Prepress Tutorial: Tips to Save Money When Printing Translated Work

When designing things in several languages, the cost of production can become quite high. However there are ways to save money and make the printing cost of flyers, magazines, etc. much lower.

These tricks also apply when doing several versions of one job even if it’s in the same language. An example could be designing a menu to be used in a chain of restaurants, and while the images stay the same, the prices change.

First of all it is necessary to understand how a press works. Read this article about 4 colour process printing.
You also need to understand what trapping means. Make sure you clear this very well because it’s a key concept in dealing with this kind of jobs. Here is an article covering trapping.

The main trick is to keep anything that changes on the black plate, or key plate, only. By doing this you will be able to keep the other three plates when you change over from one language to the other, and you will only have to pay the cost of the black plates. If you were to translate a flyer in 5 languages and you used this method, you would be paying the cost of 8 plates instead of 20. The more pages your design has, the more savings you would make.

When dealing with languages, the most obvious element that changes is text. Any text that is going to change once translated, should only appear on the black plate and not on any other plate. Avoid using blacks which are formed by any percentage of cyan, magenta and yellow, because they will appear on all 4 plates.

Make sure you also set the trapping of your black text to overprint. This is usually the default in layout applications. There are a couple exceptions to this, which I am going to explain now.

Lock everything that doesn’t change

Lock all your pictures and other coloured elements on your page. If you mistakenly move them and you don’t realize them, it will be a disaster when you try to print your job. The new black plates of your languages will not fit onto the other plates.

If by any chance you do move objects around which shouldn’t have been moved, make sure you undo it. If you nudge a picture towards the right, for example, don’t nudge it back to the left. Undo the nudging so you are sure that your picture is back to its original position.

Using Knock Out Black Boxes for Better Visibility

There are times where very colourful backgrounds make it tricky to simply use black text, as your text tends to get lost. A way to get around it is by drawing a black box and make your text white. See this illustration.

When you use this method, you need to set the trapping of your text box to knockout. If you leave the trapping set to overprint, the picture behind the box will be printed entirely and when you change the black plate, the image will show through the white text.

Using Overlay Trapping for Coloured Text

There is a way to used coloured text even when you are restricted to only changing the black plate. You will still have to use a black box, but this time, instead of laying the black box right on top of the picture, you put it on top of another coloured box.

(Enlarged version)

Let’s say you want your writing to be red. Draw a red box wherever you want your text to go. Then put a black box containing your text on top of it. The text in this black box needs to be of the same colour of the box which you have underneath. So if the box at the back of your black box is red, then also the writing inside the black box is to be red. Now set the trapping of the black box to overprint. This will result into a black mask which will cover the red box entirely, a part from where your text is. When you change the black plate, the black box will still be there untouched, and you will put another black mask on top of it. The red will again only show through the letters. If this is not clear, look at this animation.

Be Creative Even If Restricted

You might think that if you do all your titles and text in black your design can become boring. Yes, you do have restrictions, but you can still do nice designs even if you have to abide by these restrictions. I have seen very nice magazines even though they were restricted with the use of colours in text. Here are a couple of tricks you can use to make your design more interesting.

Don’t only pay attention to the elements that change, pay attention also to those that don’t.
You have a title that says: “Admire the beauty of Big Ben”. Big Ben won’t probably change even if you translate the sentence. Unless you need to move around the word “Big Ben” due to the syntax of the foreign languages, you can change the colour of “Big Ben” or apply some fancy effects to it, while leaving “Admire the beauty of” in black. Result? Noy only you have maintained your black plate change, you have also given emphasis to the word “Big Ben”.
The same holds for people’s names. If you use somebody’s picture and then put his/her name as a caption, you can make the caption any colour you want.

Make other elements of the page interesting.
Use colourful backgrounds, if they integrate with your design and without making your text hard to read. Use additional visual cues such as rulers and others.

Use Frames or Borders, or Other Elements to Divide Up the Text.
As all of your, you need to give some breathing room to your reader. Use abundant white space between different articles. You can also use coloured boxes, frames, lines to separate your articles.

Make sure that the elements you choose when you design your flyer, ad, magazine, et al, do integrate with each other. Frames can give you a boxed in looked when overused. Too many elements on a page can make it look crowded and make it actually more difficult for the reader to receive your communication. Use your judgment. You are trying to save money, but first of all you are trying to get a communication across to your reader. That’s where your graphic designer skills come into play.