Technical non-fiction with complex layout

Samuel Murray wrote:



1. Load the JPG into Abbyy FineReader 14. Let FineReader do it's magic (OCR). Since this was just for illustration, it didn't matter if the OCR introduced mistakes into the text, and I did not check if it did.
2. Copy the text into MS Word. (And hope that there aren't any text boxes!)
3. Select all text, and convert to a 1-column table (you may need to fiddle with the settings, or do some temporary find/replacing to deal with soft line breaks and tabs).
4. Reduce the width of the table to about half of the page, then add a second column using MS Word's usual method of adding columns to a table.

You'll notice that whole paragraphs end up in a single cell. This makes more sense to me because it would require fewer copy/paste actions for the client. However, if you tell a translator to create the table himself, you *might* get a table back in which every sentence is in a separate cell, depending on how the translator creates the table -- since CAT tools allow us to split paragraphs into sentences, and most CAT tools can then help one to save the text easily in a format that can be converted to a table.

If you find it hard to select and copy from such a table, simply highlight the source column (e.g. yellow), and then convert the table to text, with paragraphs breaks instead of tabs. That will put the translation underneath each piece of source text, and you can select text more easily.


[Edited at 2019-12-04 08:05 GMT]

Andrzej Mierzejewski wrote:



In such case all you can do is try to make the translation shorter..., and shorter..., and even shorter. Just remove all unnecessary words. It's the translator's decision which words must remain, and which can be deleted without any harm to the clarity and comprehension of the text.

The last resort is: a smaller font size.

As to your book: if I were your translator, I'd use Samuel Murrays' solution with two columns. This method always facilitates the actual editor's job.

HTH

AM