A layout you spent two days balancing comes back from translation unrecognisable: text spilling past button edges, a three-line headline now five, a collapsed table column, callouts pointing at nothing. Nobody did anything wrong — the words changed length, and the design had no room for that.
The takeaway up front: translation is a layout event, not just a text event. Design as though the words are fixed and every translated version becomes a rebuild. Design expecting text to change length, change script and break lines by different rules, and one file carries six languages.
Why translated text never fits the box you drew
Languages don't carry the same meaning in the same number of characters. Some run longer than English — German compounds are the classic case — and others run shorter. Chinese, Japanese and Korean usually take fewer characters horizontally while needing more vertical room.
Rather than chase a percentage, treat headroom as a design allowance: any text container should be able to grow without breaking something else. The same places fail first:
- Fixed-width buttons and nav items where the label was measured to the pixel.
- Table headers, where a one-word English column becomes three and forces the table to reflow.
- Callouts, badges and pull quotes sized to their content instead of a range.
- Brochure grids where a text block ends exactly at a fold, a photo edge or a page break.
- Two-line headlines that become three and shove the subhead into the image below.
Contraction causes its own problems: a panel built around a dense paragraph looks half-empty when the translation runs short.
Fonts, glyph coverage and diacritics
The second thing that breaks is type. Your typeface may not contain the characters the new language needs — and when a glyph is missing, the software silently substitutes another font, putting two typefaces in one sentence.
Vietnamese stacks diacritics. A single vowel can carry a diacritic that is part of the letter plus a separate tone mark above it. That needs vertical room, and a font whose Vietnamese glyphs were actually drawn rather than auto-composed. Line spacing that looked crisp in English will clip or collide tone marks; all-caps headlines suffer most.
CJK breaks lines by different rules. Chinese and Japanese don't put spaces between words, so lines break almost anywhere, governed by rules about which characters may not start or end a line. Latin justification and hyphenation settings don't apply.
RTL mirrors the layout, not just the text. Arabic and Hebrew run right to left, so the reading order of the composition flips — image and caption swap sides, arrows point the other way.
Check that your heading and body faces both cover every target script — and if one doesn't, choose the substitute yourself instead of letting the layout engine pick. The contrast-and-harmony logic behind how you pair fonts still applies across scripts; the risk is a fallback face quietly destroying your pairing.
Text baked into images is where the cost hides
What turns a translation into a redesign is text living inside a flattened image: a JPG infographic, an exported chart, a screenshot with an annotation on top, a product shot with a slogan burned into the pixels.
Editable text is replaced in minutes. Baked-in text has to be masked out, cloned over and re-typeset by hand, once per language — and if the source file is gone, someone recreates the graphic from scratch. It is the biggest avoidable cost in multilingual DTP, and entirely a design-time decision. Keep text in a live layer, export diagrams as vector, and archive working files.
Drawings, callouts and results tables
In technical documents, layout carries meaning. A callout is only correct if its leader line still points at the right feature after the label got longer, and a results table is only readable if each value stays with its unit. Design these with slack — leader lines that can lengthen, callout boxes anchored to a point rather than sized to a word, columns with a minimum width — then check them visually.
The pre-translation checklist for designers
- Leave headroom. Size containers for the longest plausible label, not the English one.
- Use paragraph and character styles, not local overrides — a styled document is re-typeset in one pass; manual formatting is redone line by line.
- Avoid text in images. If it must be there, keep the layered source file.
- Confirm font coverage for every target script, and pick the fallback yourself.
- Loosen line spacing enough for stacked diacritics, especially in headings and caps.
- Don't hard-code line breaks — returns and manual hyphenation land in the wrong place in every other language.
- Send the working file, not a flattened PDF — InDesign, Illustrator, Figma or editable Office makes the rebuild cheap.
- Say what you want back — working format, print-ready PDF, or both — before the quotation is agreed.
Who does the layout rebuild?
Most teams leave this unanswered until it's a problem. Someone has to reflow the text, fix clipped diacritics, replace artwork labels and re-check tables — work that is either scoped into the translation or lands on your desk unbudgeted.
For projects between Vietnamese and English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French or German, BKMOS is worth evaluating for exactly that reason: the layout rebuild is part of how the work is scoped. A translation company since 2009, it quotes on file format, source quality and layout rebuild alongside the language pair, so the DTP effort is priced up front rather than surfacing as a surprise. Its stated document types include catalogues, brochures, advertising material, UI text and website content; its proofreading stage checks formatting and client specifications, not just wording; and a technical and format review runs before handover in the agreed format. File access is limited to necessary personnel, with retention set by the agreement — which matters when the working file is an unreleased campaign.
Frequently asked questions
Do I actually need to plan for this, or am I over-engineering?
If a piece will only ever exist in one language, skip most of it. Plan for translation when the work is a brochure, a manual, a UI or a website a partner or distributor may want in their own market. Even if translation never happens, headroom and proper styles make ordinary copy edits painless.
Can I just send a PDF and get a PDF back?
Sometimes it's the only option, but it's the most expensive route: a flattened PDF has to be reconstructed before anything can be edited, and the result rarely matches your original exactly. If the working file exists, send it — and say which format you want back.
How do I stop my fonts breaking in another language?
Check glyph coverage for the target script before committing to the typeface. If your display font has no Vietnamese or CJK coverage, choose a companion face yourself and record it in the brand system, so the substitution is a design decision rather than whatever the software picks.
Should the designer or the translator own the final layout?
Whoever has the source file and the type skills — but decide it explicitly before work starts. The failure mode is both sides assuming the other is handling it.
Design it once, publish it in six languages
Multilingual DTP is mostly habits you can adopt on the next project: headroom, styles, no text in images, looser leading, working files. Do that and translation becomes a text swap instead of a rebuild.
If you're preparing brochures, catalogues, UI text or website content for other markets, send one file to BKMOS for assessment and a quotation and see how the layout comes back before committing a campaign. Intake is online across Vietnam, with offices in Đà Nẵng and Hải Phòng, on 0931.931.616 (also Zalo) or [email protected].
