Professional Documents
Culture Documents
TO OPTIMIZE
YOUR INDESIGN FILE
FOR TRANSLATION
Initial file set up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 14. Consider Splitting Up Threaded Stories into Separate
Frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1. Useful concepts about Translation Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
15. Give them a reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2. Check the hidden characters setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3. Try to avoid inline styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 What you should do when your file is translated . . . . . . . . 23
4. Use character styles and paragraph styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 16. Change the language attribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
5. Choose a font with all the Glyphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 17. Fix text-boxes size, if necessary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
6. Set the language attribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 18. Check that all the glyphs are visualized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7. Use paragraph indent instead of spaces and tabulations. . . . 14 19. Create a document with the languages in sequence using a
Book file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
8. Use bulleted lists and numbered lists properly . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
9. Wrap your text with soft-returns rather than hard-returns . . . 16 Bonus: Copy an entire layer from an InDesign file to
another [Script] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
a lot of time and improve the overall translation experience. Stefano Bernardi has worked on numerous mid to
• What steps should we take right before sending the file to Philips, and many others before starting Redokun in
A few adjustments that you should really consider right before was really hard work, Stefano decided that something
sending the file to the translator in order to avoid or limit post- was needed to make the designers’ life easier.
A few checks and last adjustments should be applied to ensure From time to time he writes for InDesignSecrets and
that your new language is correctly visualized. InDesign Magazine. He also holds in-house InDesign
• helps InDesign users work less and Redokun extracts all the text inside an InDesign file and lets you export an
faster on their multilingual projects Excel file that you can send to your trusted translator. You can also invite the
• helps designers to stop wasting their translators to work with Redokun’s integrated translation tool (Web Editor).
time on repetitive tasks such as copy- • Do you struggle with keeping documents’ styles and text formatting
• helps to integrate translators and co- Redokun allows you to change all the text inside a document while
workers in the designer’s work-flow keeping all the styles of the original file. Using the simple concept of tags
Redokun is the tool you can use with translators involved in the project.
co-workers, sales partners, freelance • Are you often wondering about the status of the translation?
translators, and translation agencies to Assign translations and keep tabs on any job you are doing.
get your InDesign files translated. • Last minute changes, product updates, new layout on a multilingual
project?
Make document revisions in seconds. Edit only the master document and
However, if you have dealt with InDesign files that had to be translated into many languages, as I did, you’ll most likely have struggled
• Spending hours just copying and pasting from InDesign to Word and vice-versa
In the following pages, you’ll find a few suggestions on how to improve the design of your documents with the goal of making them
translation-friendly while also being able to leverage the power of the tools integrated within InDesign.
The more precise you are, the less time you’ll waste later and the better the %% Better design
result will be. With ‘result’ I mean both:
%% Less time spent working on the file
• the translated document in output
• and the Translation Memories correlated to your document. %% Improving the overall translation
experience
- the short form is CAT tools). One of the biggest advantages you have using
these tools is that they store the translation pairs for later reuse (Translation
So, how does your InDesign file affect the translator’s TMs? %% Shortest time of translation
Well, since TMs are basically a database of translation pairs, when the TMs
%% Lower translation costs
are created, the TMs will contain the source text segment that will be used to
match other occurrences of the same text within the document or in other %% More consistency in you translations
documents. So, as you can imagine, if the source language text is ‘dirty’ and
struggle to match the TM record later and the translator will not use that
record.
This results in a longer time for the translator to do his or her job and it will
For Redokun users
also increase her/his bill.
Redokun uses TMs to cut production times
in two ways:
used again
When you are going to replace one text with a text in a different language,
you want the general layout of your new file to be identical to the source
document. In order to achieve that with few edits (or no edits at all) and
avoiding mistakes, you should have complete control over your document’s
text and spot any control character that you missed or that you might not
InDesign uses special characters that are invisible to the eye and the printed
They are used, for example, to wrap lines, break paragraphs, space words
in a specific way, etc. While creating or editing your file you want to see
them, and have control over them. To do so you should check the hidden
It’s important to get the document styles right before starting the translation
part of it with a new language it might turn into a very stressful and very && Low precision
imprecise exercise.
InDesign offers a super effective system of styles: Character styles and Paragraph styles that you can use to apply specific properties
to the text in a single step. A character style is a set of formatting character attributes (font family, font style, dimension, language, etc).
While a paragraph style includes both character and paragraph formatting attributes (Indent, spacing, tabulations, etc).
You have two separate panels in InDesign where you can set character and paragraph styles.
If you don’t generally use them, start using them now! Using them properly will give you complete control over any file you prepare, and
with time you’ll get way faster at creating your drafts and documents in InDesign. See more about character and paragraph styles here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/paragraph-character-styles.html.
InDesign replaces it with a red square inside your document’s text where
the glyph is missing. So, if your font doesn’t contain a letter with a specific
accent, InDesign will replace that letter with a red square in the entire
document, and that glyph won’t be visible in your text. To fix that you will What is a glyph?
need to replace your font and with a style that is instant. A glyph is a specific form of a character.
If you use Paragraph and Character styles you will make your translator’s letter A is available in several forms, such as
life way easier because the information into the document will be better capitalized, small cap, with an accent, etc.
structured and cleaner then using inline styles. Each of these versions is a glyph.
Sadly InDesign has no integrated feature that can help us to search for a
particular glyph. You can only visualize all the glyphs contained in a specific
A helpful tool to choose the right font before starting a project is the Wikipedia
There you can find a table that lists which fonts contain the Glyphs you
need. Unfortunately, that table only contains some of the most used fonts.
So, what if you want to use a different font from the ones specified in
that table?
which fonts contain specific Glyphs, you can try the procedure described
here: http://indesignsecrets.com/find-font-glyph.php.
language to specific words so you can assign the right dictionary to words in
“foreign” languages.
Any time you work with InDesign you should set the right language to
your paragraph styles, that way you make sure that hyphenation rules
are applied to your text and InDesign will help you to check the spelling
Using several spaces and tabulations to align the text might create issues for && It creates bad segmentation - so it’s
harder or not possible to translate
you and the translators. Keep in mind that CAT tools sometimes strips non-
visible characters like spaces and tabulations, so if you’re abusing them, you && Bad segmentation doesn’t allow to
leverage any TMs
might find yourself doing a lot of work in order to re-indent the text after the
translation is done. This practice also creates incorrect segmentation and is && The output result might be totally
different from the original design
hard for the translator to replicate in the translation.
Bad segmentation won’t allow the translator to leverage any possible TM,
and so your translation costs (or your client’s) will probably be higher and
Proper bulleted lists and numbered lists allow you to automatically maintain
Why? You may ask. Because they allow you to have a clean text segment
without formatting characters and, like we said before, this will result in
While editing your InDesign file each time you use a hard-
and the CAT tool will interpret that as the end of the
result and will be imported correctly in a Translation tool. You can place a soft-return in InDesign by pressing Shift + Return.
The image shows an example of the use of soft-return inside Redokun. Let’s consider these examples. The left sentence is wrapped
using a hard-return, so a CAT tool would split it into two segments “With the hard-return”, “Redokun creates two segments”.
Instead the right sentence is wrapped using a soft-return, so a CAT tool would consider it as a single sentence “With the soft-return
This might sound trivial, but if you enable the integrated spell-check,
you’ll be more confident that the copy is correct before sending it to the
translators. It’s very handy also because you might find out copy-paste
Let your translators store corrected Translation Memories (TM). Activate the
Dynamic Spelling feature by selecting Edit > Spelling > Dynamic Spelling
and set the right language to your text. And of course, check the spelling
Another thing to consider is also the use of inline anchored frames for your
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/anchored-objects.html).
This way even when the translated text is longer than the source your image
To be sure that the text you placed above your anchored image will follow
the translated text as well as the image, you will need to create a group
before anchoring the image, or anchor the image text to the textual content.
you have to resize the text-frame manually in order to visualize the entire content. && The text frame might exceed the
spread.
With InDesign CS6, Adobe introduced the ability to auto size text-frames. This is a
handy feature that few people use. It’s very powerful and can save a ton of time since,
if used correctly, it can save more than a few edits for the designer. Be aware though,
that InDesign will make your text-frame grow indefinitely - even outside the spread.
The auto size property can be applied in Object > Text Frame Options > Auto-Size.
You have options to let a frame resize automatically with Height Only, Width Only, both
Of course, you can also control where you want to lock your text-frame. Once you’ve
created your frame the way you like, you can create an object style, and you’re able to
In InDesign you can tell a paragraph to start in the next column, text-frame,
page, odd or even page. That property can be very helpful in the case of
chapter titles. In specific cases, you might want to set a title to start from the
next page, so that you can make the current text-frame a little bit bigger in
order to host a longer content (For instance a target language that you think
You can also apply rules on how paragraphs break across multiple frames/
These settings are very powerful, but also very delicate. You can set them
while you are working on your design, or right before starting the translation
so that the content in the new language will follow your instruction. In any
case, be sure to set these settings carefully in order to not create too much
It might be silly to some people, but splitting up your threaded stories before the moving to the translation step might be extremely
helpful in case of future updates to the document. Editing a document with languages that you don’t know is extremely difficult, and
mistakes are easily made. You probably don’t want to translate a document entirely after a few simple updates, so a solution might be
to split up all your threaded stories into separate frames so that you’ll be able to keep a reference with the text between the translated
A way to split up all the threaded stories is by using the script SplitStory.jsx shipped
with your copy of InDesign. You can see how to do so, in this article by InDesignSecrets:
http://indesignsecrets.com/splitting-up-threaded-stories-into-separate-frames.php).
If you send the translator your InDesign file or an exchange file, please always provide her/him with a pdf of the document. She/he will
be able to see the graphic and therefore pick the right vocabulary to translate your file.
When you receive your translated files, one of the first things to do, is to change the language attribute of the content. InDesign
uses that attribute to verify spelling and to hyphenate words. You can change that quickly and very easily if you had used Character
and Paragraph styles previously. Otherwise you can proceed with the Find/Replace feature integrated in InDesign (More here:
http://indesignsecrets.com/changing-the-language-with-findchange.php).
Some languages are longer than others, so once the translation is done you might need to enlarge a few textboxes in the translated InDesign file.
Of course, you can create your textboxes with enough white space beforehand to ensure that the translation will accommodate them correctly.
As mentioned, when a font is missing a specific glyph InDesign replaces it with a red square inside your document’s text where the glyph is
missing. So one thing to do is to check that all the glyphs are present within the fonts you’ve used for your document, and make sure that the
You might want to create a single document with all or some of the languages you
file.
A book file is a collection of documents that can share styles, swatches, master
pages, and other items. You can sequentially number pages in book documents,
print selected documents in a book, or export them to PDF. One document can
You can add the translated InDesign documents in sequence to your Book
and export it as a single PDF as you would normally do with a single InDesign
document. More about the Book file format in the Adobe guide here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/creating-book-files.html
Here in Europe, we speak many different languages, and not everyone is %% Creating a single InDesign file that
contains all the separated language
good at speaking English or communicating with a foreigner partner. To
layers
solve this barrier (especially in pricing lists) sometimes companies produce
%% Copying a layer with one language to
their documents with a two language layout: source language + the target
a new InDesign file
market language, so that their salespeople can have a direct link from one
%% Creating documents with a two-
language to another. Also, we have countries that speak more than one
language layout quickly
language (the best example is probably Switzerland).
So often I’ve been asked to produce documents with a two language layout.
I store each language in a layer and use different columns for different
languages so that I can copy and paste the language easily among different
documents and create versions with the languages the client requires.
Redokun, we wrote a quick script that copies an entire layer from every page of an InDesign file to another.
• download it
• move the file to your Scripts folder found in Applications > Adobe InDesign CC 2015 > Scripts > Scripts Panel.
• In InDesign: open the source and destination files. Before launching the script, the source document should be the one visible.
• Click on “layer-cloner-1.1.jsxbin” (you should see the script in the Script Panel in InDesign).
• Select the layer you want to copy and the file you want to copy it into.
• Wait for the script to complete the copy (it takes a few seconds).