Gotta 8 page manual. Mostly large photos. Each one has a caption of a sentence or two or three. Front page has a few paragraphs in addition to the photo.
I’ve got people lined up to translate the instructions into Arabic, Turkish, Mandarin, French, Spanish and Korean.
Here’s what I don’t know how to handle. If I just copy and paste each paragraph into the master Word Document and then save it as a PDF, will all of the new language fonts remain? Can I literally copy and paste? Or do I need other tools to make this work?
You won’t see it to be able to cut and paste unless they’re embedded in the doc or you have the font installed. Whether or not a font is embeddable in the doc depends on the font DRM. I think if you can see the font in the translated doc you can ultimately embed at least those characters into the final pdf.
In poking at the list of languages, I suspect I’m over-thinking this. MS-Word and Office is pretty universal. I’ve reached out for maybe 10 languages now. If the friend is fluent in English as well as Mandarin, she can type in the Mandarin into the area just above the English. Delete the English. Move on. Save document. Send it to me.
I’ll compose one large PDF with a table of contents with all languages.
Assuming you don’t have the Mandarin font she will have to embed it into the Word doc. The particular font she has will have to allow that. It’s not guaranteed to work.
One way to check whether a Word document will accept text in foreign scrip is to get some text in that script, select it with the mouse, type Ctrl-C (for copy), then go to Word and select Home–Paste–Paste special–Unformatted Unicode Text.
French, Spanish and Turkish should not be a problem, since they use the Latin alphabet. With the others, you could look in Wikipedia to find some text, but I’ll give you a word or two here:
Arabic المملكة العربية السعودية
Mandarin 中华人民共和国
Korean 대한민국
Right… or not. If they’re using a font which came with their copy of MSOffice or OpenOffice, right. If they’re using something they got from a different source, it may not go well into the PDF. This even applies to French and Spanish: there are fonts out there which include only some characters (rather than every modifier in the Latin alphabet and its variations) and they often behave badly when documents are transferred.
In any case I’d ask for both copies, the doc and the pdf: that way when you have touch-ups later, you have the doc, which more people can edit (if only because more people know they can), and also you can verify that the PDF and the doc are reading correctly in your computer.
Solid thinking. Thank you. I’ll request both. In the case of this particular kind of document, quite a few of the people I’ve approached are technicians in the very same area as I- and are familiar with the idea of what the document describes. This should help- having a truly bilingual person with zero familiarity with the technology would make this awkward and bits would go awry.
The immense majority of my translation work has been in that kind of situation; the Big Blue Database I work with is infamous, among many other things, for the horrible translations; during my first few months of using it, we had an enormous amount of trouble because some higher-ups didn’t want “boring” fonts in our printed reports and us minions wanted “fonts which will be able to show all necessary languages correctly” (which the ones the higher-ups liked did not). I definitely know what you speak of!