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Five translation pitfalls our DTP services avoid

Desktop publishing (DTP) translates digital documents in the same software used to create them to ensure consistency and quality across every language version. If you create a document in Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator or AutoCAD, our DTP experts open your source document in the same programme and translate the document for you while maintaining the original format and specification.

Translating digital documents poses some unique challenges that require programme knowledge, design expertise, technical industry experience and a set of specialist linguist skills. In this article, we look at five common translation issues you will run into while translating digital documents and how DTP experts overcome them.

Common DTP translation pitfalls

DTP translation done properly ensures every language of your documents meets the same formatting and specification requirements. Without some minor design tweaks, you will struggle with inconsistent text length, layout collapses, font support issues and a range of other problems across different target languages.

Here are the five most common issues you’ll come across when translating digital documents:

  1. Consistency: Our DTP services maintain consistency across every version of your document, accounting for fonts and other visual changes, as well as translation.
  2. Technical translation: The technical vocabulary in specialist documents (designs, blueprints, medical docs, etc.) isn’t always the easiest to translate so you need specialist translators with knowledge of your field.
  3. Text expansion: Translated text is often longer in foreign languages than English versions, which can break layouts – something that needs to be addressed during the translation process.
  4. Font support: Finding fonts that support the special characters of every language and match your original choice can be tricky.
  5. Localisation: Our DTP experts optimise the non-language elements of every design, such as layout, numerical values, date formats and everything else that needs adapting.

With professional DTP services, you get a team of linguists with the industry and software knowledge needed to convert your documents into multiple languages. They manage text expansion and contraction to ensure layouts and formatting are protected as text length changes.

For consumer-facing documents where fonts and styles are carefully chosen, our team will also help you find the best fonts to support all of the special characters unique to each of your target languages, while matching the style and feel of your original document as closely as possible.

The visual aspect of DTP translation is all about maintaining consistency across every version and managing the inevitable changes of converting text from one language to another.

As always, the other key priority is quality translation and many of our DTP clients work in highly specialised industries. This is why it’s so important to provide translators with industry expertise and a strong understanding of the terminology to ensure the correct translation is always achieved.

Want to learn more about DTP translation?

If you want to find out more about our DTP services and the software programmes our DTP team specialises in, feel free to contact us.

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