In this video, we explain what is desktop publishing or DTP in localization using Minecraft ๐ฅ๏ธโ Get ready to level up your knowledge of the localization industry!
Are you new to the localization industry? In this new series from Localization Academy, we explain localization concepts using video games. Join us on this journey and discover how your favorite games can help you learn a thing or two about localization ๐โ
What is Desktop Publishing or DTP? Let’s take Minecraft as an example.
In Minecraft, you always want to start by building your house, some people only do the basic things. And when it comes to designing, they don’t care that much. And in the end, their houses end up looking like this plain ugly. And then there are people who actually take their time and their houses end up looking beautiful and eye-pleasing just like this one. Or what these people do is they take the ugly houses and they turn them into something pretty. And that’s essentially what a DTP person does, or what desktop publishing is about, making things pretty and eye-pleasing.
Now, when it comes to localization, how it looks like in practice after we do a translation, and we import the translations back into the original, let’s say English layout, the layout can now look completely messy because of the different translations. translations are too long, or they require different fonts or they mess up the images and everything looks ugly and messy, just like the basic houses in Minecraft. So that’s when the DTP people come into play. And they fix the layout with the new translations to make it look nice and pretty just like it was originally intended to because that’s what the end users will see. Right and we want to see nice and poor things, not ugly houses like in Minecraft.
