Desktop Publishing

Desktop publishing (DTP) involves replicating text from one language to another, whilst preserving the core page layout.

Language Connect provides a flexible desktop publishing service; either standalone or integrated with our translation and/or proofreading services. In all cases, we use your existing artwork template so that the foreign language version mirrors the format and layout of the original.

The benefits

The main advantage to outsourcing your translated desktop publishing is that your operators/designers do not have to deal with any languages or foreign scripts that they do not understand, thus avoiding the risk of piecing text together incorrectly.

Desktop publishing services are vital because of the way languages change once translated. Our desktop publishers will consider the following:

• Word swells – document length can expand by up to 25% when translating from English into Romance languages, such as French
• Line spacing – Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean use less vertical space than Latin characters so the separating distance between lines may need to be adjusted
• Page layouts – languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left and thus require completely modified page layouts
• Numerical formats – can change from one language to the next. For example, currencies: 598.00 in English would be .598, 00 in Spanish and 598, 00 in French. In China, a yyyy-mm-dd date format is used, in America mm/dd/yyyy, and in Germany dd/mm/yyyy
• Punctuation formats – quotation marks differ depending on the country targeted. For example, in French, « » angular quotation marks would replace “ “ and in German „ ” double quotation marks would be used
• Fonts and character sets across languages and platforms

How we can help

Working with a wide range of software packages for both Mac and PC, we apply our technical expertise to create multilingual versions of all types of documentation.

We work with all major desktop publishing software including the latest released versions of Adobe PageMaker, FrameMaker, InDesign, Photoshop and Quark Xpress, amongst others.

In addition, our team of desktop publishers work with native-speaking linguists to provide a proofreading service, ensuring that the meaning of your text is not compromised when adjustments are made to accommodate formatting variations.
In our experience, effective collaboration between the desktop publisher and linguist ensures that:

• The design is adapted to suit the needs of the target language/audience
• Words are correctly hyphenated between lines
• Different language orthographies are respected with the use of capitalization. For example, German ‘Sie’, the formal second person singular or plural pronoun is capitalised along with all its declensions (Ihre, Ihres), but the third person feminine singular and the third person plural pronouns are not