Translation and Graphic Design

When we think about translation, we think about words.

But translating for CALD (Culturally And Linguistically Diverse) communities entails way more than just words.

We need to consider style, literacy levels, culture, religion, traditions…even graphic design!

In the video below, Sonia Sanchez Moreno talks about some of the things related to graphic design that you will learn when translating for CALD communities.

In a translation project, graphic design can be referred to as “DTP”, which stands for “Desktop Publishing” or typesetting. We like to call it “multilingual typesetting” because not any graphic designer can do it.

We work with graphic designers that specialise in foreign scripts. Languages like Chinese, Hindi, Greek and Arabic have foreign scripts.

Don’t forget to turn on the subtitles!

Plain hugs,

Sonia

Transcription

Hello everyone, I hope you are surviving the heat and hopefully getting ready for the weekend now, I can’t wait to be honest!

But before that, I wanted to give you a very quick tip today about translation and graphic design.

Graphic design is something that people don’t normally think about when they’re going to translate their content. But it’s very important and the reason for it is what we call “text expansion:.

Different languages occupy a different amount of space in a page so you can imagine how important this is if you put together a resource with a graphic design template that fits the English perfectly.

But then we’re going to translate this resource into for example Vietnamese or Greek or Spanish for that matter. You’re going end up having about 30% more text than in English!

So when you design your your template, your actual design, you have to consider leaving 30% white space so that we can fit the translated text into your fact sheet in all the languages that we have.

This is because if we are translating a resource into 10-15 languages we want them all to look the same from a graphic design point of view. The only way to achieve that is not touching the actual template so allowing for enough room for all the translations to fit in.

I hope that was interesting and useful everybody have a good weekend and make sure you go to the beach or the swimming pool or stay in the aircon!