DTP (for) translation

IT documentation, technical manuals, brochures, books, booklets, catalogues, pamphlets, sales and publicity content – all such types of documents have to be designed in an engaging and attractive way so that a prospective client can be quickly converted into an actual client! This design work is done with specific software like Corel, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Framemaker, Adobe InDesign, etc. Such specially designed content can be localized to reach more and more target customers – creating multilingual versions of such files while keeping the design as consistent as possible between various languages, requires both language knowledge as well as technical knowledge of these special file formats.

Linguistic knowledge is quintessential in multilingual DTP projects as post-translation quality assurance of documents involves following checks which require understanding of the concerned language:

• incorrect line and paragraph breaks
• missing translation
• incorrect translations
• half cut sentences/phrases/words
• incomplete/incorrect labeling of images
• text overflowing from images/tables/boxes
• formatting/alignment errors for bullets/points/paragraphs/headings/headers
• missing accents
• two or more languages mixed up in one line/paragraph/page
• text and image overlapping each other
• typos

In files with numerous drawings and images, 7-8 rounds of checking are sometimes required so as to iron out not only all of the above problems but also minor errors and formatting issues. Though a very time-consuming job, the results of such thorough work is evident when satisfied clients can use “ready to print” files delivered by us for their marketing, promotion and sales activities!