DTP Career in Translation Companies

Hi, this is Sumit Pundeer. I'm a freelance graphic designer worked with few Translation Agencies in India. It is great to work with international languages. I want to describe about my job as a DTPier with my company. When we work with a translation company we get good bucks than publications and advertising agencies. It is the best option for a DTP operator to work with any translation company. We can also work from home and earn great... to know more read the article full...

Below I have shown some work I have done. Please check the both designs are in different language but the layouting and designing are same. 

Working as a DTP operator, we have to do few things;

• Formatting and Page Layout Designing
• Creating and editing Graphics (Generic graphics, Screen captures, Illustrations and Diagrams)
• Working with markup languages such as HTML, SGML, XML as well as online documentation formats such as Acrobat PDF and various others. 
• Font Management Applications - Like, Chanakya Hindi Font, You cannot use this font without Summit Indica Software. 
• Converting/generating output of translated material in multiple formats (creating PostScript files and PDF files)

This is not the job to just copy, paste and change the fonts. We have to maintain the layout of the document. When we work with European, Asian, Middle-Eastern languages we face some difficulties like;

Text Expansion and Text Contraction

Below is the list showing example;

Source Language	Target Language	Text Expansion	Text Contraction	Notes
English	French	15-20%		Text expands when translated into French
French	English		10-15%	Text contracts when translated from French
English	Italian	15%		Does not apply to technical content
Italian	English		15%	Does not apply to technical content
English	German	5-40%		There are less German words but they are longer, so text can expand greatly
Arabic	English		25%	Depending on topic
English	Finnish		20-30%	Finnish grammar varies greatly from English (lacks pronouns and articles)

Text contraction is not a big deal, we can manage it by giving a little more paragraph space, word space and line space. We can not give more space, the look of the document should be same as in source.

But for Text Expansion we have to do more efforts. For this we can reduce character spacing and word spacing or we can choose a font which is thin and suited for our documents.

Graphic and Typography Translation

This is most interesting to translating the graphics, like -magazine dialogues, diagrams, advertisements, etc.. When you see your source in native language and there are some typography designs. Now, you have to change all these in other Language. For that you just use same kinds of typography as given in source. You can research and download it from internet. Then use some Photoshop, for background finishing, etc.. Urdu and Arabic are the most difficult language to handle.

I'll share more details if I'll get the time...

Thanks for your time..