DTP services

The translation of a document from one language to another can have a major impact on the graphic lay-out of the document.

The following things need to be taken into consideration:

• Documents that are translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese, for example, are roughly 20-30% longer in the target language. So the lay-out of the target language takes up more space. One way of getting round this is to use a smaller font or different margins.
• Many German and Russian words contain a lot of characters, which means that tables, graphs and menu headers need to be made wider.
• Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi mirror the lay-out as they are written from right to left.
• Special modules or language-specific versions of DTP software are usually required for character-based languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

If you so desire, we can handle not just the translation but also the entire lay-out process and carry out the DTP in Adobe, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, PowerPoint, Pagemaker or Publisher. Our translators work closely with the DTP people, who are used to working in these languages, so you can rest assured that everything will be correctly positioned, punctuation will be accurate and words will be hyphenated correctly at the end of a line. In the case of languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese in particular this can save you a lot of trouble. Ask us about the possibilities.