Multilingual DTP

Did you know that...

• ... Arabic and Hebrew are not only written right to left, but laid out from right to left, so that the first page is the one with the spine on the right?
• ... Chinese and Japanese have very different rules than Western languages when it comes to deciding where you can break a line of text?
• ... Some languages of the former Soviet Union can be written in Latin, Cyrillic, or Arabic script, and that using one particular script will have important social and political connotations?

You had your brochures formatted by a top-notch design firm, and the text has been translated (possibly by us). But how do you get that multilingual text into the brochure template, and how do you ensure that all your design investment does not go wasted? And who will proofread all your foreign-language brochure before it's printed?

We can help!

At 101translations we understand the special requirements and hurdles of layout and design into various languages:

• We can ensure that the font you intend to use for your brochure has the special characters required by the relevant languages, and if not, we can suggest alternatives.
• We can source the best Asian, Arabic, Indic, or other fonts to match the Roman design of your brochure.
• We can deliver our translations formatted to match your design, directly in your preferred DTP format (Quark Xpress, Adobe InDesign, PageMaker, FrameMaker, MS Publisher), on both Windows and Mac systems.
• We can deliver the formatted translations as PDF files, optionally with the text vectorised (already converted to outlines, so you don't have to worry about fonts at all.)

Case Studies

One of our customers, who provides business card formatting and printing for Fortune 500 customers, has entrusted us with the translation and formatting process for foreign-language versions of the cards. Based on the English-language versions and on the end-users' requirements, we create ready-to-print EPS files of the translated side of the cards, in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc.

Another customer asked us to translate a prospectus for potential customers into over 30 languages, including many Asian languages, and to format the same as MS Publisher files with all the formatting in place. We adapted all the layout to manage the variations in text length from one language to the next, and created special, right-to-left versions for Urdu, Arabic and Hebrew.

We translated a brochure into several languages, including Urdu, Telugu and Chinese. We then laid out the Urdu in Adobe InDesign using the correct text orientation and fixed specific issues with the way InDesign handles Telugu ligatures. And all this for customers that are themselves a design studio!

How much does it cost?

Less than you think! Please contact us to request a free quote.