Dave Williams, our in-house production specialist works with Adobe InDesign on a daily basis; here he looks at the advantages of creating documents for translation in this format.
InDesign has been around for 10 years and is one of the most popular Desktop Publishing packages on the market today. Adobe constantly updates and upgrades its software in order to keep up-to-date with the demands of today’s electronic publishing industry. They have recently released the 6th version.
InDesign is compatible with fonts for nearly all languages, which is really helpful to production specialists working with translated text. The Translation People have the latest version, many earlier versions and also the Middle Eastern version of InDesign. The Middle Eastern version allows us to typeset many of the languages spoken in the Middle East including Arabic and Hebrew; InDesign ME enables the typesetter to flip the text so that it runs right to left, to reflect the flow of languages such as Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew. This facility ensures that the client’s end Arabic/Urdu/Hebrew document looks as professional as the original in spite of the change in text direction.
The Trados plug-in is another cost and time-saving advantage of using InDesign for any documentation you hope to have translated. This plug-in allows text to be exported from the InDesign file into a Trados friendly format. Once the translation process is complete, the translated file can be imported back into the InDesign document and a foreign language version of the same layout is created. This speeds up the whole document translation process reducing time and cost for the client. The imported translation file still does require some typesetting as different languages have different text length, so some manipulation of the text, to retain the aesthetics of the original language document, is required.
At The Translation People if we are asked to create new documents with a view to having them translated into numerous languages, we would strongly suggest the use of InDesign as it lends itself well to translations, whatever the language.
