How do you create a translation-friendly document with Adobe InDesign? Here are few quick and easy tips for designers preparing for multilingual InDesign projects.
Adobe InDesign is by far the most complete and powerful page design and layout package out there. It offers graphics designers a lot of freedom and possibilities. What designers are typically less confident about is the translation of an InDesign document.
For many designers, translation is just an afterthought, something that translators need to worry about. And yet, by taking translation into account in the source document, designers can prevent a lot of rework with the target language documents.
Creating translation-friendly InDesign files has a few important benefits:
Translating an InDesign file
Let’s get one important misunderstanding out of the way: you don’t need to copy the text from your InDesign source document and paste it into another format, like Microsoft Word or Excel. Translation software used by Yamagata Europe can perfectly handle InDesign files.
Copying and pasting your text from one format to another is not only costly and a lot of work, but with every conversion, you also increase the chance of introducing mistakes. You risk pasting text in the wrong place, omitting parts of the text, or mixing up important formatting or accents.
This is the typical translation-friendly InDesign workflow:
Making your InDesign source document translation-friendly
No longer copy-pasting into Word or Excel? Great, your translator will love you for it! But there’s more you can do to streamline the InDesign translation process and to avoid costly rework. Here are some of the most common best practices to follow.
1. No hard breaks or returns
In an attempt to better align your text, you may want to use forced line breaks, paragraph breaks, or tabs in the middle of a sentence. This is usually not a good idea, because it may require additional editing in the target language. It’s better to use a non-breaking space instead. This will not break the sentence in two and it will make more sense to the translator, who does not typically see the text in the original lay-out.
2. Use the InDesign table functionality
You don’t want to create tables by applying tabs or spaces. Not only is this difficult to lay out in the source and target language document, but you also make it difficult for translators to get a grasp of the actual table.
Instead, use the table functionality in InDesign. It’s powerful and easy to use.
3. Don’t embed text in images
Keep your text in the document layout as much as possible. Don’t embed text in images. This way, you avoid having to edit the image as well. If the source text is embedded in the image, you will need to extract it, and after translation, you will need to put it back into the image for each language version. Needless to say, this takes a lot of time.
4. Avoid off-page text
The pasteboard can be used to store text that isn’t needed in the actual document layout. If your pasteboard hasn’t been cleaned yet, the text will be translated and added to your translation cost. To avoid this, remove the pasteboard text if you don’t need it. If you want to keep text outside the page, store it in a separate, locked layer. This way, it will remain untranslated.
5. Generate an automatic table of contents
Don’t build your table of contents manually. Instead, generate it automatically in InDesign. This way, you’ll keep it consistent in the source language, and you avoid having to perform extensive checks on the target languages.
6. Use paragraph, character and table styles
Paragraph, character and table styles are very helpful for laying out the target languages. Styles help you to focus on the consistency of the overall layout, instead of working on it frame by frame.
7. Make room for other languages
If possible, leave space in the source language design to accommodate the translations. If your source language is English, then your target language will almost certainly need more space.
For example, if you translate a full English page into French, then you will need more than one page for the French version. As a result, you can no longer stick to the same layout and page count for different language versions. This is confusing and it easily leads to mistakes. By providing 20% to 30% whitespace for text expansion in the English source file, you can minimize your layout work for other languages.
Smooth InDesign translation
By carefully applying the above-mentioned tips and tricks to your source file, you are on your way to making future translations a much smoother process. And you’ll be happy to encounter less translation mistakes, less unnecessary rework, and no exceeding translation budgets.
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