InDesign document translation and multilingual desktop publishing

Indesign Translation and desktop publishingGPI DTP specialists have a great deal of experience formatting and correcting translated InDesign documents, as InDesign is one of the most popular formats for a wide variety of projects. Most InDesign documents that go through document translation are graphically rich marketing collateral, catalogs, short instruction manuals, and occasionally, large technical manuals.

If you are designing an InDesign document with potential plans for document translation and graphic localization you will have to pay attention to InDesign best practices in order to create a document that can seamlessly go through the translation process. GPI desktop publishing specialists proactively detect and report document or design flaws that may impede post document translation formatting. These issues are communicated to the client, and corrections to the template or workflow are recommended to make translation and multilingual InDesign desktop publishing as cost effective as possible.

Best practices to optimize your InDesign documents for translation

There are many best practices to optimize your InDesign documents for document translation, but here are some of the top techniques to take advantage of:

  • Proper use of an automatic table of Content
  • Leverage master pages for global updates
  • Bullets and Numbered: do not use separate text frame for each item
  • Use a separate paragraph tag for any distinct style change
  • Use real tables: tabbed text with "phony" rules can more than triple the post document translation format touch-up required on this element
  • Intelligent use of layers
  • Use style sheets
  • Group elements which should stay together
  • Link text frames when pagination should flow in InDesign:

Further resources on InDesign from GPI blogs

GPI has developed a series of best practices for InDesign translation and desktop publishing. You will find some technical tips in our InDesign translation blogs:

GPI can provide training and/or consulting with your workflow to ensure that your InDesign documents are optimized for translation and localization. GPI has extensive experience in translating InDesign files into Arabic and other bidirectional languages.

For more information go to our request translation quote, or call us at +1 866-272-5874.