How formatting can save you money

Translation has often been named the second oldest occupation on earth and formatting has always been an issue. After all, the first known translation is a bilingual text which was forced into a rock using chisel and hammer and became well known as the Rosetta Stone. Formatting has certainly come a long way since those early days. Highly sophisticated formats now ensure the professional appearance of a document and give texts the desired character. To find out how to format text in a way that can reduce your translation costs, read on...

Since the Rosetta Stone, things have changed a lot in the industry. Just consider that 40 years ago, you had to allow at least an additional 4 days to take care of the logistics of a translation. The source text had to be mailed to the translator, who typed it on his typewriter and then mailed it back. The fax machine brought a revolution - overnight translators were able to receive a translation and were also able to send it back much faster (with a backup copy by mail).

Nowadays we take it for granted that the translation process happens in "real-time". No cart and horses, no snail-mail, no faxes ending up unread under the desk. Our clients send us an electronic file format - we translate the text and send it back - and it even looks the same.

Obviously things have also changed behind the scenes. The source documents we receive from our clients on a daily basis are increasingly more sophisticated. They often contain large amounts of software specific formatting and "mark-up". So it comes as no surprise that some formats are relevant to the ongoing cost of clients' translation needs. Here are a few hints how to keep your costs down...

Firstly, consider this: only in rare cases will the translations have the same length as the source text. French, for example is usually about 10% longer than English, while Chinese might require only around 80% of the space of the English source text (so just imagine the effect when translating Chinese into French!). In many cases this is not much of a problem. But it can bring the translator to a grinding halt where format specific character restrictions apply. Think, for example, of PowerPoint presentations where suddenly a text may no longer fit the textbox if the box doesn't happen to expand.

Here are a few very basic tips to avoid the complications and higher costs which can be caused by post translation DTP work:

• For Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and web sites, use "styles" to achieve consistent formatting in your document (rather than applying character-formatting).
• Try to avoid layout inconsistencies in the first place, because every issue will be multiplied in each translation.
• If you use a consistent layout across an entire PowerPoint presentation, e.g. for bulleted lists, then it will be much easier to adjust it in the target document.
• Use text boxes and other objects wisely - they can create problems in your translation.
• It might sound picky - but we recommend the use of "tabs and tables" instead of "spaces and indents"

Non-editable formats like hard copy and PDF are another challenge. Why? Well - here is a secret: we and our translators actually use specialised software tools to take care of the formatting by taking it on a roundtrip. The tool strips the translatable content of a document from its formatting. Then the translator translates, and our software takes care of getting the final document right. This approach allows us to re-create almost every single editable format we know. The downside is that those tools cannot deal with hard copy or "native" PDF files. At the end of the day that means that such files have to be formatted by hand - which incurs additional cost. This is the reason why our clients will often hear our Project Managers ask them for a different source file when they give us a PDF file to translate. We find that in 80% of all cases clients can provide us with a different (and easier) format - sometimes clients weren't even aware of this themselves. The reason is that many PDF files have been created with DTP tools. Those DTP tools make it possible to export so called "stories" which contain exactly what we want: the translatable text only. In fact - this is such a help to us that we are even wont to help clients to extract those stories. Therefore we have tools at hand which our clients' DTP specialists can use to "batch-extract" the translatable text for us. Then all clients have to do is to send us the stories, plus a PDF version for reference. We will then translate them and return them to our clients ready for re-import into their DTP software. If we don't translate in this way, then PDF is a little bit like a Rosetta Stone: although it can be sent by email, we will have to use chisel and hammer to get the translation right...