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osusanna626
Participating Frequently
March 20, 2026
Question

How to translate an InDesign layout to Spanish efficiently

  • March 20, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 55 views

I have an opportunity to bid on a project which involves a re-design of an environmental-type guide and map utilizing InDesign and Illustrator. The only criteria in which I have very little experience is that a Spanish version will also be required. Basically, I’d like to answer “yes” to the question “Can the bidder produce desired products in both English and Spanish?” Any advice/suggestions will be very much appreciated.

    1 reply

    Joel Cherney
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 20, 2026

    Job it out. Produce your English file, package it, and hand it off to a professional. 

     

    There are many tools you could use to handle the production of a Spanish version of your English layout. The simplest and most straightforward of these tools are plugins it scripts that rely on hoovering up your text content, running it through AI translation, and automatically inserting the translated content. At that point you get to reengineer the document, as you can expect your Spanish translation to be around 15% to 20% longer than your English was, so your text objects are likely to shift or overflow. 

     

    Now you have a Spanish document that no living Spanish reader has ever looked at, so you now need a proofreader, lest you ship your map and guide to your client with obvious AI hallucinatory content in the middle of your Spanish translation. I know plenty of translators who offer PMTE ("post machine translation editing") but you might not. I always find it hard to hire new editors when I don't already have a trusted in-language editor or two to ask "hey, these edits are from a new kid...  Are they any good?

     

    It's simplest for you to job it out. If the contract  language forbids subcontracting, well, then, I would not suggest going it alone. 

     

    "But I want to go it alone!" Take a look at id-extras or idmls.ai or Redokun, and may God have mercy on your soul. 

    osusanna626
    Participating Frequently
    March 20, 2026

    That makes a lot of sense. Any suggestions for locating that professional? 

    Joel Cherney
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 21, 2026

    Sure! Feels like an odd topic of conversation for the InDesign discussion, though. I’d most likely start with the American Translator’s Association, as I’m based in the US. Their tool will let you search by area of specialization. That’s what I’d do, if I had to select a provider specializing in a sector in which I didn’t already have a high degree of familiarity. 

     

    If you’d like me to into more detail, feel free to drop me a PM - I have a fair bit of experience in doing translation projects for governmental clients that involve mapping and GIS data. In my experience, cartography-related translation projects that lean on Illustrator present some challenges; pretty much every translation firm on the planet has tools that can ingest IDML directly, but there’s no markup-language file format for Illustrator, so setting up a good workflow can be tricky.