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I recently heard a funny story on the radio: a woman didn't want to date a guy because he did not know which teams played for the Super Bowl. It seems that only someone who has lived on the moon for years might not know what the Super Bowl is. However, I have lived here for about 5 years now and I still don’t have a clear idea of what American football is, and who the star players are. I know soccer, but that’s different. I believe there are others like me, who come from different cultures, with their own lifestyles and their beliefs. Sometimes what you think might be common sense is a new concept for other people. Do not assume when preparing your campaign for foreign cultures. Research those markets first. Find out what everybody’s “Super bowl” is and build your campaign, website, brochures, etc based on what common sense is for them. Do not expect foreigners to understand the rules of “your games” even if you translate your message; try to learn their games and rules and adapt your products to fit their needs. If you would like to know more about how to reach the global audience, you can attend this online seminar by Huiping Iler, owner of wintranslation.com: Going Global on the Web: Avoid the Pitfalls and Seize the Opportunities Special scripts in desktop publishingNow that most of the desktop publishing applications support Unicode, typesetting multilingual documents is easier and some typesetters can do it without too much effort. Professional desktop publishers are now able to place Chinese, or Korean, or Amharic text into InDesign or QuarkXPress, even if they do not have the specific language versions or understand the language. They will still need a translator to do a qu ality assurance and make sure that the text displays properly, that it is placed in the right spot, that there are no missing paragraphs, and to check line endings, line breaks, etc, but that’s something else. The good news is that it seems that everybody can do it now. The bad news is that for some languages this is still a myth and without enough knowledge and tools, an ordinary desktop publisher, typesetter or graphic designer, won't be able to handle the job properly. We receive calls everyday from people contacting us for help: "My Gujarati font doesn't display correctly. Could you help?”, “I have InDesign CS3 and I’ve been trying for a while now to paste some Hebrew text, but somehow the characters look like they have their own will!”... “Do you know why we can’t import Beng ali text in InDesign?” Have you ever tried to paste Arabic text in InDesign or Quark? If you do not know the language you might think that the text looks OK. But this is a clear no; that's not how it works. Arabic is supported only by Middle East versions of InDesign, Quark, etc. Hebrew is also a right-to-left language like Arabic, so it's supported by the same applications. Some might have problems with Hebrew vowels used for Biblical text. There aren't too many font families that can display those vowels and most of the time they don't even show all the diacritics. Indic scripts act in the most unexpected way. With them you can never be sure. You might think that you have typeset an entire brochure by yourself in a totally unknown language and saved lots of money, but after a while people will tell you that they can't read the brochure in their own language. Not all the characters display correctly. You will need to know from the beginning what fonts are supported by your application and ask your translator to use the correct font. Microsoft supports lots of Indic fonts; however, not all of them are supported by desktop publishing applications and you might need to do lots of tests to find the right font. The next font used for typing was Shruti – this is the Gujarati font that comes with Windows operation system. It displays correctly in Word, however, when pasted in InDesign or Quark, some of the characters took on strange forms. In the end, the font recommended by a Gujarati typesetting speci alist was used successfully for this small project. The Gujarati font that displays correctly in English applications was Saumil, a true type font that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. And the good news for designers is that the font works on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. Correct text in Word:
The Gujarati text imported in Indsign using GJ-TTAvantika font and Shruti.
You might come across the same problem with all the other Indian languages. Usually, the translator will type the text in Word using a font provided by Windows, or a font he is comfortable with, like Mangal for the Hindi language. However, Mangal won’t display properly in a desktop application and you'll have to replace it with KrutiDev. As each font comes with a special keyboard arrangement, some translators that are able to type Mangal might not know how to type KrutiDev - this is also a font provided for free on the Internet and it works perfectly with InDesign or Quark. Some of the fonts can also be converted using special applications. For example, if your translator can’t type KrutiDev you can use a font converter like TBIL to convert the text to the font you like. How accurate these converters are, only a Hindi language speaker can say. So, if you decide to do multilingual typesetting in-house, make sure you have a language native verifying that the text displays correctly from the first page laid down. If you only have somebody checking your document after the final draft is ready, you must be prepared to do everything from the beginning again and again… Language jokeThe Official Language The European Commission has just announced that English will be the official language of the European Union. German, which was the other possibility, narrowly missed out. During negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly this will make sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer pepl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und after zis fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German; lik zey vunted in ze forst plas. If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl. |
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