Mavericks: MS Word crashing on documents with comments

In short, Word crashes silently upon opening certain documents. The problem seems to be with documents that include Comments. I have tested by using WinWord to remove the comments from a file that crashed. After removing the comments, Word opens just fine.

Furthermore, when creating new comments in a fresh document, Word crashes.

I have tried all

• reinstalled Word 14.3.8
• deleting all caches (font and otherwise) using Onyx
• Installing latest Java
• disabling MS Error Reporting

all of which didn't help.

Any suggestions?

Changing preferred language to English (as explained here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/115387) worked for me!