Desktop Publishing

Thanks to our DTP team, we are able to guarantee timely preparation of document translation projects along with typesetting works to provide complete Turnkey solutions.

Mostly prepared with Adobe InDesign®, QuarkXPress®, FrameMaker® software; technical manuals, brochures, catalogues and books are dealt with maximum care to their layouts that may contain rather complex structured indexes, graphics and tables. 

Challenges with Turkish dotted and dotless letter "I" 

Turkish has 4 versions of the letter "I". Unlike English, which has only two, a lowercase dotted i and an upper case dotless I, Turkish has lower case and upper case forms of both the dotted and dotless I. 

While English maps the lower case "i" to upper case "I", Turkish maps the lower case "i" to an upper case "İ". This change in the case rules for the letter i frequently breaks software logic. Many desktop publishing (DTP) applications like FrameMaker have the ability to artificially force the display of text to all UPPER CASE. With FrameMaker and many other word processors, the lowercase "i" will incorrectly map to uppercase "I" in Turkish.

Rule of thumb: If Turkish is a target language, let the DTP staff at your translation agency modify document templates to not force page headers or headline text into an artificial UPPER CASE display. If text is upper case in Turkish, type the text in manually, do not depend on the software to transform the display of the characters.

Technically speaking 

The best option would be to send us the original source package, for example, including original source files (let’s say .idml), images, fonts, links, which makes it possible for us to:

  o  export source .idlm files to .inx files,

  o  convert the exported .inx files to .ttx files,

  o  open .ttx files with TagEditor to complete translation process and,

  o  convert bilingual .ttx files back to target .idlm file. 

The DTP specialist’s job starts here. Target files (.idml ) are not suitable for printing and must be dealt with by a DTP specialist for several reasons. 

Actually, the target language may expand or contract through the translation process; re-alignment of the layout will be needed to accommodate such expansion and contraction. 

Also, source documents may contain numerous typefaces not available in the target language. In this case, new fonts (Unicode Arial, Times, Verdana, etc.) may be adopted or non-existing accented fonts of the target language may be recreated to maintain the look and feel of the original design. 

To get your documents ready for print, we work on your original files that were created using:

  o  InDesign®,

  o  QuarkXPress®,

  o  FrameMaker®,

  o  PageMaker® and

  o  PowerPoint ®.

PDF files 

If you cannot send us the original files package, but only a PDF, we can follow B Plan for you. We try to convert pdf files to .docx files and work on .docx files. This could be a good option if you are thinking of using the target .docx files for your internal informative purposes, for example, as staff training material.  

Recent case studies 

Schell trusted us in our DTP services with integration of translation.