Yes Virginia, There is a Translate Feature
April 17th, 2008Have you ever needed to break the news to a kid that there is no Santa Claus? Seen the tears well up in their big brown eyes? You can relive that unique experience with new InDesign users. Just ask them to select some text, and then go to the Language menu (in the Control or Character panel) and click.
When the dropdown menu of over thirty languages appears — French, Spanish, Norwegian, five flavors of German, exotic Finnish and Turkish — shush! Don’t say anything for a moment. Just watch their faces as the wheels turn. You can almost hear their hearts racing … they’re thinking, “WHAT? InDesign can translate text to all these languages?!?! Why isn’t this in the product brochure?”
Now don’t wait too long to break the bad news to them, that would be cruel. Before they utter a word you must jump in with, “No, no, it doesn’t translate, choosing a language here just associates the text selection with that language’s spelling and hyphenation dictionary. You use it on text that’s already been set in a foreign language.”
Oh. Of course, yes, that’s useful too. Nice feature. Then, usually, an embarrassed little chuckle. They almost believed in Santa Claus for a moment there. Very funny.
But it Does Do a Little Translation
InDesign’s software engineers actually did build a limited translation function into CS3. One where selecting text and changing the language dictionary in the dropdown menu does what every little InDesign-using boy and girl has always dreamed: translates the selection to that language.
You’ll find it in the Type > Text Variables area, specifically, the Creation Date and Modification Date variables. These are great for inserting into text frames in footers or slugs, when you want a date stamp that automatically updates to show when a layout was created or when it was last modified.
Insert one of these variables into your text flow, then drag over the variable to select it (it acts like a single, inline anchored object) and change the language dictionary from the dropdown menu.
Here’s a Creation Date variable showing today’s date in my default language, US-English. (I’ve edited the default variable a bit in Type > Variables > Define, and added the “era” to it, which always cracks me up.)
I selected the variable in the frame and chose Italian from the Language dropdown menu. Osservi, il Osserva, mio caro:
Apparently you don’t capitalize days and months in Italian? I wouldn’t know. Here it is in German, Norwegian and Turkish:
Whoa, right? Can you hear the sleigh bells?
“Osservi, mio caro” (without ‘il’, just like ‘Look, my dear’ and not ‘Look, THE my dear’) is a formal style.
Talking with a friend it would be “Osserva, mio caro”…
Thank you for your attention, see you next week for your Italian language class…
;-)
Oh, and, no, you shouldn’t capitalize days and months in italian, even though nowadays no one seems to follow these rules anymore…
Funny! I know now how to write the date in Russian!
Grazie, Guido! I’ll make the change above.
And that is exactly why native speakers do far better translations than computer software.
Someday I’ll figure out how to make the Era field show BCE… there’s got to be a way…
What’s interesting is that when you do change the language and you have the spell checking turned on, you can right click on the word and it will give you the word in the language you have selected.
If only it knew how to check grammar???
Not that it gives the translation though, just a word close to that spelling in that language, which is not the correct word. So I believe.
AM, you are amazing! I never knew that! I’ll buy you a cannoli in Toronto. (Do they have cannolis in Toronts?)
Another great and almost hidden feature. Actually, all Roman languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan) don’t capitalize days and months. Not sure about Romanian, which is also a Roman tongue.
Yes, this little ID translation trick is cool! Of course Adobe *had* to implement it, given that ID is multi-language — or they’d be skewered by “localized” users if all variable-dates appeared in English.
Igor, we Scandinavians don’t capitalize the days or months, either, which I (though I am Norwegian) find very annoying. Days and months are a kind of proper name, after all, which we do have the good sense to capitalize up here, so this bad, old convention is illogical. I’m sorry to hear you “Romans” have this problem, too.