Trados and FM9 : Company requests files in MIF format?

[Craig Ede]

Tino's description is quite accurate. What this implies is that providing MIFs can be cheaper, since all the DTP stuff is taken on after the translation. Doing the DTP yourself can be quite instructive in instituting best practices for documents that will undergo translation. There are many of these, like using numeric callouts in figures with an associated table that describes each item (so that that text can vary in length without going outside the anchored frame or covering part of the graphic). Note that your numeric callouts will have to change if your table numbering system changes the look of the numbers themselves.

While doing DTP for a translation company, I got pinged by the customer because a cross-reference referred to the wrong page. This was due to the target being two paragraphs under a heading rather than in the heading itself. In the original document that was on the same page as the heading, so no problem, but in the translation the longer text brought out this error in the source. (And of course, the DTP person should not be moving Cross-Ref markers around; the assumption is that they are in the correct place.) The amount of time spent on "quality checks" that eventually found source file problems was not insignificant. That is costly to one or both of the companies involved.

Another best practice is not aligning the bottoms of text boxes in graphics at the edge of the anchored frame. This makes it extremely difficult to see that that text has overflowed since the overflow line at the bottom of the text box will be hidden by the presence of the edge of the anchored frame.

Craig

Date: Wed, 21 May 2014 13:04:21 +0200
From: info at heiko-haida.de
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Trados and FM9 : Company requests files in MIF	format?



Hi Stephen,

well, I have been working for translation companies for more than 15 years (DTP). There are two ways to handle this:

a) mif files are supplied for translation, mif files are returned (no dtp involved). This is best if you can handle all dtp yourself.
It is necessary to know which mif version (which FM version) is used, that is most important.

b) Frame files are supplied and a dtp step is involved for preparation. 
In this case, it is preferable to have all details about the layout and design rules communicated. Fonts should be supplied, graphics should be supplied (they might also contain text btw). 
If you want to get the translations back fully layouted (or get PDFs ready to publish), you should make sure that your source files are accurate in the way the layouts are set and formats and typography are used, so that no one has to guess what was originally intended.

As you can see, b) may need a lot of communication, preparation and data transfer in both directions. It may of course be useful, but it only makes sense if there is a certain (recurring) amount of text to be translated, or if languages are involved where you can not provide the proper typesetting yourself.

Regards - Tino H. Haida, Berlin

 

 		 	   		  
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