Frequently asked questions

IDML (InDesign Markup Language) is the open, XML-based exchange format for Adobe InDesign documents. It carries every text frame, style, and layout attribute from your .indd file in a structure we can translate programmatically without touching the binary.

In InDesign, export an IDML via File → Export… and choose “InDesign Markup (IDML)”.

We run a three-stage, maker/checker pipeline:

1. Parse — We unzip your IDML and extract the translatable spans without disturbing styles, anchors, or layout tags.
2. Translate & check — A translation model drafts each span, then a second pass reviews every span for accuracy, tone, and overflow risk before anything is written back.
3. Repack — Reviewed translations are dropped back into the exact IDML structure and re-zipped into a valid InDesign file ready to open.

We support the major world languages used in commercial publishing: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian.

Don't see your language? Email support@translateindesign.co — we're adding more as demand grows.

Pricing is transparent and volume-based:

• $4.99 platform fee per file.
• $1.00 per 1,000 translated characters. Counted on the source document.

A typical 20-page brochure (~15,000 characters) comes to about $19.99. You see the final quote before you pay.

Yes. Every upload gets a free preview of the first 10 translated rows so you can verify tone, terminology, and formatting handling before spending a cent.

If a job fails on our side, or you're double-charged, or we go down mid-job, you get a full refund. Machine-translation quality preferences are not refundable — always use the free preview first. Full details on the Refund Policy page.

The current per-upload limit is 50 MB. If you have a genuinely larger document, email support@translateindesign.co.

Files are purged within 24 hours of upload. We never write file content to long-term disk, never log text content, and never use your files for model training. See our Privacy Policy.

IDML is backwards-compatible, so any file exported from InDesign CC 2015 or later is supported. We routinely test with files from InDesign 2020, 2023, and current releases.

Translations from English into languages like German, Russian, or Finnish typically expand 15–30%. We flag every span where the translated text is more than 20% longer than the source — check the overflow column in your review screen.

The most common cause is a third-party compression tool re-zipping the IDML (which invalidates the format). Download directly from the dashboard and open without extracting first. If it still fails, send us the job ID to support@translateindesign.co.

Email support@translateindesign.co with what you're trying to do. We're a small team and we reply to every request.