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. It is the day after International Translation Day, and that is the whole point. Why the day exists A translation is finished. It is accurate, it reads well, the terminology is right. Then it is handed to someone else, and a second question begins: will it still be correct once it is a document? That is where things break. Letters that...
Solitaire, an upscale women’s boutique, needed one wordmark that worked in English and Arabic together. No Arabic font matched the Latin, so I built the Arabic out of four Latin letters. The project Solitaire serves an English- and Arabic-speaking clientele, and the identity had to carry both languages in a single lockup: storefront, labels, packaging, bags. Not two logos for two markets. One...
While living in the Middle East, 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...
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...
