InDesign file translation (a question)

Process matters. How to deal with disappearing "hard spaces".

Please note: on February 3, 2025, memoQ discontinued the Language Terminal service and with it, apparently, access to the InDesign server for converting INDD files for import, and for rendering previews for INDD and IDML files to be translated (or intermediate stage exports to check formatting details. See this post about Scribus for a possible alternative.

This post will remain here until I am able to clarify with memoQ developers whether there are plans to restore the previously available conversion functionality.

After the scheduled post today about the free Language Terminal web service to facilitate the translation of InDesign files by users of any translation environment tool, I received the following question on The Former Bird Site:

“Hard spaces” are non-breaking spaces (Unicode \u00a0), and apparently Steve was translating the content of InDesign files in Microsoft Word for the client to re-import to InDesign and lay out all over again. This sort of workflow is not uncommon, and it often means a lot of extra work by the client at the end, including, in this case, replacing all the non-breaking spaces that get stripped out when a text in Microsoft Word is imported to InDesign.

This is an excellent example of why it is inevitably better to work with the actual file formats used by the desktop publishing application. Using the INDD file (or other InDesign format), the translator will deliver a product which typically needs only minor format adjustments (like column length or hyphenation), and special characters such as non-breaking spaces will be preserved. I will show this using a series of screenshots made in memoQ, but the result will be the same from any translation environment tool (Trados Studio, Wordfast, Phrase, etc.).

The screenshot above is the same example (downloadable here if you want to try this yourself) used in the post discussing InDesign files, this time with a complete translation in German. To answer Steve’s question, I have inserted non-breaking spaces into Segments 2, 3 and 4. With the non-printing characters switched to visible, these non-breaking spaces are represented by a character that looks like a degree sign. The translation is complete, so I exported the result (sort of).

Because the original INDD file was imported to memoQ using the integration with Language Terminal, the “export” does not immediately generate a file but instead opens a new tab in the memoQ user interface, which advises on the progress of the target file creation. Once that is complete, the IDML file can be saved locally by clicking the Save button and choosing where to put the result. The IDML file, you say??? But the original was an INDD file! Yes, but that’s OK. Possibly even an advantage.

The target file in IDML format has all the layout structure of the original INDD, and the end user can use it without further ado, but it is also a format which can be read directly by a great many CAT tools. This can be very helpful for relay translations with the target as a pivot language, or by simply copying the source text to the target and exporting that result, you can quickly obtain an IDML file in the original (source) language without InDesign and without bothering the client!

To demonstrate that those non-breaking spaces were retained, I created another project with German as the source and imported that IDML file:

As you can see, all the non-breaking spaces are in fact saved in the InDesign format, not lost as they would be if Microsoft Word had been used as an intermediate format in the translation process.