How we work

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Source Formats

In order to optimally meet the technical requirements of your translation projects as well as the linguistic and content-related aspects, our engineering department prepares texts for translations in such a way that the target format corresponds to the source format and you avoid problems when further processing your texts. Tags and codes are protected in order to maintain the original programming.

If you wish for us to work directly with a translation tool developed by your own company, we are happy to familiarise ourselves with the software. If you work with a redaction system for your website or technical documentation, we can program our CAT tool Trados to process your company’s specific formats and settings, such as only sections marked “to be translated” being analysed and processed in our software.

Formats with direct processing in Trados
Many common formats can be directly processed in our CAT tool Trados. Our clients can decide whether they want documents in the target language to include rough or finished layout. Find out more here about DTP.
Below you will find a current list of formats:

  • Adobe FrameMaker
  • Adobe InDesign
  • HTML
  • OpenOffice
  • XLF
  • QuarkXpress export files
  • Comma and tab-delimited text files (CSV and TXT)
  • Java resources
  • JSON
  • XML
  • Rich Text Format (RTF)
  • Microsoft Office formats (Word, Excel and PowerPoint)

Formats with indirect processing in Trados
With some formats, processing with Trados involves an intermediate technical step: the texts must first be exported from the original format before they can be processed with our CAT tool Trados and then imported back into the original format after translation. There are additional costs for professional conversion by our DTP team. These formats include:

  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Photoshop
  • CorelDraw
  • Microsoft Publisher
  • Visio
  • AutoCAD (DXF and DWG)

PDF and scanned documents (gmp, gif, jpg etc.)

If you have the original file from which the PDF was created, please always send us this (in Word, InDesign or other formats). This is because the format is damaged during conversion to PDF. There are free conversion programs like iLovePDF that allow apparently clean conversions, such as back to Word. In most cases, however, format changes due to incorrect line breaks only become apparent after the translation and correction proves relatively time-consuming. Texts with several columns, tables of content, indexes and tables are particularly problematic.

If you don’t have the original format, we will convert the files professionally before translation. The text is then newly formatted and tables and lists of content are newly constructed and if necessary linked.

We also offer the translation of scanned, handwritten and therefore non-vectorial texts. If text recognition programs don't produce a workable end product, we will type out the text if required. We always find a solution to deliver clean target files for you.