Localization in entertainment industry is growing rapidly by the quantity and geographical range; thus the skills to do simple DTP work for multilingual content is a must-have to localization professionals. In this blog, I will share the steps, challenges, and lessons-learned during localizing a poster into 9 languages for a Netflix Original Series — Grace and Frankie.

Tools: Photoshop & Indesign

STEP 1: DECIDE TRANSLATIONS FOR 9 MIIS LOCALES 

Translation is very essential to a localization project. In this specific task, the text that needs to be translated are names, TV title, date, and netflix-specific phrase (“A Netflix Original Series”).

Step 1.1: Decide which content to translate

(Language Group 1: Romance languages)

(Language Group 2: Non-Romance languages)

I divided the language groups into 2 groups. In the first group, actors’ and actress’ names do not to be translated since French/Spanish/German/Portuguese are romance languages. German is especially an interesting case, since they kept the title of the show unchanged, due to their cultural preference, to keep English topics the way it is.

In contrast, in language group 2, everything except for “Netflix” need to be translated due to the nature of the languages, different written scripts.

Step 1.2: Decide what to translate into 

In terms of the names, I consulted Wikipedia for the profiles of all actors/actress to make sure that their names are recognizable in different cultures. Then I consulted Netflix website in different languages to get the correct way of translating “A Netflix Original Series.” I also consulted different linguists on each translation to make sure there’s no typo or inappropriate content.

STEP 2: PHOTOSHOP — MAKE MASK LAYERS

Photoshop has great functions to mask the words out from the poster — I used “lasso” tool to select the words that I want to hide, and then used “patch” tool to find a similar place on the poster to replace the words. Here is the final result:

STEP 3:INDESIGN — RECREATE ENGLISH FILE 

Originally, Indesign does not open psd. or jpg file, but there’s a function to make it work! I created a new INDD file, and used the “File >> Place” function to import the psd. file that I masked, as well as the original poster picture (jpg). Then, I found similar fonts to recreate the English INDD file for later localization work.

STEP 4: INDESIGN — CREATE 9 LANGUAGES LAYERS AND APPLY 1 LOCALE  PER LAYER 

With the English layer in Indesign, I duplicated the layer and renamed each layer with the language name so that I can import translations into each layer within one INDD file.

CHALLENGE: finding the corresponding fonts and being able to download them for non-romance languages took a long time.

STEP 5: PHOTOSHOP  — ADD “RED DOT” IN EACH POSTER

This step itself is a challenge since there’s a “red dot” on the “i” in the title “Frankie” in the original poster. So, I exported each language layer from Indesign into jpg. and imported them into Photoshop to use the “Magic wand” tool and “color” tool to make one part of the title red.

CHALLENGE: It is really up to the style guide which part of the character is the best to put the red dot; and it also depends on the font of each language — whether the font support a little part of the character to have this red dot.

CONCLUSION

This project looks very simple until I really dived into doing it. In this specific project, I used Indesign and Photoshop together to make this project happen, under the suggestion of my instructor. However, I think that photoshop itself might be enough for this project, and even easier to operate.

All in all, I learned and practiced my DTP skills in this project and became more interested in knowing more on Multilingual DTP!