When pasting into Word for Mac, you get an error Translation Error: No translation available… then MathType crashes

Applicability

Issue

Rather than use the Insert Equations buttons on the MathType tab in Word, you prefer to keep the MathType window open and copy and paste to get equations from MathType into Word. When you paste an equation into Word, you get an error message:

…and when you dismiss the error dialog, MathType crashes:

Reason

This doesn't happen with every equation, or even with most equations. It only happens when you use a symbol that's not included in the identified "translator" file, texvc.tdl. If you know about MathType translators or what they're used for, that's fine, but not necessary. The issue here is caused by the process of MathType creating an "OLE object" to paste into Word. If the file texvc.tdl doesn't include a translation for one or more of the symbols you've used in the equation, you'll get this error and MathType will crash. This happens even though you haven't selected the Texvc translator. Sometimes Word will crash too.

Solution

This issue will be fixed in a future version of MathType, but until then, the workaround is to use one of the Insert Equations buttons (i.e., Inline, Right-numbered, etc.) on the MathType tab in Word to insert equations. This will create an OLE object for the equation just like pasting, but MathType should not crash when inserting equations this way. (Note this method of inserting equations is faster than copying and pasting. Inserting with the button requires three steps, while copy and paste requires 4.)

We hope this has been helpful. As always, please let us know if you have questions about this or if you have additional techniques that work. We'd love to hear from you.