Journal 5th Entry – Mohamad

As I mentioned in my 3rd entry, I had to extend my internship period because of this class, so I used to have a supervisor called Pamela Glaser who is a very sweet person, and now I have a different supervisor called Ronnie Coleman, who is a very nice guy too. But I still work with both on anything they need me to do. This week Pam had something for me to do, It was concerning the “ABC’s of Housing” booklet that we finished printing last week. I have to mention that Pam was my supervisor during the time I was designing the booklet project. Pam doesn’t have – like most of the employers here – any knowledge of how to use the Adobe InDesign software. She told me that she received an email from the person responsible of the “ABC” project that we need to make a spread pdf version for each of the translations they just made for the content of the booklet in Korean, Créole, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Dutch and Spanish. The email contain attachment of the InDesign files of all the languages, So I opened them and I can’t explain my feelings when I saw the devastation made in those files! They took the final English version of the design I made, and just replaced the text with the translated ones without fixing the design, and they were ready to print it! As we all know different languages have different font size and spaces; for example a paragraph in Chinese take a lot less space than a paragraph in English, so you can imagine how much empty space there was in the whole design. So I had to tell my supervisor that I don’t accept that it will be printed the way it is now because it looks horrible! And she promised to ask the responsible to give me some time so I can fix all of them. I hope that they will accept and I’m waiting for the answer next week.

One thought on “Journal 5th Entry – Mohamad

  1. Joel Mason

    Dear Mohamed,
    I can certainly understand your feeling about seeing how your original layouts were affected when the text was translated into different languages. This is a situation that the United Nations design office deals with on a regular basis since every UN document distributed to the public has to be produced in at least six languages. Coincidentally, in 1991 The Herb Lubalin Study Center for Design & Typography produced a study called “Typographia polyglot: A comparative study in multilingual typesetting.” It took the UN Declaration of the Rights of Man and set it 22 languages including English, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi and Farsi. I don’t know whether it’s available online, but I will bring my copy to our next class meeting to show you.

    Sincerely,

    Professor Mason

    Reply

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