Beyond traditional Desktop Publishing (DTP)
DTP has now gone beyond just Indesign, Quark, FrameMaker, Photoshop, Word, Powerpoint and the like. We are always learning and employing new applications and platforms selected by our clients. Be it Canva, CaptionHub or social media applications, integrating animation, voice and texts and localizing them every step of the way is essential in today’s market. It shows true understanding and sensitivity when including your target market.
What are some of the key elements that need to be considered when localizing within DTP?
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- Images and photos might need to be replaced
- Voices localized – this includes translating and then dubbing over, or employing AI tools and validate after
Animation checked, layers and transitions remain smooth after localization. Any texts within the animation have been localized.
Fonts in the target language has been taken into consideration
DTP is not just about replacing all the texts into the intended language, it’s also about making it visually pleasing to the eye in terms of layout, line breaks, and font display for aesthetics, flow and readability.
A professional piece will have considered the following elements:
Font families in the localized language should be selected to replicate the diversity and style of the source fonts. Advise can be provided to select royalty free fonts, or professional paid fonts.
Font size. Watch out for font sizes. They need to match that of the source, but some languages might require adjustments when there’s a mix of the source and target language. One good example is that of Thai where the Thai characters appear a lot smaller than say English with the same sentence, and if such, we’ll need to adjust the size of the Thai upwards to make them look the same as that of the English, so as not to ruin the overall aesthetics.
Stacking in the text and accent heights to ensure correct layout of vowel diacritics, especially for languages such as Thai that requires complex script rendering, and where tone marks and vowels do not misalign or overlap, and that they are stacked and spaced correctly. Thai script uses four vertical levels: two below the line (subscript vowels), on the line (consonants), and two levels above (superscript vowels and tone marks).
Thai does not use punctuation and can have several words placed together, inserting a manual space wrongly in between of a syllable can cause the entire sentence to read incorrectly, and worse, for the meanings to change.
Kerning and Leading (line spacing) is very important in Asian languages, where languages like Japanese and Thai can be twice as long as that of English, or Korean that typically shrinks. Asian languages normally have a few characters that constitutes to a word, hence leading and font scaling will be needed at each sentence, so that it does not end up with a messy piece with words broken up everywhere.
Line breaks (aka word wraps) Justification and proper line breaks should be done by native speakers, so that there are no hyphenation errors, widows and orphans.
Style guides. Single byte, double byte or complex single byte? When and how to use? Style guides and expectations are usually set at the beginning of project. We recommend the standard and more popular adaptations for the language you are localizing into. For instance, for double byte languages such as Chinese and Japanese, to use double-byte brackets and no spaces around localized texts, but single-byte brackets and single-bye spaces around alphanumerics. These styles and expectations can be set and adapted to achieve consistency through the current and future material as a corporate standard.
Images with embedded non-editable texts that need to be recreated.
It is all the fine details often not considered that makes all the difference between a professionally done DTP piece, or an amateur one with painful mistakes that are easily seen by the native eye.
Contact Asialion for in-house linguists and DTP who work hand in hand onsite at our own office for your desktop publishing work for fast turnaround and no complications. A dedicated team with a physical presence in Asia.