Tips for getting the best book translation

The French Linguistics book translation service is ideal for translations of books and other material for publication, due to the level of attention that is paid to the quality of your text. (If you are interested in using this service, please address enquiries to translation@french-linguistics.co.uk; typical prices for translations for publication start at 80 Euros / 1000 words, depending on the volume of the text in question.)

However, here are some tips to be aware of for getting the best out of the service:

• Where possible, supply your copy in a common document format (such as Microsoft Word, Open Office).
• If you have it, supply the laid-out version of your book in PDF, PageMaker etc, but in addition to the text document, not instead!
• We can generally work directly with LaTeX, however.
• Remember that the length of the translation is likely to differ from the original. As a rough guide, text in Romance languages (such as French and Spanish) tends to be around 20-30% longer than the English equivalent. This happens for various reasons, including the fact that English uses certain grammatical structures such as noun + noun compounds which aren't always used in these other languages.
• If you have any preference, state if you want the final text to conform to a particular style guide. Although this is something that should generally be checked at the final editing stage, we may be able to make the translation conform to your required style guidelines and thus save time during final editing.
• If you have images with captions that need translating, then these will usually be supplied in tabular format unless you specify otherwise— budget for the extra time needed to lay out the images in the translated version. If you want images laid out as part of the translation package, make sure that you have the images available in a format (such as a layered Photoshop file) that allows the text to be manipulated.

We can offer professional graphic design services (at extra cost) in addition to translation if this is required.

It's important to note that we can work directly from PDF or PageMaker files if they are the only format you have, or if you require translation and layout services in one package. However, there may be an extra charge for such services. If you've already contracted layout to another company, it may make sense to have a simple text version of your copy translated and then use the layout services that you've already paid for, or for which the publishing company can offer you a discount.

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