Mechanical engineering documents run a DTP rate of 83.7%. Construction, 80.8%. Biotech, 76.9%. Medical reports, 76.2%. Marketing content, the category I used as my example, sits at 14.8%. UI and gaming content sit near zero.
The reason is structural. A deck or a brochure needs layout because someone designed it to look good. An engineering spec or a medical report needs layout because the source document is dense: tables, diagrams, numbered sections, footnotes, all structurally part of the content, not decoration on top of it. Translation doesn't just change the words in that kind of document. It breaks the structure, and someone has to put it back together.
The other pattern I didn't expect
Hebrew and Arabic, right-to-left scripts, account for 41.1% of all Tomedes' DTP orders combined. Every document that moves from right-to-left to left-to-right, or back, needs its layout rebuilt, not just resized. That's a harder problem than text expansion in French or German, and the data shows it clearly.
In legal, medical, and financial documents specifically, the DTP queue and the human review queue don't run one after the other. They run at the same time. A medical report that needs formatting work also needs QA. Both bottlenecks live in the same document, simultaneously, not in sequence.
What this actually means
The words translate fast now. That part of my original point holds completely. What I got wrong was where the waiting happens. It's not primarily in the documents designed to be seen. It's in the documents built to be dense: the technical spec, the medical report, the legal filing, where the structure of the source document is doing as much work as the words inside it.
If your business translates decks, this still applies to you, just less often than I assumed. If your business translates technical documentation or medical materials, this is probably already your actual bottleneck, whether anyone's named it yet or not. UI and gaming content sit at 0.6% and 0%, near the bottom of the whole list.
Tomedes' desktop publishing service works across the file formats this kind of document actually lives in, InDesign, FrameMaker, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, rebuilding layout rather than just resizing text around it.
FAQs
Q: What is DTP in translation?
A: DTP (desktop publishing) is the process of rebuilding a document's layout and formatting after translation, so tables, diagrams, headers, and design elements match the original structure rather than breaking when the translated text runs longer, shorter, or in a different script direction.
Q: Does every translation project need DTP?
A: No. Roughly 1 in 4 Tomedes projects include a DTP component. It's most common in technical, medical, and legal documents with dense formatting, tables, diagrams, and numbered sections, and far less common in simpler content like marketing copy or website text.
Q: Why does DTP take longer for some languages than others?
A: Right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic require the layout to be rebuilt in the opposite reading direction, not just resized, which is a more involved process than adjusting for text expansion in a language like German or French.
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