Twenty years of doing it the hard way
I started typesetting foreign languages in 2005. Since then I have set type in over 130 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Inuktitut, Khmer, Michif, Urdu, Cree, Tamil, Hakha Chin, and a long tail of languages most people have never had to set.
For most of that time the work was manual. Reflowing a brochure into 28 languages meant reflowing it 28 times. Checking that Arabic had rendered correctly meant checking it letter by letter. Making the same correction across fifty forms meant making it fifty times.
That is not a complaint. Doing it that way for two decades is exactly why I know which parts of it are a craft and which parts are a machine’s job.
So I started building the machines
Working in a high-volume production environment, I built macro tooling for the repetitive formatting work around translation, the preparation before and the cleanup after. It cut average job time by 63% and, more usefully, made job duration predictable. The work received an innovation award.
The interesting part is not the code. It is that most people automating localization production have never done the production. They do not know that mirroring an image in an Arabic layout is usually wrong when there is a logo in the photograph. They do not know which languages need a different typeface at the same point size to stay legible. I automate this work well because I did it by hand for twenty years first.
The practical details
Languages
Over 130 typeset to date, including right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto), CJK, Indic and South-East Asian scripts, and Canadian Indigenous languages including Cree, Oji-Cree, Inuktitut, Michif, Mohawk and Algonquin.
Tools
Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Acrobat Pro; QuarkXPress; FrameMaker; Microsoft Word with VBA. Mac and Windows.
Teaching
Instructor of the Localization DTP Specialist course at Localization Academy.
How I work
Everything in-house. Nothing subcontracted, which means one person is accountable for security, consistency and the deadline.
Where
Ottawa, Canada. Most of my clients are somewhere else.
Response time
Within the hour during business hours. I have kept Australian and Gulf schedules for two decades and I know Friday and Saturday weekends exist.
