Designing catalogs in multiple Languages

[Neal]

I work as an in-house designer in a 2-person design department and we design 2, 80 page product catalogs, twice a year (in addition to a ton of other design and production work). I was wondering is anyone had any suggecstions on how to handle the flow of designing catalogs that need to be translated into multiple languages.

The catalogs need to be translated into US English, UK English, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. In the past our small design department has always been responsible for taking the copy from the previous years catalogs and trying to re-use whatever copy we can (product descriptions that haven't changed, general info that doesn't really change, etc.) and then supply the project managers what copy we do need translated (new products, new general brand copy). Since the design changes each year and products are in different locations and the way we categorize things changes, our design department spends a ton of time searching thru previous catalogs to find copy we know we have in English and then finding the corresponding translations and placing them in each version of the catalog. The actual design of the catalogs is about a 2 month process from initial design to approved nearly final US English version and then the translations take an addition 3 months of updating text, sending out proofs and having project managers in the corresponding countries make edits and sending them back to us to revise, which is a slow process and usually someone in one country catches things that were not caught on the original version and all versions have to be updated, and sent out for retranslating... it gets very confusing, especially since we have a ton of other design work to do in addition to these catalogs. We are understaffed to say the least!

I was thinking of refusing to do any translations this year, since I feel it is not really the a design responsibility, and either making them pay for a translation service to do the work, or having each country purchase a copy of InCopy for their office and send them the US English version with styles set-up for all headlines, body copy, etc. and have them translate the files and send them back to us so we can make sure nothing crazy happened, and make whatever design-related changes we need to do and be done with it.

Does anyone have any experience with non-designers using InCopy? If we went this route it would probably be office administrators (who do the proof reading on the proofs we send now) using the program, and I'm not sure if they will be afraid of the new software, or refuse to do this since the program may seem to them like a design program - and they may think I'm trying to make them do my job. The company has no in-house copywriters or department who's jobs are copy-related so translations get thrown at me and my fellow designer! We use translation services for small graphics and posters that need translating, but the cost to do this many catalogs I think would never get approved by the owners of the company. If we had all of the copy in a word doc that I could pour into the design it would be fine - but as of now we are grabbing one sentence here, and another there, across 80 pages - making it very tedious.

Sorry to write such a long description of such a boring problem! But I think it would be good to know how other companies handle this before making these suggestions to my boss.

Neal