When I simply can't convince my client that keeping all of the translations of a given document in One Big File is a terrible, terrible idea, I

1) make a separate INDD for each language

2) make a separate PDF for each language

3) combine PDFs in Acrobat

But I'd guess that you are either

a) using TM tools that play nice with this workflow, or

b) not using TM tools

But I like to be able to do things like tell my tools "Harvest all of the en_US -> zh_HK translations in these three hundred folders and auto-align them" which

i) may not be of interest to you, and

ii) would be impossible with multilingual INDDs

But seriously, I'd have style names per language. You know, sectionhead_enUS, sectionhead_zhHK, and so on. That way, when I told the TOC tool to collect entries for the TOC, they'd by default pick up only the headings for that language.

Hi Paolo,

As a translation DTP pro/localization nerd, I am always astounded when I encounter people who think it best to keep all of their translations (for long documents, no less) in one big InDesign file. I don't know what tasks are made easier by this workflow, and it makes lots of things harder. I didn't understand, when you asked your question, that the end product really would be one handbook with all of the translations in it - your use of "thumb index" is what clued me in. However, just because they all go to print as one unit doesn't mean that they're easiest to work with in one huge INDD.

 

At the same time, this means that a translator has to reapply each single style to each single paragraph, and I'm not sure this would end up being a very quick, or universally well-understood operation - even with the help of the Find/Replace function.

 

The translators aren't working in tools that do this for them automatically? That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. What kind of files are handed off to the translators? do you have any control over that part of the workflow? Are they a third-party provider, or part of your organization? (FWIW, pretty much any TM tool these days will strip out formatting and reapply at the end of the translation.)

As for #2), updating master pages separately for each language would be useful when a thumb index is used to identify that particular language - master pages are actually different from language to language.

Are you aware of the ability of InDesign to allow you to place one InDesign file into another? That might be very useful for you, especially if you are doing internationalization work. (That's what I assume from your mention of "switching to a different paper format" - I'm imagining doing most of the work in A4, and then switching to letter size for the North American audience.)

I would be interested to know the kind of disaster you are foreseeing. I have not yet faced anything so serious to be considered a disaster in twenty years of this job, but I would like to consider any improvement to my workflow, as well as any trouble I'm not yet aware of.

Ah, I was predicting the disaster of you trying to include your files in a Book file and accidentally synchronizing a bunch of different styles with identical names, or something along those lines. It wasn't exactly clear from your initial posts that you were familiar with this kind of work (most who pose here are not familiar translation work), but of course your most recent post clears that up competely.  Of course, we have some terminological differences - for instance, I'd consider books, pamphlets, posters, graphic novels, and anything else that could be in an .indd a "document" so even if your .indd is eventually going to have a front and back cover, spine, frontmatter, the works, it's still a "document" to me. I do see that you said "book" in your initial post but I never saw "indb" or "book file" or anything of the sort. Apologies if I've induced any confusion by assuming that our Venn diagrams of books and documents mapped onto one another. I'll make sure to use correct terminology when discussing book files to avoid further confusion.

To elaborate on this point: the files I send the translators can contain paragraph styles named Body, Heading, Numbered 1. If the translator prefer to change the name of the styles to something like Body_DE, Heading_DE, Numbered 1_DE, he can do it. However, this can be an annoyance when a general reformatting is due and you are in a hurry.

That could be an annoyance, or perhaps a major delay - which is why I always instruct my translators to make new styles only when necessary, to alert me when it is necessary, and to completely apply all the styles I made when their transations are complete. Many CAT tools these days have adopted the SDLX-style "format painting" interface, which makes preservation of styles basically perfect. (Those who don't have such an interface often use tools like Oxygen for editing XML, or in some cases still use ye olde TagEditor from Trados.)  When a translator cannot or will not respect the styles I've set up, I simply inform my project managers, and then those translators are no longer involved in projects which are to be delivered in InDesign with well-styled text. You may not have that freedom to tell your PMs "Any translator that fails to respect styles in this project fails the test and cannot be used in InDesign translation projects of more than n words," but if you do it might reduce your headache & overhead when plotting workflows for multilingual books with multiple TOCs.

For example, If I want to change the font size in Body, I must do it both in Body and Body_DE. No general synching would be possible.

When I get to set the styles up myself, I always used Based On - no general synch, no, but specific synch. Alternately, I have a Body_Parent style, which is used nowhere in any text, but Body_EN and Body_DE and Body_VI and et cetera are all based on the Body_Parent style. So, instead of using the Book panel to synchronize all styles across all docs, I can just have a few template documents and use the flyout to Load Paragraph Styles from another document, and then just load in a new Body_Parent style.

Also, I never used the possibility of including an InDesign document into another one. Can you suggest any example of how this could be used? I would think that using book files would be the right idea to manage different languages, and I suspect that nesting .indd files would add a level of complexity.

Hm, good point. My projects are likely to use lots of cross-references, so I tend to shy away from Book files (the performance hit on my aging hardware when updating hundreds of references across twenty-odd chapters is significant). But yes, if you are willing to synch your styles all at once, then a Book file would probably be a better way to manage styles. However, since you asked for an example... One multilingual handbook I'm working on right now is about 300 pages long, and it's all one long story. Each translation is 10-15 pages long, broken out into three "chapters," each of which is a separate INDD file. However, these files don't have the chapter headers... and the chapters are placed as inline images. So, the logical order of stuff in the story is:

EnglishChapter1Title (live text)

EnglishChapter1Content [placed INDD}

EnglishChapter2Title (live text)

EnglishChapter2Content [placed INDD}

EnglishChapter3Title (live text)

EnglishChapter3Content [placed INDD}

SpanishChapter1Title (live text)

SpanishChapter1Content [placed INDD}

SpanishChapter2Title (live text)

SpanishChapter2Content [placed INDD}

SpanishChapter3Title (live text)

SpanishChapter3Content [placed INDD}

VietnameseChapter1Title (live text)

... and so on. So the placed INDDs have no page numbers, the page numbers are handled in the "container" file. This is useful because the content doesn't change much - the big change from year to year is the list of included languages. So, it's really easy to delete all of the Spanish stuff & regenerate the TOC, and it's really easy to assign the Swahili. Likewise, it's really easy to job out the Arabic to a third party - because 95% of the work they're doing is in completely separate INDDs.

But, to return to your original question - I may be mistaken, but when I tested it over here in CS4, if I made an in-language TOC in one of my files, then it only picked up the "Header" style in the document I was working on, it did not pick up identically-named headers in other languages in the book. I tried it a few different ways, with each document in the Book file started renumbering at page 1, with each document continuing numbering from previous chapters, et cetera.  So I must really not understand your original question:

I have a book made of documents in different languages. I would like to have a separate TOC for each of them.

Since there is no way to tell the TOC feature to only include paragraphs from selected documents, how would you do to accomplish this task?

Each language is in a separate document, a separate INDD, and the INDDs are included within an INDB, right? The way to generate TOCs per language is to open up one file at a time and Update TOC. When I test it, Document 3 (VI) only picks up headers from Document 3 for its TOC. The only issue would be if you needed each TOC to start at Page 1, and the way to get that would be to use Section & Numbering Options to restart each chapter at 1.