| Any DTP and any CAT | Sep 3, 2013 |
Rasto wrote:
José Henrique: It is very easy process. In framemaker go to save as: *.mif. You can open it directly in Trados. When finished open it in Framemaker. Do a control and that is it. True is, that Framemaker is more difficult than InDesign.
I understand that different CAT tools can go "inside" different DTP files (possibly except the lame MS Publisher) to have them translated.
The problem is that translation often causes text to shrink or expand randomly. The empirical "rules" stating that "language X > language Y translation will make text shrink/swell by Z%" are not reliable at all.
It is said that EN > PT translation causes the text to swell by 20%, in average. While this rule may apply (but not always) for text flowing over several pages, DTP often involves FORMS, to take just one example.
One pervasive field label, "birth date" (10 ch) - though "date of birth" and "D.O.B." are sometimes used - in PT becomes "data de nascimento" (19 ch - almost doubled!). While the EN > PT "swelling trend" is a fact, the opposite may happen too, e.g. "household" (9 ch) in PT becomes "lar" (3 ch - one-third!).
The main issue is obvious. After translation, text is expected to overflow or shrink, labels/tables text will often get out of alignment, so post-translation DTP adjustments are required.
Will a DTP operator unfamiliar with the target language be able to handle it? Unlikely. The job will have to go back to the translator for possible abbreviations, hyphenations, etc., sometimes more than once.
I had a case where I translated EN > PT, and a colleague proofread a 200-page book. We were given MS Word DOC files, so I used Wordfast, and that colleague used Trados. No problem with that.
Of course, Word's typesetting looks pretty bad on a high quality book. So after we were done, translation delivered, the client asked us to check the final DTP done with InDesign, presented on PDF files. Apparently it had been done by a francophone DTP operator who also spoke English. She possibly used an Italian dictionary to hyphenate in Portuguese, so many syllables were wrongly split. Every time we corrected one wrong hyphenation, a new one was born down below in the same paragraph.
Bottom line is that between the two of us, we had to thoroughly proofread the entire book eight times until it was free from all such flaws.
It would have been faster if either of us used InDesign with a PT dictionary to do it at once. However this raises another question: How much would a translator have to invest in time to learn and resources buy, in order to offer service in all three major DTP apps? Some USD 3K, I'd guess, and the time to master them is priceless. Still, the minor ones also come up every now and then...
That's why I'm doing it on PDF files, with Infix. When the end-client stubbornly demands translation in the original DTP app files format, I hope they are ready to spend much more on DTP operators.
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