Hi Sneather,

I was puzzled by this post since I come from a CAD Engineering background and haven't heard of such an issue with translations, especially these days . I had a quick look at this and had no issue importing a STEP file assembly from Solidworks 2011 with all part names and styles(colours) used in Solidworks, see attached.

The only thing I can think of is if your client is using SW correctly, what I mean is you can model all parts of an assembly in a single model window/session, the industry standard for SW is to model each piece as an individual part file (*.SLDPRT) then you create an assembly file (*.SLDASM) and bring in the individual part files to create the assembly.

The only way I can check is I'd need the original SW file to see what's going on, if you like you can PM me and we can organise it.





Please note the object names are different it's just that they begin with the same 3 words, I think Michael was looking into expanding long object names on mouse over, isn't that right Michael ;)

*Model from GrabCad*

Cheers
~Danny~