Adobe Certifications and Multilingual Desktop Publishing
Adobe Certified Experts (ACE) certifications help deliver well designed translations.
As part of our ongoing career enhancement plans and professional development requirements, the desktop publishing team at GPI continues to rack up training and certifications for several Adobe products. Two of the recent credentials for some of our team include Adobe Certified Experts (ACE) certifications for Adobe Acrobat Professional and Adobe InDesign. The training, studying and testing for each ACE exam is challenging even when you have 10 + years experience using Adobe for multilingual translation and desktop publishing projects.
About Adobe Certified Experts (ACE)
An Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) is a professional who has demonstrated proficiency with one or more Adobe software products. To accomplish this you must pass one or more product-specific proficiency exams and agree to the ACE terms and conditions.
The test is multiple-choice questions (between 60 or 90 question depending of the software) and you need to go to a certified testing center in person to take the exam. Also, you can’t have the software in front of you when you take the exams. Each exam takes between one to two hours to complete and you get the test results right after you complete the exam. You may find some of the following resources useful to learn more about Adobe certifications:
- Adobe Training & Certification
- Adobe Certification Exams
- Why and How to Become an Adobe Certified Expert
The Adobe Acrobat Professional ACE
The Adobe Acrobat exam covers several topics including:
- How to create PDF documents from a variety of source applications that are appropriate for Web, print, and screen
- How to modify and enhance PDF documents
- How to edit and reuse PDF content
- How to combine multiple documents from different file formats in single PDF document
- How to manage PDF security and settings
- How to setup and manage PDF document reviews
- How to create and distribute interactive forms
Using Adobe Acrobat to create or translate multilingual documents
Some useful features in Adobe Acrobat that are helpful when completing translation and localization projects include:
- Annotates: The ability to annotate a PDF file with Acrobat commenting and markup tools are a great part of any review cycle in translation workflows and makes it is efficient and easy for agency and client-side stakeholders to give feedback on translations.
- OCR: Using the OCR (optical character recognition) feature from Acrobat to extract content for translation is a great timesaver when your starting point in the translation cycle is a scanned document.
The Adobe InDesign ACE
The Adobe InDesign exam covers several topics including:
- How to create short and long documents using the same text and graphics
- How to work with different styles and formats
- How to create an interactive documents
- How to manage graphics using InDesign
- How to export high quality PDF documents appropriate for print and interactive purposes
- Troubleshoot issues related to document settings and formatting
Using Adobe InDesign to create or translate multilingual documents
Some useful features in Adobe InDesign that are helpful with translation and localization projects include:
- Right-to-left: InDesign has special features to handle right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. If you have a mix of languages in the same paragraph, you can specify the direction of text at a character level. Also, to insert dates or numbers you can specify the direction of text at the character level.
- CFK Composer: CFK Composer for Asian Languages is very useful when you are working with Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Each Composer evaluates possible breaks in CJK and Roman text, and chooses those that best support the hyphenation and justification options specified for a given paragraph.
- Find Fonts: Find Fonts function allows you to quickly check which fonts used in the source file are not available in your system also let you globally replace any font throughout the entire document or even replace fonts across several opened InDesign files simultaneously. This function is highly useful when you work with multilingual documents and you need to change the use different fonts for different languages.
- Find and Change: Find and Change enables you globally find and change not only the texts but also fonts, type sizes, styles and etc. as well as any special symbols like hard returns, page breaks and etc. This feature is really helpful when you want to apply global changes for a translated document.
- Check errors: Before sending your translated document file to a printer, use Check Errors to check if there are any errors in your document. This function is also useful for checking any missing links and fonts.
Conclusion
Becoming an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) is not a simple task. Maybe you handle the software every day without any problems but that does not necessarily mean that you use all the features it has to offer. When it comes time to take the exam, it is important to have studied all of the great features of the software in order to pass. So study hard and good luck on your test!
GPI’s Multilingual Desktop Publishing Services
Globalization Partners International, a translation agency, provides many services including
document translation and multilingual desktop publishing services. This list below highlights some of the more common applications we use for documentation localization projects:
You may also find some of our previous blogs on desktop publishing useful:
