All indesign stories to word for translation

**Slicktrix** · July 26th, 2006, 04:48 AM

Hey,

A lot of the designs I make in indesign CS2 have to be translated.
I'm looking for an easy way to export all text to word.
There someone replaces the text with the translation, and I can import the translated file without having to redo the complete layout.

So I think I want to export all indesign text to word, preserving the styles. The translator can leave the styles and I can import using my own styles. There still is a lot of copy-pasting to be done then but it would be a lot better.

Is there someone out there who knows how to do this, or even has a better way... Best would be if the translation was placed in the correct textframe, with the correct layout... (or am I dreaming?) I suppose it's possible with xml, but I know nothing about xml....

thnxs

**billbaloney** · July 26th, 2006, 05:37 AM

It's certainly possible in InDesign CS2 to save your content out to an XML "snippet" that can then be translated and re-read by the InDesign document, but you'll need to do a fair amount of ramping up (also here) before you'll be able to understand the process and come up with your own.

**RacerX** · July 26th, 2006, 06:12 AM

First question that comes to mind is... how did you get the text to begin with? I know very few people who use InDesign as a word processor.

The second thing that pops into my head is... what makes you think that the translated text is going to be the same length as the original content? You're going to face a lot of work no matter what because any work you did on kerning or hyphenation will be totally lost in the translation. And what may have been a page of text in English could be up to two pages in some other language. And in that case you would be forced to re-layout the page or pages to make everything fit right.

... and that is assuming that you actually understand the language enough to make the proper adjustments.

**billbaloney** · July 26th, 2006, 06:26 AM

Actually, InDesign is well-suited for this task, as long as you create smart layouts. It's just like in Quark: you create a layout with column flows, drop in the text, and make adjustments when necessary. Not rocket science. This is the same thing that's done, with less human intervention, every day in multilingual web sites. And often XML is the exact storage technology used to map entities to translations.

**Slicktrix** · July 26th, 2006, 06:30 AM

The files I create are more than often pieces of different former publications...
And often pieces of text are mailed to me, copied from catalogues, scibbles on a piece of paper, technical info from our database,… You name it we get it, and most of the time it's a combination of these methods!

The company I work for has offices in 156 countries. We make publications for all of them. Russian, chinese, hebrew, french, german, english, dutch, arabic, polish,… we come across all of it round here. I will spare you the trouble we have just getting all these lanuages on our screen. All these translations are done inhouse (by native speakers) also. So word is the only reasonable sollution for the translators…

Believe me, I know that working with text you can't read isn't that simple… But that's the kind of job I'm in. That's also why it would be easy if translated texts are placed in the right textframe, with the right layout. The file is far from ready then but it would save me a lot of hastle copy/pasting... Especially when I have to make the same file in 25 different languages.

I hope you can understand my problem a litle better now, thnx anyway!

**Natobasso** · July 26th, 2006, 11:30 AM

I suggest giving your translators .txt files (non formatted) so when you get the translation back you can just reflow it into your doc (hopefully you have linked text boxes, yes?) and the raw .txt will flow in using your font style. Make sure they give you .txt files back with no formatting.

**Esquilinho** · July 26th, 2006, 12:16 PM

Originally Posted by Natobasso

I suggest giving your translators .txt files (non formatted) so when you get the translation back you can just reflow it into your doc (hopefully you have linked text boxes, yes?) and the raw .txt will flow in using your font style. Make sure they give you .txt files back with no formatting.

Why not use .rtf instead, then? That way, styles can be preserved.

**MacGizmo** · July 26th, 2006, 12:22 PM

The simple solution is to just export as text (Command + E) and keep your preferences in ID set to "Create Links when placing text and spreadsheet files"