Required InDesign Translation Skills

How many different skills are required to complete an InDesign translation project? Setting aside supporting skills (e.g., accounting, project management, marketing, et. al.), there are essentially two skill sets required for the actual project work. The first category is the language skills required for translation and proofreading. The second skill category is formatting within InDesign.

Sometimes clients envision that translation of InDesign documents occurs within the actual InDesign environment. It might seem that translators can open an InDesign document up in the application environment, and change the source language text into the target language text, while keeping the existing formatting intact. However, that’s not quite the approach to a professional InDesign translation project.

First in InDesign translation projects all text for translation comes out of InDesign in order to allow translators to work more effectively using modern translation tools. These tools are not low quality machine translation. Instead translation tools allow human translators to more easily focus on just language independent of formatting. Source and target text segments are aligned side by side for direct comparison. Translation tools also allow for detection of text repetition within the body of a project. Detection of repetition benefits clients by lowering translation costs (i.e., the exact same source text needn’t be translated more than once).

Once translation and proofreading by a second translator is complete the translated text is ready for placement back into the InDesign file. Skilled InDesign technicians are assigned to this task. Formatting adjustments are sometimes necessary since some languages require more space than others to express equivalent meaning.

Successful InDesign translation projects are supported by assigning ideally suited specialist personnel to each piece of the project.