We maintain your document’s layout when dealing with editable formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InDesign, etc.) and offer complimentary formatting for non-editable files to be translated.
Desktop Publishing (DTP) services are charged when requested as a separate service.

For the sake of efficiency, i.e. in order to speed up the translation process and avoid formatting mishaps, here are some tips to follow before sending us your files:

1. Avoid monolithic documents that are hundreds of mega-bytes in file size, rather organise content into smaller chunks in order to avoid memory problems on the translator’s PC.

2. Leave room in the layout for the translated text as it will expand in most cases. For example, Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian but also Eastern European languages such as Polish, Russian, Croatian, Serbian etc., compared to the same content in English will show a considerable text expansion. As a result, the translated text in many cases may no longer fit nicely into the layout.

3. Avoid text on pictures (JPG, PNG, TIFF) as in most cases, it cannot be extracted for translation. When creating translatable content, avoid the text functions in graphics applications such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. Rather use InDesign, Word, Framemaker etc. to create the translatable content and the graphics application to create the visual content.

4. Avoid paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, rather use soft line breaks for that purpose. Remember that when translatable text gets imported in a translation editor, the text is segmented, i.e. the translation editor creates smaller chunks, e.g. each sentence will become a segment. If you use the paragraph break to layout a document, the segments will get cut off in the middle and translation will become a nightmare.

5. Use styles, avoid manual formatting when creating layouts. Avoid creating indents using space or tab characters – if at all possible, use styles with automatic indentation.

6. When selecting a corporate font as part of your corporate identity, plan ahead whether you need to localise and into which languages you need to localise. Select a corporate font for your CI that supports all character sets of the languages you want to get your content localised into.

7. Avoid sending PDF files to translation. Prefer open formats. Even if content can in many cases be extracted from generated or scanned PDFs, the resulting target layout will not look as nice as when working with the underlying open text format.

8. Avoid embedding PDF documents into the main document, rather embed the open formats as those can be imported into the translation editor in most cases.

9. Before sending documents for translation, make sure you know which text must be and should not be translated and make sure to tell us about it. Modern translation environments avail of many functions that allow translators to include or exclude text for translation and thus control, which parts of the document are imported or ignored for translation.