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How to Fix the “The document cannot be processed since it contains unexpected contents” issue on Trados Studio

03 June 2025
A piece of information on another Trados Studio issue
Another Trados Studio error was caught:
The document cannot be processed since it contains unexpected contents.

The developer claims that they eliminated the cause of this error already in Trados Studio 2017 SR1, but we discovered it in Trados Studio 2021. The error occurs when trying to open a document in a project.
The error is serious because it is caused by a violation of the internal structure of the SDLXLIFF file. You can’t proceed with translation (in fact, you won’t be able to).
How to fix it:
- If the Trados Studio package was created by a client, immediately inform them that you can’t continue working and ask them to generate a correct package.
- If you created the project yourself, create new versions of the source files that cause the failure. Let’s say, in case of Excel, create an empty Excel document and copy the content of the faulty file into it. For Word, a DOCX → RTF → DOCX re-save is usually enough.