English on the left and the French translation on the right. I thought of using a 2-column table with the English text copied in the left column and the French in the right column, but then headings nested in tables do not show up in document maps. I thus decided that using a two-column layout would be the way to go, but this causes a different issue: rather than getting all of the French text on the right, the English text simply continues into the right columns and the French text only appears in the last pages of the document, after the end of the English text.

Any suggestions as to how to get around this problem or how to achieve my objective by using a different means?

Thank you in advance.

[StuartR]

Word really doesn't have a satisfactory way to do this.

You could try placing text boxes on every page, and linking these manually so the text flows from odd page to odd page, and from even page to even page, but this is quite labour intensive. See the following example.

[jmt356]

Is there no way to make items copied into a Table appear in the Document Map? Is there no way to force certian entries to stay in the left column and others to stay in the right? If not, is there a software that can be recommended for doing this? Publishers do it all the time, so I imagine someone thought of an easy way to do it.

[StuartR]

...Publishers do it all the time, so I imagine someone thought of an easy way to do it.

You need publishing software to do this.

I suspect you can do it with Microsoft Publisher, Adobe Indesign, CorelDRAW, Serif PagePlus and similar products, but I am not an expert on any of these.

[emiliaserv]

I found this that appears to confirm your suspicions:
The Document Map doesn't display some or all of the document's headings.
...
Headings may be in a table or text box When you display the Document Map in a document that contains only a table (table: One or more rows of cells commonly used to display numbers and other items for quick reference and analysis. Items in a table are organized into rows and columns.) or one or more text boxes (text box: A movable, resizable container for text or graphics. Use text boxes to position several blocks of text on a page or to give text a different orientation from other text in the document.) with heading rows or heading styles, the heading rows or styles do not appear in the Document Map.

That said, as a translator I create bilingual documents as 2-column tables all the time when I want to use them for reference purposes. Would it be feasible to leave your headings outside the table and separate the languages with a tab (I'm assuming the headings aren't too long otherwise it's going to be much more difficult)? You could then have the rest of the text within the table and there shouldn't be any problem here.

Graham

[jmt356]

It’s certainly feasible for short documents. But I am working on another longer document with many headings, and it will be very labor intensive.