Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies

GRAPHICS LOCALIZATION

After you receive the translated glossary from the editor, you’re ready to localize the navigation bar. Although you’re using Adobe Illustrator, you could just as easily have used Photoshop or Macromedia Freehand, as these tools all support layers. The Layers feature, shown in Figure 11, is important in localization, as it allows you to separate the text from the image and then edit the text into different languages. To create the Spanish buttons, simply duplicate the English text layer and edit the text.

Figure 11. The navigation bar was created in Illustrator. Notice how the text is kept in language-specific layers for easy editing.

Unfortunately, text expansion makes the localization process a bit more challenging ...