Desktop Publishing
Companies invest time, money and creativity in the texts and design of their graphics and documents. These can be company presentations, manuals, brochures, mailings or newsletters. The content is designed graphically and in line with the corporate design.
As soon as a document is final in terms of design and content, translations are often required for other target markets, because multilingual expansion has become essential for many companies in the age of internationalization and globalization.
What does that mean?
Having the content translated and then swapping the source text for the foreign language – sounds very simple, doesn’t it? In practice, however, changing the language can seriously alter the appearance of the beautiful document, which is very annoying.
Romance languages, for example, require up to 30% more space than German. This can change the positions of illustrations, line and page breaks or make the text too long for the document. New pages may have to be added.
In order to reproduce the attractive layout and formatting of the document in the translation, this is where the foreign language typesetting (desktop publishing) comes into play. DTP experts (graphic designers) work with our translators to adapt the format in all the required languages. This ensures that the layout is retained for use in print or digital media.
The usual programs that our DTP experts work with are InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, Freehand, Corel Draw, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, FrameMaker and MS Publisher.
But how does the foreign language sentence work in a specific case?
First, the texts for translation are fed into our translation tool SDL Trados Studio. If the file format is not supported, the file must be converted beforehand. For example, InDesign files are converted from INDD to IDML.
After translation, the target-language document is generated from our translation tool. During the subsequent layout check by our graphic designers and translators, the formatting of the file is checked for excess length and breaks, among other things, and the translation is checked for completeness. In general, there are a number of factors to consider when typesetting foreign languages, as some languages are subject to certain conventions that require adaptations for the target market. In Chinese, for example, the layout is justified instead of left-aligned.
Tips for an efficient translation process with foreign language typesetting:
- Editable texts, also in images & graphics
- Provide linked graphics and fonts used
- Leave layers open for editing (DO NOT lock)
- Consistency in style, format and paragraph format templates*
- Use of Open Type fonts, otherwise: Provide fonts**
*Templates make typesetting in foreign languages easier, as changes do not have to be made individually at different points in the document, but only once in the template.
**Companies often create their own preferred fonts within their CI guidelines. These fonts may not be supported for foreign language characters and fonts. Fonts work with Unicode encoding. This makes it possible to use different fonts, special characters (such as in Czech or Slovak) and even several different systems in one document. With the widely used standard fonts such as Arial, Times or Calibri, the probability is highest that the required characters and fonts can be displayed in foreign languages.
