It’s all Greek to me…
Over the years, I’ve gone from typesetting regular Annual Reports to documents with increasing degrees of complexity; including working in foreign languages, such as Arabic.
I’ve worked in foreign languages as a typesetter since 2008, when I helped create the book 1000 Languages: The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues while working at the now defunct Ivy Press publishers in East Sussex.
In 2010, I got the chance to work on a multi-lingual project for DHL at Hogarth Worldwide in London, where I discovered working in Arabic for the first time. The opportunity came by chance – when I was already working in more ‘regular’ languages, such as French, German and Russian. One of the project managers asked if there was anyone who could typeset in Farsi and Arabic. Nobody answered. Given that I’d worked in Hebrew previously, I offered to have a go. I was then given a Mac with the Middle Eastern version of InDesign (which is quite specific and has features such as “World Ready Composer” for setting right-to-left reading documents) and I learned as I went on. Thankfully – of course – there were a team of proofreaders who knew the languages better than anyone, so I had plenty of guidance.
I also learned that having a niche makes you stand out in the industry. Fifteen years later, that’s still true.
Fast forward to 2019, I ended up working on a high-level annual report with both English and Arabic versions that ran concurrently. Besides just typesetting, my role included setting up the character and paragraph styles as well as looking after the page formatting (type going right-to-left, etc.). For this particular job, I learned how to typeset in Arabic with a keyboard (not just copying and pasting copy in from Word) by researching how to write the characters with a pen, using a guide to handwriting – so I got a feel of how the individual characters merge together into words).
Sadly, I’m unable to show that report here (due to an NDA that’s still in place); however, I have the knowledge that the client was so impressed with my Arabic typesetting skills – as a non-native speaker – I was asked to go back and work on the report the following year.
It didn’t happen, though… my life had taken a different turn, in that I was in the process of moving to Scotland and I’d been offered an annual report season at Emperor’s Edinburgh office and we couldn’t get the dates to match up.
On this page are a few examples of my foreign language typesetting skills from the past few years.
