On a recent Air Canada flight from Montreal to the Caribbean, I switched the seatback screen to Arabic to see how it was handled. The screen offers 15 languages, including English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Punjabi, Korean, Japanese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese. As a Canadian I really appreciate that, and I know a lot of work goes into translating and building an interface in that many...
In a past project I had to typeset a document from English into Vietnamese. As soon as I pasted in the first line of text, I ran into a problem that comes up a lot with Vietnamese. Vietnamese uses accents that aren’t found in a lot of standard Latin fonts, so the letters that are missing from the font just show up as squares in InDesign. The source font simply doesn’t support the...
International Multilingual Typesetters Day is October 1st, the day after International Translation Day. I picked that date on purpose, because typesetting is what happens right after the translation is done. Why the Day Exists Once a translation is finished, it gets handed to someone who has to turn it into a working document, and that’s where a lot of things can go wrong. Letters...
Solitaire, an upscale women’s boutique, needed one logo that worked in both English and Arabic. No Arabic font matched the English lettering, so I built the Arabic out of pieces of four Latin letters. The Project Solitaire serves both English and Arabic speaking customers, so the logo had to show both languages together on the storefront, labels, packaging and bags. The client wanted a...
While I was living in the Middle East, I bought a smart lock. The manual inside the box was printed in English on one cover and Arabic on the other. The English was fine, but the Arabic was broken. The problem wasn’t the translation. Every Arabic letter was standing on its own instead of joining to the letters next to it, which to anyone who reads Arabic looks as wrong as an English...
A large pharmaceutical company needed its animated brand video in Latin American Spanish. The problem was that nobody had the project files anymore. The English source on the left and the Spanish on the right. All of the on-screen text was rebuilt by hand. The Project The English video runs about twelve minutes and follows a cast of animated characters. There’s on-screen text in nearly...
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.
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...
