White Paper: Localizing User Assistance Content: 15 Essential Tips for 'Help' Translation (cont.)

Technical Suggestions

With well-written, easy-to-translate content in hand, we’re ready to proceed to the technical authoring process which encompasses tools, technologies, layout, design and graphics.

1. Use Unicode compliant authoring tools that ensure your content can be authored and translated in any language. Unicode is a standard for encapsulating textual content that supports all the languages of the world. Many older versions of popular authoring tools do not support this standard so check that the preferred tools in your technical writing group facilitate the use of Unicode.
2. Consider technologies that repurpose your content. Use tools and/or technologies that allow you to generate all your user assistance from a single source. This ‘write once, publish everywhere’ methodology, also called multi-channel publishing, can be used to create a printed manual, help system and even web content all from one master set of content. This can create huge cost savings when translating user assistance into multiple languages.
3. Create and use a template so that all files within a piece of user assistance use the same styles. This not only ensures consistency in the English version, but also makes it easier to publish and verify the translated versions of the document. Having a template that enables effective translation can save hours of time that would otherwise be spent rebuilding or modifying a template. Also, many non-Latin-based languages do not use bold or italics. By enforcing the use of styles in your template, you enable the translation team to make necessary design changes in the style sheet for these languages.
4. Use adequate white space. Text can expand 30 percent or more during translation. Be sure to allow adequate white space (a minimum of a 1-inch margin on all sides) to accommodate this expansion. Ensure that columns are at least 25 characters wide. Leave extra white space in table columns to accommodate the increased length. Design your graphic callouts and slides with text expansion in mind. By planning ahead for text expansion, you can create layouts and designs that look closer to the original even after translation is finished.
5. Understand how graphics and screenshots are a cost driver.
   1. Graphics: Avoid placing text within images. If you must have text on an image, provide your translation team the source layered versions (Photoshop .psd or Illustrator .ai) of all final images that have text. Graphics for which the layered version cannot be found are difficult to modify if the translation team needs to alter the text for a particular locale. For example, if the final graphic is a JPG image, without the source files the translation team will have to recreate the graphic text, which can add 15 minutes to several hours of work depending upon the amount of text and the complexity of the background. Consider using numbered callouts on the image whenever possible and put text in a legend within the content area, as in the graphic illustrated on the right.
   2. Screenshots: Avoid screenshots in your user assistance if possible. Screenshots must be captured for every language. Each screenshot may only take 15-20 minutes to create and place, but you need to consider that the translated versions of the software are typically not available until the last minute and sample data is often not available in all languages. Creating hundreds of screenshots in each language for multiple languages requires a significant time investment. Consider using "fuzzy" screen captures where the look of the dialog or screen is conveyed but the text does not need to be readable. This will allow you to reuse these screens across all language versions. Also, you can try using vector-based line drawings of screens for certain types of products (such as mobile or medical device screens). The text in these screens can be edited with ease since they are really just layered graphics.

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