How to Automate Multilingual Text Replacement in Large InDesign Catalogs?

Question

I create very large catalogs, between 100 and 600 pages. I initially create them in Spanish and English, with short descriptions of the references. There are about 200 or 300 different references. Once my catalog is ready, we translate it into French and Italian. I’ve a library with the translated references, and I use Command+F to change the text. My question is, is there a faster process than doing it manually? I already have all the translated references; I just need to change them. Can anyone help me?

Mike Witherell · Accepted Answer

Hi Laura,That is the purpose of a script called “Find Change by List”. Edit the script to include your 300 references and then run it. It will execute each change sequentially.A slightly more complicated approach would be to design a Data Merge from a spreadsheet document that had a column for each language.

Joel Cherney · Answer

There are a very large numberof faster processes to handle this kind of localization work in InDesign, but I think that most of these would require more time, effort, and frankly expenditure, than Mike’s suggestion of the FindChangeByList script, which is free, and will most likely take you a very reasonable amount of time to set up. I’m happy to make some suggestions, if you start playing around with FIndChangeByList and discover that it will be only slightly faster to copy and paste your three-hundred-odd strings into your preferred text editor than it would have to hunt through the document with the Find/Change dialog.If you are interested in learning about handling this kind of localized text replacement, much would depend on the current format of your “library with the translated references.” If that is some kind of XML-tagged document, you might be able to handle this with a comparativelysmall number of clicks, and no copying and pasting at all. If it’s a big bilingual table in Word, doing so would require rather more steps. But it’s hard to guess how to offer suggetstions for means to get your translated text out of A and into B where B is InDesign and A is unknown.

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