Julio Montero

Regional Director (Toronto)

jmontero@megalexis.com 

You want your translated documents to match your originals both in format and content. To achieve this, you must consider the DTP implications at the beginning of a project. Documents that contain images, graphics, cross-references, footnotes, tables and charts are especially vulnerable to accrued costs and benefit from the following treatment:

Best practices:

Provide editable source files* from these programs:

• Microsoft Word
• Adobe InDesign
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Frame Maker

 *If you don’t have access to these, we can manually transcribe and convert the content, but this is more expensive and time consuming.

 Send us the associated file elements:

• Fonts
• Graphic files
• Links
• Target language mock-ups

Share visual references:

• PDF versions of the files
• Layout screenshots

Consider proofreading your mock-ups

• Proofreading by a linguist is strongly advised before publication. This ensures that mistakes are not introduced during the final formatting or upload.

Did you know?

• Text is extracted from your files for translation and then imported back into the final format.
• Linguists rarely work directly in DTP programs.
• Text within pictures must be processed manually.
• Spanish or French will run 20% to 30% longer than English. 
• Languages such as Urdu and Arabic are written from right to left, which impacts the placement of all visual elements.
• Document flexibility is required to allow margins, fonts, page breaks, graphic placement and image sizing to fit in the spaces available.