Translation tools

Talkbridge’s tools and technology solutions help our clients achieve the following:

  • Accelerate time to market;
  • Significantly reduce localisation costs;
  • Improve the quality of global content;
  • Guarantee consistency in style, look-and-feel;
  • Enhance the control of content;
  • Safeguard the security of source and translated content;
  • Communicate seamlessly with international audiences.

Workflow Management

  • Content management – automate the management of localised content from documentation through to online publication;
  • Controlled authoring – establishes a collaborative authoring environment to reuse content, enforce corporate standards and provide detailed audit trails;
  • Translation management – automate processes across the translation and localisation lifecycle.
  • Translation returned back in its original format

The most common programs we use are:

  • Adobe Page Maker
  • QuarkXpress
  • Corel Draw
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • FreeHand
  • AutoCAD
  • Adobe FrameMaker
  • Adobe InCopy

Our expert DTP operators ensure that no character corruption occurs. We can desktop publish over 100 language combinations, including those which use different character sets to English such as Russian, Chinese and Bengali and languages which read right to left including Arabic, Urdu and Farsi.

Typesetting is carried out by skilled operators, proficient in the language in which they are working, ensuring the highest quality throughout. By using Talkbridge’s experienced multilanguage DTP team, you will avoid common errors which creep in when non linguists typeset foreign language text. Sometimes a non-linguist typesetter, in an effort to make presentation consistent, will standardise punctuation across different languages, rendering it grammatically incorrect!

We also use Translation Memory (TM) Tools.

They work as a kind of terminology database and are extremely useful when translating large-volume documentation containing a high level of repetition.

The benefits of TM tools are as follows:

  • Consistency of terminology and style across different documents. This allows a different translator to work on the same account while remaining faithful to previously translated documentation;
  • Speed. No sentence is ever translated twice so time is saved;
  • Reduced costs. When any similar or identical sentences are detected you are charged at a much-reduced rate.
  • Furthermore, TM tools do not entail any cost for the client whatsoever.

Translation Memory Tools are an AID to human translation, NOT a replacement.

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Translation graphic file formats

The problem of file format incompatibilities is particularly relevant to the translation industry.

How can you be sure that the recipient of your file can open it?

One way around this problem is to represent the translated text as platform-independent graphics. Some of the most popular file formats are described below.

  • Encapsulated Postscript: This is a very popular file format which most printing houses are set up to handle. It is equally popular in both the IBM PC and Apple Mac worlds. The main advantage of EPS is that it does not require the computer to be equipped with foreign language fonts. This means you can send an EPS file to virtually any printing bureau to print your documents. The main disadvantage of using EPS files is that they can be very large. Several megabytes (or even tens of megabytes) is not untypical;
  • Graphics Interchange Format: The GIF format was invented by CompuServe. They are limited by the number of colours which they can contain (maximum of 256) and so are rarely used for high quality printing. The main application today is on Web sites;
  • Joint Photographic Experts Group: JPEG files can contain up to 16.7 million colours and, as the name suggests, are often used to represent photographs. High definition JPEGs often end up as very large files in the same way that EPS representations do;
  • Portable document format: PDF files were invented by Adobe. One of the major differences between EPS and PDF files is that PDF files require the computer to be equipped with the foreign language fonts in order to display the letters/characters properly.For this reason, PDF files tend to be smaller than their equivalent EPS.

For more information on how we can work together, please contact one of our teams.