Have you ever been frustrated to realize a translator had messed up the design of the document he translated?
You’ve probably faced this problem
If you have been doing business abroad, this has probably happened to you already. Maybe you were selling a new line of products to your customers abroad. Maybe you were going to do a visual presentation before your foreign partners. Whatever your material was — a catalogue, a presentation, or something else — it included text, which you needed translated.
But when you received the visual file with the finished translation, you realized you would have to send it back to the designer. And the designer would have to do his job all over again. Because the translator had used different software to work on your file, and compatibility issues had messed up the original design.
Different file formats can pose problems during the industry translation process. And when managers face the problem we just described, they often decide that the best thing to do is just send the translator a text file — and once the translation is done, they ask the designer to add the translated text in the original file.
But this too is a suboptimal solution. It takes more time, and it brings the risk that the designer will misplace the translated text — after all, it’s in a language he doesn’t understand.
Here’s a simple solution
So, is there a solution?
Yes, fortunately there is a way to avoid issues caused by different files extensions and software. And it’s quite simple. Just hire a translation company who — like we at Upwords — works with expert professionals, and has access to the right kind of software to open and work on your files.
INDD? Our translators will open it with a compatible translation tool that will allow them to only take care of text, while the tool protects all other visual elements of InDesign, and once it’s finished we export back the translated text to .Indd in a heartbeat. Whatever your content — brochures, user manuals, data sheets, safety procedures instructions, an so on — we work with the right technology for it, so that there won’t be any need to re-design your material after the translation phase, and if minor adjustments are needed, our in-house DTP experts can take care of it, since they are also multilingual, just like our team!
What about adapting?
What if your content has to be adapted? This can happen — sometimes words in the target language take considerably more space than the original words, or the alphabet is right-to-left. In these cases, we’ll get our transcreation professionals to help you.
Our transcreators are not only experts at providing industry translation services — they are also designers and copywriters, who can go a big step further and actually recreate your content. They will adapt your visual messaging to the target language and audience, while maintaining its tone and meaning.
As a result, you will have content — labels and packaging, ads, or any other kind of material — that truly speak to your foreign customers, partners and prospects. And you will get this without wasting time, money or peace of mind.
