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A Global Perspective on Life Sciences Industry News
Words Within Borders
Using Creative Design Tools to Assist with the Authoring of Multilingual Documents
If
you ever happened to be on the receiving end of a French letter or
had to even write one yourself, you might have wondered about the
longwinded line in the end reading something like this: “Dans
l'attente de vous lire, je vous prie d'agréer, Mesdames et
Messieurs, l'expression de mes sentiments distingués.” What does it
mean? It’s simply the French way of saying “Best regards”: Two words
in English, two lines in French.
Not
really a problem, unless you are dealing with the layout of a
document—maybe a brochure, datasheet, packaging, or similar—intended
for publication in a variety of languages, and your spacing needs to
allow for both (and more) versions. The translators of course can be
directed to try to keep the word count of the target text as close
to the original as possible, but that’s not always feasible. In
fact, foreign languages take up on average 30% more space than
English text, as it is one of the particularities of the English
language that it lends itself to brevity (lauded by some as the
highest virtue in language and lamented by others as sheer loss of
syntax).
DTP
to the Rescue
Be
that as it may, desktop publishing has come a long way since its
introduction in 1985, and while multilingual DTP addresses the issue
outlined above, there is more to learn and always room to improve.
And we haven’t even mentioned yet the challenges of different
writing systems, different hyphenation rules, right-to-left text,
special characters and other typical problems. To this date based on
the wonderfully simple principle and complex system of WYSIWYG (What
You See Is What You Get), multilingual desktop publishing only works
if the eyes that see the page know what they are looking at.
DTP
and Translation
Most
translation agencies work with desktop publishing experts
specializing in the integration of target texts into the source
document created by you in your authoring application of choice,
such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. Rather than having your
document translated as word file and then importing it in-house into
your DTP software, using the agency’s specialists offers you the
advantage of working with a team that knows the tricks and pitfalls
of the different language layouts inside out. They also cooperate
closely with the individual translators and make sure that the
latter’s “seeing eyes” review the results before the finals go to
the client. If the translation is excellent but doesn’t look good on
the page, its effect is greatly diminished.
Apart
from the basic checkpoints—is everything on the page and in the
right place—there are a number of additional items that need to be
verified with regard to the foreign language versions. We already
brought up hyphenation: the vocabulary of languages like German or
Hungarian is full of compound and similarly long words which may
need to be hyphenated, and this has to be done correctly and in a
way that does not interfere with the flow and look of the text.
Ideally, hyphens should be avoided as much as possible and methods
like kerning (adjusting the space between characters) used to keep
the text in place.
Long
words in headers can be a real headache, and capitalization is
another can of worms in the same department. While English language
DTP experts like to get creative with UPPERCASE, tOGGLE cASE,
Sentence case, and lower case for headlines or taglines, different
rules apply in different languages and what looks like fun and
attention catching in one language will appear simply wrong in
another.
Fonts
are a tricky matter altogether. Some may not show the special
characters in the foreign language or replace them with something
else (Über looks like Uber and ingrédients like ingre&dients). Most
of the simpler fonts will be able to handle the characters of the
other languages; fancy fonts featuring in the original might have to
be replaced. There is no room for error: A word without a specific
accent in Spanish will be plain wrong, regardless how attractive the
font.
Optimizing your DTP files
One
way to optimize multilingual desktop publishing projects from the
start thus lies in choosing a relatively basic font as well as a
simple yet flexible layout that will accommodate different sets of
characters and can easily be adjusted to read from right to left
(e.g. for Farsi, Arabic, or Hebrew).
An
extremely useful DTP feature is the style sheet, since it creates
consistency and makes applying and updating even complicated
formatting fast and easy. The principle behind the style sheet is
the separation of presentation and text data, which facilitates the
creation of different language versions following the same format.
Equally helpful is the use of different layers, which will need to
be aptly named and made available as source files to the translation
agency’s translation and desktop publishing team. All graphs and
charts must be editable.
How
the text and other elements are connected also has an impact on
their rendition in other languages. If inline components (text
boxes, graphics) are to remain in a certain position in relation to
each other, they need to be grouped using the Group command or
Ctrl-G, which will create a dotted outline around the elements. When
placing a graphic between paragraphs, it is preferable to place it
within the text frame—as an additional paragraph—rather than
creating text boxes above and below the graphic, which will have to
be reformatted if the text expands in the foreign version.
Last
but not least, it is crucial to leave plenty of white space in your
document to allow for the expansion of text in the target languages,
as well as space between the lines paired with a font that is not
too small, since it may have to be reduced further. This way, your
translated versions will not only sound but also look just as
elegant as the French closing of a letter. Je vous donc prie
d’accepter, chers lecteurs, l'assurance de ma considération
distinguée.
Nanette Gobel,
MA
©aiaTranslations
2011 Cannot be
reproduced without written permission from Atkins International
Associates Inc. Contact
Sherry Dineen for information.