Cost saving opportunities for long documents

If your client hands you a very long document, especially if it is a technical document with a lot of repetitive phrases and sentences, you may want to ask the translator to use translation memory software to establish consistency among the repetitive units. There is also major cost savings possible. Usually you can expect to get a 50% discount off the regular price for repetitions.

Freelance translator or a translation agency?

If the selection of translators and using tools seem like a lot of work to you, you may want to consider the service of a professional translation company over freelancers. The cost is usually higher, but you will have the peace of mind of having professional project management help. Project managers at professional translation service firms work day in and day out recruiting translators and overlook the quality of translations. Their expertise is usually worth paying for.

If you decide to go with a translation company, you might want to ask some questions about their typesetting capabilities. Having the translation and typesetting taken care of in one shot will save you a lot of time and headaches. When you call to get an estimate, have them describe their process of dealing with the specific file format that you have. Don’t hesitate to ask for prior project samples and references. You want to choose a company that is technically competent to work on your project.

Typesetting foreign languages

In order to start typesetting foreign languages, you need additional software and an understanding of basic foreign language typesetting rules.

Software requirement for foreign language typesetting

For most Roman based languages such as Spanish or French, in order to have the full language support, you need to use QuarkXpress Passport or the InDesign English/ International version.

Full language support is more than the ability to enter and manipulate text. It provides hyphenation and spell checking as well as the ability to alphabetize lists properly such as table of contents and indexes. It also has additional import filters to handle language specific characters.

To typeset Slavic, Cyrillic, or Greek languages, you may want to look into the Central European version of InDesign. It can handle South and West Slavic languages such as Czech, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, Polish, and Eastern Slavic languages such as Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. It can also handle Albanian, Greek and Turkish.

If you are working with QuarkXpress, a separate set of dictionaries for those languages is available through a custom install of QuarkXpress Passport.

For Asian languages, QuarkXpress has different versions for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. For example, QuarkXpress has both a Simplified Chinese version and a Traditional Chinese version for the two different writing systems. While there is a Japanese version of InDesign, the Chinese language support is provided through a special plug-in called Asiaweb InChinese. InDesign doesn’t fully support Korean.

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