A Team of Expert Professional Desktop Publishers Personal | Professional | Precise
The presentation of printed materials can be just as important as the text itself, so getting it right is essential for effective communication.
Consistent design across printed and digital media can help to strengthen your brand image and ensures that your readers get the best possible first impression of your company, before they even read the text.
Dixon Associates has a team of expert professional desktop publishers, typesetters and graphic designers, so we can ensure that your materials look their best in any language and format.
Why Combine Desktop Publishing With Translation?
Desktop publishing, also known as typesetting, is a highly skilled task with many unique challenges, so it is always best completed by a specialist. Additionally, there are particular considerations in certain languages that might not be known or noticeable to someone who is not familiar with the language. All our desktop publishers and typesetters are also linguists, so we can ensure that your documents are perfectly tailored to your target market.
Key benefits of combining translation and desktop publishing include:
Consistent service thanks to a single project manager overseeing all stages of the project
Harmonious design and layout in all languages, accommodating changes in text length in the translations
Use of appropriate substitution fonts that support different alphabets and writing systems
Expert layout and formatting adaptation for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.
Cross-cultural design considerations to ensure effective multilingual communication
Additional Typesetting Considerations in Different Languages
There are many factors that typesetters and desktop publishers need to consider when working with different languages, which may not be familiar to those outside the translation and localisation industry.
Adaptations for right-to-left languages
There are many languages that are written from right-to-left, including Arabic, Azerbaijani, Dhivehi, Hebrew, N’Ko, Persian and Urdu. If your materials are being translated between a language written from left to right and one written from right-to-left, or vice versa, various elements of the document’s design and layout will need to be adjusted to accommodate the reversed writing direction. These include:
Replacing directional bullet points and numbered list formatting (e.g. ▶ in English would become ◀ in Arabic)
Flipping background graphics horizontally
Switching left text alignment to right text alignment
Reversing the order of flowcharts, series of images and process illustrations
Substitution Fonts For Different Writing Systems
The different alphabets and writing systems used in different languages can present some challenges for typesetters who are used to working with English text, so it is important that these languages are typeset by specialists who are familiar with them. Differences can range from a handful of accented characters in languages like French, German or Turkish, to entirely different alphabets in languages like Greek, Russian and Georgian.
Many languages do not use alphabets at all and instead use complex scripts; examples include Burmese, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Thai and many more. However, not all fonts support all languages’ writing systems, so it is frequently necessary to replace the fonts in a document when translating between languages that use different writing systems. If this is not checked by a specialist linguist or desktop publisher, it can result in the text becoming corrupted or not displaying correctly.
Integrated Publishing Support
Specialist Software
Desktop publishing is typically done using specialist software, such as such as Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Microsoft Publisher, and many others. It can also apply to some audiovisual projects, including presentations, videos, eLearning courses and websites. Our translation software can integrate seamlessly with most of these file formats, providing optimal efficiency by ensuring that the formatting, layout and design is preserved during the translations process and eliminating errors that may arise if text is manually copied and pasted between files.
Professional Printing and Accessible Formatting
In addition to desktop publishing, we can arrange for your materials to be professionally printed in a range of formats. We can also provide various accessible formats, including large print and braille.
To find out more about how we can help you, speak to one of the team today by phone on +44 (0)1952 288 230 or by email to info@dixon-associates.co.uk
