How to maximise your Translation ROI

Maximise your Translation ROI by integrating Design/DTP

There are immense savings to be made — and efficiencies created — by giving your language service provider (LSP) control of the design and/or desktop publishing (DTP) of the documents you need to be translated. In doing so, you can significantly boost your Translation ROI (Return on Investment).

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, quality control and review costs are negligible since DTP and translation are in the hands of the same team. This in turn means reduced delivery times, increased productivity and the risk of errors is eliminated. These benefits translate into improved efficiency and productivity — as well as a significant cost reduction — boosting your translation ROI.

In addition, the return on the initial cost of designing the layout increases. A designer who is experienced in combining DTP and translation will ensure that it can be adapted to any number of different languages with the maximum ease. In the ‘traditional’ model, even if the design department adjust a layout to accommodate one different language, their lack of expertise in this field means that there is no guarantee that the adapted layout will work with a third, fourth or fifth language. Even adapting the original layout to fit one translation is horrendously expensive — horrendous because it is totally avoidable.

Related topic: How to calculate Translation ROI

The value of using a specialist

Let’s take a concrete example. A company has a 500 page technical manual created with Adobe InDesign. It contains:

All this is set up and finalised before being sent to the LSP to translate into five different languages. No-one in the design or content teams at the company speak any of these five languages, or at least not enough to sign off on a translation (someone may think they can, but that is another issue).

Who, then, will be responsible for inserting the five different versions of the translated text into the text boxes and graphics? For ensuring that the index and cross-references are accurate? For re-flowing the layout and page breaks, and for regenerating the table of contents?

If you are working between two languages which are reasonably similar (Portuguese and Spanish, say), then it might just be possible, allbeit risky, for someone in the in-house design team to handle it. But if you are working between two or more very different languages, or ones which use different scripts (such as Chinese) or a right-to-left script (such as Arabic), you will gain substantial benefits by going to an LSP which integrates translation with DTP.

In short, if you know from the outset that the layout for a document will be used for multiple different languages, there is no doubt that integrating the design/DTP work with translation expertise will provide the greatest return on your investment.

Our integrated Design and Translation service

The integrated approach adopted by QuickSilver Translate is an end-to-end process which consolidates all the elements of a translation project into one continuous workflow — combining design software and processes, with state-of-the-art translation software (CAT tools).

We offer:

Thinking of translation, and the design and layout for translation, as two sides of the same coin is the most cost-effective approach to ensuring high-quality multilingual documentation.

Find out more: Cut costs! Integrated DTP and Translation

Find out more: Preparing Layouts for Translation (desktop publishing / DTP)