Skip to content

Translation and desktop publishing (DTP)

Translation and desktop publishing

Translation and desktop publishing

Translation and desktop publishing are more closely related than you think. When creating the layout of a product catalogue or marketing brochure, most companies outsource this task to a design agency. Alternatively, they turn to their own in-house design department. In either case the focus is almost always a monolingual one. Understandably the idea is to produce a nice-looking document for publication in the original language. Very little consideration is given to the possibility that the document in question might be translated into one or more languages.

 

Translation and layout

The decision to translate this kind of documentation has a significant impact not only on the content itself but also on the layout of the document for reasons that may seem obvious but that are often not taken into account when designing the original.

First and foremost is the length of the text. English takes up a relatively small amount of space in comparison to most other languages (which use more words to say the same thing). If English is the source language of the document then all translations of this will occupy more space. If you translate into one language there is very little difference between

  • modifying the original in advance to accommodate the longer text or
  • tweaking the translated document in order to make the text fit.

However once we enter the realm of multilingual translations we may find ourselves modifying various documents to accommodate various language translations. Modification of the original however, which we would only do once, would have sufficed. Therefore it is often more efficient to modify the original document in anticipation of the translation.

 

A key tip

Employ simple techniques such as extending text boxes as far as possible to cater for the longer translated text. Or reduce the point size of all the text in the original document, particularly if there is very little extra space to play with. (Reducing it once in the original will avoid having to do it once for each language).

 

Conclusion

Whoever is designing the document should take into account factors such as these. This is why it is essential for the language service provider to play an increasingly important role in document design.

Related Posts