You may be at the point with your project to send it to a translator. It’s exciting times when you feel like you are almost completed a project, and the final document is about to be presented to you. So, what happens when your translator suggests adding desktop publishing to your project. You might find yourself asking why your won design team couldn’t handle the project. You may be surprised as to why your translator should be the one to handle your desktop publishing.

Reasons to Have Your Translator Handle Desktop Publishing

Multilingual Desktop Publishing

One reason why you shouldn’t have your design team handle a translated version of your project is that translators already know how to reproduce a layout while incorporating the source language file with all the necessary cultural and technical adaptations. Your design team won’t know how to replicate cultural details so that they are accurate in a layout. You want your final document to look as if it was created for that particular language.

What a Translator Will Do with Desktop Publishing

There are many things that a translator can perform in regards to desktop publishing:

• Adjusting layout to make room for reduction and text expansion
• Extracting content from files for translation
• Assembling text from right to left for languages such as Urdu or Hebrew
• Editing graphics
• Creating a table of contents
• Addressing issues related to graphs, columns, and tables
• Modifying the template attached to the document
• Changing fonts to match target language
• Creating an index for target language

A professional translator will deliver a finished project to you that needs no further work. Everything you need to move on will be provided to you.

Why Use a Translator for the Project?

A translator with a desktop publishing background will be able to work with any type of file or format. Through the process of translation, they can recreate any file that you need to have translated. They can lay out documents using multiple software in many different languages. If you are translating to Chinese, Korean or Japanese, those languages require specific publishing software in order to be completed.

Complex Languages Require Experts

Translators are experts in foreign language text. When it comes to desktop publishing, you need to keep in mind that when you translate from English to French, for example, the word count is going to require a smaller font as well as more space on the page. By allowing your translator to handle the desktop publishing portion they can design the layout to accommodate the differences in size.

Translators Can Make Suggestions to Improve the Project

Since translators are knee-deep in the project, they can see where improvements could be made. They can see where to optimize the projects overall feeling and look. Translators also know everything about the target audience you are trying to connect with so they can be helpful in recommending the best design of your translation or the layout that will best suit the project.

It’s best to let a professional translator handle the project in regards to desktop publishing when you are dealing with a language you don’t understand. They will know how best to present your project to your target audience.