Well, the first line of defense is to clear the check box for "Detect
language automatically" in Tools | Language | Set Language. But note that if
you insert an AutoText entry or formatted AutoCorrect entry whose language
is French, the language at the insertion point will be French unless you
change it back to English at that point (if you've got the Language Bar
displayed, that should be easy enough.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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all may benefit.

"matthewshepherd" wrote in
message ...
I work as a translator (French to English), and whenever I start working
in a
document, I switch the language of the document to English. Otherwise,
there
are various formatting errors (spaces before question marks and colons,
angle
quotes, and Word getting cutesy and trying to "fix" my "spelling errors.)

So I CTRL-A, and set the Language to English. And get to work.

But Word, in its infiinite wisdom, keeps dicking with the language
settings.
Every time I type a French name or title or quote -- or start working in a
paragraph that is still in French -- it decides to swap the language back
to
French. And then it starts "fixing" my typos, etc. etc. etc.

I DO NOT want to uninstall or deactivate the French dictionaries. My main
language of correspondence with clients is French.

I DO NOT want to deactivate spell checks or corrections. They are very
useful in English.

I WANT to tell Word "this document is an English document. This document
is
a good document. DO NOT CHANGE THE LANGUAGE IN THIS DOCUMENT, EVEN IF I
START
TYPING IN FLUENT SWAHILI."

How can I do this? It's making me a little nuts.