Best Practice: Format Conversion in translation services
It’s easy to think that translation is just about words. But when you render a document with text, images, graphs and charts into another language, you step into the world of design and layout.
If you are translating plain text in MS Word this is not a big issue, but for professional documentation use is often made of more specialised programs such as:
- InDesign
- PowerPoint
- QuarkXpress
- FrameMaker
- Or various other graphics or layout programs
In this case, desktop publishing (DTP) will play a significant role in the price and flow of the project.
In the past, the only way to translate text in a format such as PowerPoint was for the translator to be a licensed user and to translate by overwriting the original: a laborious and error-prone process.
These days, however, QuickSilver Translate uses a combination of software tools (some of them proprietary) to create an integrated, optimised method for extracting text into our Computer Aided Translation (CAT) software, and then re-inserting the subsequent translation to and from all major formats. In addition, the software we use gives us all the advantages of consistency and efficiency for one-off translations, and even more so when we undertake numerous translations for the same customer.
Continue reading – Best Practice: Format conversion in translation part 2
