It’s easy to think that translation is just about words. But when you render a document with text, images, graphs and charts into another language, you step into the design and layout world. If you are translating correspondence in MS Word this is not a big issue, but if your original is in PowerPoint, QuarkXpress, InDesign or FrameMaker or any other graphics or text processing program, DTP will play a significant role in the price and flow of the project.

You may choose to extract the text and then paste the translation into the original layout, but keep in mind the varying typographical conventions and space requirements for various languages. Spanish typically takes up 20% more space than English, which requires font resizing and realignment of graphic elements. Some East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Hebrew and Arabic are written right to left, which calls for special typesetting techniques.

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