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DTP (Desk Top Publishing) By Total Language Solutions

Language translation services are delivered print ready-to-use

Using a personal computer or workstation to produce high-quality printed documents.

A desktop publishing system allows you to use different typefaces, specify various margins and justifications, and embed illustrations and graphs directly into the text.

The most powerful desktop publishing systems enable you to create illustrations; while less powerful systems let you insert illustrations created by other programs.

Popular powerful applications range from Quark Xpress, PageMaker to InDesign and is generally viewed as trade standard for design and print.

As word-processing programs become more and more powerful, the line separating such programs from desktop publishing systems is becoming blurred. In general, though, desktop publishing applications give you more control over typographical characteristics, such as kerning, and provide more support for full-colour output.

A particularly important feature of desktop publishing systems is that they enable you to see on the display screen exactly how the document will appear when printed.  

Systems that support this feature are called WYSIWYG's (what you see is what you get).

Until recently, hardware costs made desktop publishing systems impractical for most uses.

But as the prices of personal computers and printers have fallen, desktop publishing systems have become increasingly popular for producing newsletters, brochures, books, and other documents that formerly required a typesetter.

Once you have produced a document with a desktop publishing system, you can output it directly to a printer or you can produce a PostScript file which you can then take to a service bureau.

The service bureau has special machines that convert the PostScript file to film, which can then be used to make plates for offset printing. Offset printing produces higher-quality documents, especially if colour is used, but is generally more expensive than laser printing.

Total Language Solutions can grab text for translation directly from DTP files. The translated text is automatically place in the equivalent position of the foreign language version. We then adjust formatting and layouts as necessary to accommodate text of different length or proportions from the original. The translation is then thoroughly checked in this finished format, and proofread so that it is ready to print.

Alternatively Total Language Solutions can produce high resolution PDF’s for DTP translations, so long as original link images and fonts are supplied then these are embedded into a PDF (Portable Document Format) which can be used by most lithographic and digital printers.

Case Studies

Sector: DTP

Many of our clients have a requirement for our in-house DTP and print ready services: we work on a wide range of software platforms and we deliver the “one-stop-shop” integrated translation and in-house preparation service to receive and return material translated and ready to publish. The translation of client material into other languages will be such that the language translations convey the technical and factual content found in the source material. The translations also convey client “messages” to users in their languages. The integrated translation and DTP service ensures that the text and associated copy maintains its integrity in terms of layout, colours, sizes and relationships as are found in the original copy. Thus, the source version is matched visually by the translated versions.

The client requires the translation of all of the instruction booklets for its retail products in every European language. We take the original manual (in English) lift out the text and manage the translation process, then restore the target languages to the original template such that the layouts are the same in every language. This is achieved even though the length of text varies by language: for French, Spanish and Italian when translated the texts are about 15% longer than the English original and for German, it is about 25% longer. These differences have to be managed.

The client benefits from our quality “one-stop-shop” integrated DTP and language translation service: the results are improved quality and medium term cost savings as typesetting and other overlapping tasks are brought into line.

Typically, such clients retain us to manage this process over the longer term so as to ensure consistency and continuity to the process, and to maximise cost savings.

The languages translated cover all of West, Central and East Europe; the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and the Far East.