This year, for the third year in a row, I was delighted to work on a major US city’s booklet for their Summer events program. The booklet was translated into 20 languages, reflecting the city’s linguistic and cultural diversity. I was responsible for multilingual desktop publishing on most of these translated documents. Here are some key takeaways I learned along the way.
Year after year, it seems I always come across the same problem with this project. The translators don’t know what should be translated and what shouldn’t be. In fact, this is something that I don’t even think the end client (the major U.S. city) is aware of or knows what to do about. This has gotten to the point where something needs to be done about it
My proposal: any terms that should be left in English should be either highlighted or made a different font color to signify to the linguist NOT to translate it. In fact, many TMS (Translation Management System) solutions on the market have the option to make words in a certain font color “locked” so that the linguist couldn’t translate them if they tried to. This simple foresight would have saved a massive amount of time.
We were initially told that the files for this project would be ready for us in March or April at the latest. But we didn’t receive the files until the end of May. It took us about a month to complete. Keep in mind, this was a 24-page graphic-heavy booklet translated into 20 languages.
It indeed felt like a race against time as the dates of season-opening concerts as depicted in the booklet rapidly approached. Working in a rush like this also doesn’t have a particularly positive effect on the overall quality of people’s work, although the project turned out just fine. I wish we would have been given these files at the beginning of spring as opposed to the end of it so that we could have gotten a better head start on this project.
Perhaps one of my biggest takeaways from my Masters in Translation program at Kent State is the importance of file naming conventions. Indeed, every client has their own preferences when it comes to naming files. Some clients are okay with me adding a “_DTP” at the end of the file name to signify I have performed DTP on it, while others prefer I do not change the file name at all.
However, I feel that, in this project, since I was working with other DTP specialists as well, we never came to an agreement on how to name files after we worked on them. This made things confusing when, for example, I was asked to update files another DTP specialist had originally worked on.
I have been quite impressed with this city’s language access accommodations, as well as their adherence to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their Summer events booklet is always a fun project to work on because of it being a lot more colorful and graphic-heavy than a lot of the files that come my way. But I think better planning and preparation would have made this project go much more smoothly and quickly.
Are you or your organization looking for multilingual desktop publishing services? Feel free to reach out to me at robert@rrlanguageservices.com with details regarding your project and I will get in touch with you. Also feel free to check out my blog post on the importance of formatting translated content (AKA multilingual desktop publishing) and I why this crucial step is often overlooked by people outside of the language services industry.