Formatting Foreign Character Sets in Translations

If you are translating your company’s content into foreign languages, you can expect to encounter unfamiliar character sets. Some are more unfamiliar than others and many firms don’t give this much thought until they encounter a language that does not use the Roman character set, like Russian or Chinese. However, even Roman languages can pose special challenges with characters that don’t exist in English such as ñ (eñe – considered a letter in its own right), along with diacritical marks (é), ligatures (œ), and so on.

For brochures, websites or larger documents, if you are fluent in the language and have a great eye for detail, you may be able to cut and paste to get the results you need. However, if your translation vendor offers formatting services, they can usually work directly from your source application files to save you time and trouble at very little additional cost. It pays to ask! ILS offers complete formatting services that let you deal with your other responsibilities while we handle these issues.

If you need to resize short translations to fit an ad or label, ask for an Adobe Illustrator EPS file that has been “outlined”. This provides the best of both worlds. It is locked down like a graphic to eliminate the possibility of introducing errors during formatting, but leaves flexibility for resizing. You can format the text to meet your needs – even for a character set, such as Greek, which you may not have installed.

The above solutions save time by eliminating the need to have your translation vendor check your work after you’ve finished formatting and leave full responsibility for quality control in the vendor’s hands.

International Language Services – Character Set Formatting Specialists

When ILS handles your translation needs, it pays to let us format your content to match your English versions. We have the experience and capabilities to handle any character set for your translations and incorporate your content smoothly into your format. By turning over the formatting chores to us, you can spend your time on areas of your own expertise and rely on ILS to provide you with exactly the documents you need, ready to publish in any medium. Contact us today to discuss your current or future translation needs.