K International work with all kinds of documents. Anything from a glossy magazine full of photos with catchy headings to something less exciting but equally important like a technical manual with detailed diagrams. What we have come to understand over the years is that any project can benefit from an early adoption of translation planning.

Where does translation fit into your project?

Producing a document in a foreign language should be considered from the word go. Many decisions taken at the start of a project can help save costs later in the process.

Know your target audience

Which languages your project require may be based on various factors. You may be targeting an export market or you may be producing documents for the local community at home. These factors can influence the design and production of your project.

Brief your designers

When you brief your design studio for a new project include translation in the specification. Specify that you expect to produce the materials in a number of target languages. Where possible the software packages used by your designers should support your target languages. As an example, until the new Adobe Flash Player 10, there was limited support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic. If your project required Arabic, any Flash animations would need to be localised very carefully and at a potentially high cost.

• QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign are the two leading page layout applications.
  We currently recommend the use of InDesign, although with the imminent release of QuarkXpress 8, we may have to change this recommendation.
• Retain your copyright and your source files.
  Creating artwork is costly and it is important to request the source files for any project that you commission. On many occasions we have been asked to translate PDFs, printed documents and even scans in order to produce identical artwork. This is not always going to be possible or cost effective and the answer is to always request and keep the original artwork. Ask for two copies, one for the archive and one to send to suppliers such as printers and translation companies ;).

Publish and Print

Not many moons ago, publishing was synonymous with printing. Nowadays, publishing has diversified into a media rich landscape, including print media, video, the Internet and so on. Often the same images are used, this can be the case for your text too.

Ongoing value

With these points in mind, it is important to be able to reuse your translation and not have it locked away in your artwork. For this reason, especially for large volumes of text we recommend that all translated text should be managed and used as a single source from a content management system (CMS). Making use of translation memories, glossaries and templates.

Although we understand that you may already have trusted and valued suppliers in place, our in-house Multilingual Studio offers an excellent resource to help you with your project from the very beginning. We would be happy to provide a free quotation or consultation.

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