Yeah, so the headline may be a bit misleading. There is no such thing as the perfect way to work with translations. But I think I have found a pretty awesome trick to make many steps much quicker and smoother.

TL;DR export and reimport translated text in InDesign by using paragraph style tags and a free xml editor, and avoid any copy-paste work.

So this requires pretty strict implementations of paragraph styles for EVERYTHING, with no overrides. Plus, the style names must not contain spaces or special characters.

For this example I will talk about a 12-page leaflet I am designing, which will be translated to eight or more languages. It has a front page with an image and a title, 3 lines. The content pages are a mix of headlines, three column flowing text with a few sub-headings, pictures with captions and graphics containing text boxes, some with headings and normal text.

Now, the problem is always that exporting and importing translated text is labour intense if you copy-paste in and out of a word document, and re-applying paragraph styles is dreadfully boring, but this is often the case when working with small bureaus or freelancers.

Now here comes the trick: I add as many tags as I have paragraph styles, and name them exactly the same as the styles. I then go to the tab options and Map tags To Styles. I do this for all pages, starting from page one. Now each paragraph has it's own tag.

Next, I export as XML, and remember to remap Break, Whitespace, and Special Characters. (I am still experimenting with this setting and a few others at the moment), UTF-8 encoding.

Here is the clever part: I open the xml file in an xml editor with the "pretty print" setting. I found a free one which even lets me LOCK THE SYNTAX. That means that I can see and edit all the text I need to translate, but I can't change formatting, placement, order or any damn thing. Just the text. I would imagine that would be great to work in for a translator.

When the translation of the xml is finished, i import the xml in InDesign and Merge Content. If the syntax is intact and the settings are correct, all the text in the document will now be translated. Some boxes may need to be resized to fit longer texts, but that is a small price to pay. You can even make sure the text boxes are extra big to accomodate more text later on. Don't worry: White space on a page is not to be feared!

Using this method reduces my workload to exporting the file, and then importing the translated xml file. I then adjust some text boxes to accomodate longer texts or odd column breaks. I may ask for revisions, and when I import these revisions, my changes to text box sizes and such remain intact. Yay.

I have tried to boil this down to the essentials. What do you guys think? Is this a way to go? I have to deal with up to 8 translations in my work, regularly, and this will really make my work easier, if I can just get the translator to work with the xml editor.

Btw, depending on how this goes, I may put together a video guide.