Word import results in BACKWARD quotation marks & spaces before punctuation

[GPDX]

I'm trying to lay out a 132-pg magazine but when I place Word docs sent from my editor,  punctuation is appearing incorrectly. Primarily quotation marks are backwards (it should appear as "phosphorescent." in the attached image) and spaces following punction (commas & periods) are shifted to the left of the character instead of following it.

I probably don't understand how to properly import styles from Word. I need to retain styles to preserve italics and bold faces. But I don't understand how to do that without these punctuation corruptions.

I saw this thread which tells me to strip formetting, which i can't do, or to use style mapping, but I don't quite understand how to do that properly. 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/importing-text-into-indesign-its-backwards/m-p/10581590#M151... 

This is what I see in the style mapping dialog box, but I'm still getting formatting errors. Did I do something wrong?  I'm sure that I'm ultimately importing incorrectly, so even if you know of a tutorial or article which tells me how to do this correctly, I'd be eternally grateful!!

Please help!

MacOS High Sierra

v10.13.6

InDesign 15.0.1

[Jongware]

It looks like your InDesign thinks it's running backwards. You might have enabled some RTL mode somewhere, and set it as default for new text.

Create a text frame in this document (do not copy an existing one!). If you type in it, does the text behave normally? Or do you get this same behavior?

[GPDX]

Typing in a new text frame produces normal frontward-facing quotation marks and spaces in the proper place. It appears as expected.

[Willi Adelberger]

Hi, if the puntuation-space-order is wrong, check first, if it is correct in the Word document. If not, check if your langauge is correct.

If you want to style maps your styles you have to create your styles in InDesign first. What you are doing here is to map everything to the [Basic Styly] which is nonsense, you will loose any style information from Word. If your INDD file does not contain any styles, import the Word file with styles but without mapping. You have to work on your styles in InDesign, as the Word settings will you not make happy and the printer neither.

[GPDX]

The punctuation is correct in Word.

I've tried creating a new ID doc and importing the Word file with preserving styles and w/o mapping but still get the same results.

The only thing that seems to correct the punctuation errors is selcting "remove styles and formatting from text and tables" but then it strips italics and bold faces, which I need to retain.

[GPDX]

I figured out a workaround. I didn't have MIcrosoft Word and was opening the .docx files in Pages. I downloaded a trial version of Office and converted the files to .rtf and everything works now!!