Exporting Text to be sent off for Spanish Translation

[TonyaGarrison]

In Adobe Captivate, there's a feature where you can export all of the text in the project into a Microsoft Word document. Then when the Word document has been translated, you can import it back into Adobe Captivate and it will replace all of the  English with the proper Spanish translation.

We want to do this with Indesign but we've been unable to find a method as efficient as what Captivate does. We can send the Indesign file to the agency we use for translations but they want to charge us more money as they prefer Word documents.

Does anyone know of a way to incorporate a feature as Captivate has into Indesign for export text for translation?

[brianp311]

You can check out Rorohiko's TextExporter script: https://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/indesign-downloads/textexporter-4/

[David Popham]

This may be overkill for your project, but worth checking out - https://redokun.com.

[stefanobernardi]

Hey David, thanks for the mention.

Tonya, feel free to get in touch with us if you'd like to have a chat on how Redokun can help. Of course, we would be very happy to help.

Anyway Tonya, you should either talk to the translator or find a new translation partner.  In InDesign there are no integrated features that can help you with this process. Both converting the PDF to Word or using a simple "text export" might cause issues and errors that you probably want to avoid. Also InCopy (that someone might mention in the next days) is not the ideal tool. I covered this topic deeply in this post.

If you believe our software is too much for you needs, I would suggest you to make sure your documents are translation-friendly. Here is a post I wrote for InDesignSecrets that might give you some guidance. And in our blog you can find many resources that can help you with this (posts, ebooks, videos). It's not rocket science, it's just a few best practices that you should keep while producing the "source-language" file. The two best things you can do is to use Paragraph Styles! And keep the document "well organized".

If your InDesign document is built "translation-friendly" than the translator will have no reason to charge you more than what he/she does with a simple Word document. Right now, I'd guess they might be worried they'll have to edit the document after their tools have processed it, and that (if the document is not produced correctly) might take some time.

[BobLevine]

Have you spoken to the translation company about what they want?

[stefanobernardi]

This. We often forget that working is all about understanding each other needs and helping each other. A quick phone call can often solve "big troubles" in few seconds 🙂

[Jeff Witchel, ACI]

There is a fairly new feature in InDesign that could help, but your translation company may not want to use it. (You'll have to check with them.) You can send the translator a PDF of your layout and they can mark it up with the Spanish text in notes in Acrobat. When you get the marked up PDF, you can import the changes into InDesign ans apply them to your layout (File > Import PDF Comments). In order for this to work, your translator has to use correct markups in the PDF. For instance, if you want to replace the Engish text, the translator should use Strikethoughs over the English text and write the Spanish in the Acrobat notes.

[stefanobernardi]

Notice that in this way the translator will have big troubles with keeping translations and terminology consistency.

[Oussama5FB8]

you can use https://it-tun.com/exporter it exports all the texts as an excel file and you can import the translated files back , changes will be applied in a new layer