Episode 2: Let your Document Speak More than One Language

The second episode of our Tip & Tricks series shows how language variants of text building blocks help you build your document for an international audience in different languages, even using different languages in one document.

Business correspondence for global organizations is usually provided to their customers in more than one language. With reusability as the major time saver in the document creation process, the Papyrus Business Designer makes sure each text building block can be made available in language variants.

By changing the document language, your document, like a product, offer is designed once and ready to be sent to your customer in any language required by your customers.

Building block in language variants

In the first step of your document design process, you create a number of text building blocks. For example, you create a building block for the introduction, and another one for the product description, and another one for the product list, and so on. It is already at this early stage that you lay the foundation for your multi-language business document that you are going to design later.

By creating language variants for each text building, e.g. a language variant for English and one for German, you will have the prerequisites to design your product offer for your U.S. customers and for your German customers in one go.

Note that you still have only one building block for your introduction, but in two different language variants.

Document language

Now combine your building blocks into the business document, e.g. the product offer. Depending on the document language that you select, the English or German variant of your introduction building block and the other building blocks is used and your product offer is shown in English or German.

Choose the language of your variant

Now imagine you want to send an insurance offer to your German customers with a section listing the insurance policies, required for legal reasons in German and English. Still the document language for your insurance remains German. Can you define that the policies building blocks are shown in different languages?

Using the Overrule language option in your document, you can do that for each building block and insert for example the same policy text building block into your document several times, showing it in languages different to the document language.

Tip: For a column-like arrangement as shown in the figure, use the Positioning synchronization design building block and the positioning options such as Width for the text building blocks.

Conclusion

To support your international customers, Business Designer offers the creation of text building blocks in language variants. One building block in several language variants can be used in a single business document and the document can be sent to your customers in different countries. No need to re-create your product offer – just switch the document language.

To find out more about working with language variants in Business Designer, see the Papyrus user documentation, register for our Papyrus Correspondence / Business Designer workshop, or watch our Business Document design tutorial (time code 01:50).