All-Caps Styling and Translation Memory

When creating a document, please keep in mind that using All Caps to style text may result in a less efficient translation workflow.

When text is styled as All Caps, the text renders as capital letters no matter what characters are actually entered into the document. This can lead to issues when matching translation units to a translation memory (TM), because the translation software will use the characters typed, not the characters seen in InDesign.

For example, if the word Hello is styled using All Caps styling, it will be displayed as HELLO. When a user translates this into German, they could type in Hallo, HALLO or hallo. All of these options will be rendered correctly (i.e. they will be displayed as capital letters in the PDF), but the underlying characters used in the translations are obviously different (e.g. the character a is not the same as the character A).

While this is not a hard rule, refraining from using All Caps styling can help to streamline the translation process.

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