Multilingual DTP & Document Automation in 130+ Languages
I’ve spent 21 years typesetting documents in over 130 languages. Now I automate the parts that shouldn’t need a human.
If you produce material in more than a handful of languages, you already know where the time goes. Not the translation — the formatting afterwards. Text that expands 30% in German and breaks the layout. Arabic that renders disconnected because the file was prepared wrong. A hundred near-identical forms that each need the same twelve fixes.
That is the work I have done by hand since 2005, and it is the work I now build tools to eliminate.
Macros and scripts that take the repetitive formatting work out of multilingual production — file preparation before translation, cleanup after it, batch fixes across hundreds of files. On recurring work this has cut average formatting time by 63%.
The craft, still done properly. Over 130 languages including right-to-left, CJK, Indic, South-East Asian and Canadian Indigenous scripts. InDesign, QuarkXPress, FrameMaker and Word. Print-ready or press-ready.
PDF re-creation when the source is gone. Animated video localization without project files. Logo transliteration. Fillable forms. Subtitling and SRT work. OCR. The jobs that come back from other vendors.
Government — public health campaigns, newcomer settlement guides and investment brochures for federal, provincial and municipal agencies across Canada and the United States, including the Government of Canada, the Government of Ontario, the City of New York and the City of Ottawa.
Health and insurance — member handbooks, benefit summaries and claim forms for North American insurers, produced at volume across dozens of jurisdictions.
Pharmaceutical and life sciences — patient-facing material and product documentation for global pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
International organisations — including the United Nations.
Delivered as a specialist supplier to the language service providers holding these accounts.
Jaber has been part of Polaron’s international project management team since 2011.
Eva Hussein, CEO, Polaron Language Services
Most of my work comes through language service providers who need multilingual layout capacity they do not want to staff in-house. I am one accountable person, not an account team — you send files, you get files back, and you can reach me directly.
I answer email within the hour during business hours, and I have worked to Australian, European and Middle Eastern schedules for two decades. I know Friday–Saturday weekends exist.
I bought a smart lock. Inside the box was the operation manual, printed in two languages — English on one cover, Arabic on the other. The English cover is fine. The Arabic cover is broken. Not mistranslated. Not badly worded. Broken at the letterform level — every letter standing on its own, unjoined, like a row of separate characters that happen to be sitting next to each other. To anyone who...
In this video, we’ll be looking at how the Qatar World cup incorporated this small but impactful Arabic element called a "kashida" into their overall theme.
This video gives a quick overview on how to properly annotate and mark-up a PDF using Adobe Acrobat.
Managing a translation project may seem like it simply involves sending a document to a translator, waiting a few days with crossed fingers, and hoping that the English document you sent comes back and looks a little like what you think is Arabic, Burmese or Chinese. Now, imagine if you had to do that three, seven, 14 or even 50 times over? And then extrapolate that out to include checkers and...
You read the title correctly. I’m a one-man show and always on-call. My clients can attest, whether they live in America or Australia, somehow I’m always able to answer their emails within minutes, and in the most extreme cases, within hours. Over the past decade or so, I’ve had the pleasure of working with wonderful people around town and around the world. My goal has always...
Last year was a special one not only because it marked 10 years since I took on my first multilingual DTP project, but also because I tackled an 80th language: Hakha Chin, a language spoken in southern Asia by almost half a million people. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with translation companies here in Canada and around the world. I’ve worked with governments...
Of all the over 70 languages I’ve worked with, and as unique as each one is, they all generally fall into one of two categories: left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL). Although typesetting all foreign languages involves several challenges to overcome, RTL typesetting adds an extra dimension: text direction. There are many things to consider when working with RTL languages, including text...
One may wonder, when would a foreign language typesetter be needed? Let us take a common example of when I put my services to work. If a business has a promotional brochure, there may come a time when it would need to translate its material for the purpose of marketing to a broader, more diverse and international audience. The number of languages in which they would like to translate depends on...
