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Our field of operation

...a little digression about 'exotic languages'.

Chinese is usually written from left to right, in some cases from top to bottom, e.g., on posters or advertising. The character set of Asian languages is very large. For comparison: an Arial for a Western, for the Cyrillic, Baltic, Greek, Eastern European, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish languages has a file size of 266 KByte, whereas an Asian one has 10499 KByte.

Arabic is written from the right to the left.

Editable characters are available in Word for Windows after installing the language support. The necessary fonts are also installed. To obtain Chinese characters, you also need an input system that enables the user to enter a character based on a western letter sequence. This is included in the scope of delivery of our programmes by default.

For Arabic, the text must be aligned to the right and written from the right. This support is activated in the MS Office Language Settings programme.

white pencil beside book

Note on navigation in right-to-left languages (Word for Windows)
Navigation in right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew) is very complex because, for example, sequences of numbers are written from left-to-right again. Thus, no continuous rule can be defined.
Marking, forward and backward erasing as well as navigating through the document require some experience. Visually, numbers and text are the same, but have different directions.

The direction cannot be identified, so the cursor must be placed and the arrow key used to determine in which direction the cursor is moving. The number or an inserted Western text runs from left to right, Arabic text then again from right to left. The same applies to marking. In most cases, therefore, the cursor must first be positioned 1 or 2 characters back in order to be able to start from the correct position when marking begins.
Tabs and spaces also like to change direction, as they cannot be assigned to just one language. Thus, navigation is complex even in purely Western text if an Arabic space occurs in the text.
The fact that Western text marked as Arabic cannot be reset to Western text, except by reinserting it as Western text, is also disadvantageous.

In the workflow, it is currently the case that our clients first receive the Word document for proofreading and have this document checked by their responsible foreign agency or similar and incorporate the necessary corrections into Word if necessary.

Once the proofreading process is complete, the layout is adjusted to exactly match the original.
The documents are printed out for final checking. As a reference, we refer, among others, to Baier & Köppel GmbH & Co. KG, VDMA and Karl Mayer Textilmaschinenfabrik, whose documents and catalogues we have also edited in Arabic.

If translations are to be printed in Arabic or Chinese, it is always necessary to obtain a release from the customer so that the question “Who is now liable for the high printing costs?” does not arise.

white and black printer paper

Last but not least...

As a language service, we are bound by DIN standard 2345, which supports us in our daily work. It is the basis for optimal translation quality.

The consistent implementation of DIN 2345 and the use of the translation memory system “Trados Workbench and Multiterm” lead to good results in every language. Terminology work and quality assurance are our top priorities.

Our qualified native-speaker translators work efficiently and cost-effectively as a result. This makes it possible to guarantee a competitive price, good quality and short turnaround times.

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