Multilingual Desktop Publishing: Language Services Taken Further

Imagine a brand that’s looking to expand and reach new markets on a global scale: to promote its products and services, said brand spends a lot of time, effort and money to translate new campaigns into the foreign languages spoken by their target audiences. 

Only problem: the translations are great, but the material on which they’ve been distributed looks off… Even if the language content is flawless, poor presentation and formatting can undermine the impact of the publication. That’s precisely where multilingual typesetting comes in.

What is multilingual desktop publishing (DTP)?

Desktop publishing (DTP), or typesetting, is a process by which text is inserted into a page layout, alongside graphic elements, to create print-ready documents that adhere to traditional typography and printing rules. 

While adapting and localising translated text for foreign audiences may sound simple, it does require extensive knowledge and experience that only a seasoned designer and a professional linguist can provide.

What are the main challenges a typesetter faces?

Using tools such as Adobe InDesign, the industry-leading software for desktop publishing - a typesetter’s job is to ensure that a document’s content is, through its design and layout, both accurate, impactful and carefully crafted. 

Not only do these rules and standards apply to physical material such as brochures, leaflets and business cards, but in today’s digital world, efficient typesetting can also be crucial to a brand’s online presence.

To revisit our scenario at the top of this article, what happens when a brand’s brochure needs to reach a global audience? 

• What is the best font to use in Hindi that will stay truthful to the brand’s identity?
• Where should the lines of a chunk of text in Chinese be split for it to read naturally?
• Knowing that the same text in Russian can take up to 25% more space than it does in English, how does this impact the layout? 
• How does the design need to be adapted for languages that are read from right to left such as Arabic or Hebrew?

An experienced multilingual typesetter is able to answer all of these questions (and many more), using their skills to allow brands to shine and reach new audiences in any part of the world, regardless of cultural or language differences. This is made evident in the example pictured below:

Someone with no prior knowledge of DTP or the Arabic language may simply trust that the translations they have been provided can easily replace the source material. After all, why wouldn’t it be as straightforward as a simple “copy & paste”? In fact, when transposing translated texts into some ready for print designs, many things can go awry:

• A brand’s preferred font may look stylish and work perfectly in English, but not all fonts are created equally. A typesetter must ensure the fonts displayed support all of the numbers, punctuation, accents and special characters the target language uses.
• Similarly, some fonts may look right to an inexperienced eye, but end up being incompatible with the language at hand. In our example above, even though the fonts used are able to display Arabic letters, the words are not correctly joined up. 

Think of it as a normal paragraph in English, but with a double space between every single letter and no clear separation between individual words. The result would make for a jarring, nonsensical mess.

• Linguists and typesetters work in tandem to ensure the content is both aesthetically pleasing and functional. 

When to split a line for better readability, how to condense big portions of text in a limited amount of space or even what font size to use… all of those aspects may sound anecdotal, but all put together, they can make a huge difference to create a truly effective piece of typesetting work. 

After all, isn’t it said that the devil is in the details?

How can you make a difference?

The specificities of certain languages mean a multilingual typesetter needs to juggle several imperatives at once: the end result needs to reflect the brand’s identity and be truthful to the original material, but at the same time embrace the local linguistic rules. 

At ICS, our multilingual expertise is truly holistic: thanks to our extensive experience as a language service provider, we know the intricacies of the translation industry. We are fully equipped to take any brand’s material to the next level and can accompany our clients from start to finish. 

We are masters in the art of managing translation projects, however big or small, into dozens of languages daily. Once the content of a project has been carefully and expertly translated, reviewed and finalised by our team, we are then able to take said translations into our industry-leading DTP software.

From there, a qualified typesetter will work their magic to localise any brochure, leaflet, guide, etc… so that they are fully ready for publication and always true to the brand’s identity: from font type to readability to style or accuracy of the layout, no stone is left unturned. This all-encompassing approach to our multilingual translation and DTP offering is the perfect marriage between our wealth of knowledge as both linguists and typesetters.

Do you have any material for translation that would require professional typesetting? Get in touch and let’s discuss how ICS may be able to help you further your reach. With our global network of professional linguists, your projects are in safe hands.