Editorial translation and layout of the institutional guide for the Malaga City Council
01/The Client
The Malaga City Council is the oldest civil institution in the city, created by the Catholic Monarchs on 26 May 1489. For more than five centuries, it has evolved to serve Malaga and to be an administration close to its inhabitants.
As a municipal institution, it is responsible for the administrative, urban, cultural, and heritage management of the city. Among its many competencies, the preservation and enhancement of architectural and historical heritage stand out, with projects that disseminate Malaga’s cultural wealth to its citizens, as well as to international visitors and investors.
Within this framework, the council promotes publications and informative materials that combine historical rigour with an attractive editorial design, in order to project the image of the city and its most emblematic architecture at a global level. The guide Málaga City Council. The institution and its headquarters is a clear example: a journey through the evolution of the municipal corporation and its various headquarters, with a special focus on the current Municipal Palace, inaugurated just over a century ago, and its valuable artistic, architectural, and symbolic elements.
02/The Challenge
Málaga City Council required the translation into English and implementation of the layout for this architectural guide, which holds high historical and heritage value, targeting an institutional and international audience. The project required maximum linguistic precision and special care in visual adaptation to respect the editorial identity of the publication.
It was also an editorial translation assignment, a specialized translation that combines fidelity to the original content with a strong stylistic component, in line with the standards of the publishing sector. Although the client belonged to the public sector, the final product also had to meet the demands of the publishing world in terms of narrative quality, stylistic coherence, and visual presentation.
The deadline was very tight: the translation, proofreading, DTP, and quality control of a document, with a high level of detail, had to be completed in just a few days.
Among the challenges were the need to ensure an accurate translation from Spanish to English with correct architectural terminology, ensure linguistic consistency through a thorough review, integrate the translated content into the original design in PDF and IDML, verify the layout of all texts with a double layout review process, and deliver a final print-ready file together with a document with the necessary technical premises for production.
03/The Solution
Nóvalo tailored a workflow to meet the project’s urgency and complexity, with a twofold objective: to offer maximum linguistic rigour and ensure seamless editorial integration.
- Specialized editorial translation: the project was assigned to our native translators, who are specialized in institutional and editorial texts and have proven experience in historical and architectural publications. This way, we guarantee a precise, natural result that is fully adapted to the original style.
- Structured revision and quality control: the translation was subjected to a thorough revision by the Nóvalo team, including a second native translator and additional quality control, to ensure terminological and stylistic consistency throughout the content.
- Layout and text integration: the content was incorporated into the original design, taking care of the typographic layout and the correspondence with the images.
- Double layout verification: two of our specialists validated the location, format, and correspondence of the text in the final design, ensuring a faithful and careful integration in the layout.
- Preparation for printing: together with the final file, the project manager sent a document with the printing premises, which included the technical indications necessary to preserve quality in production.
Communication with the customer remained consistent throughout all phases, allowing decisions to be validated and doubts to be resolved quickly, thereby meeting the required level of demand.
04/The Result
Malaga City Council received, within the agreed deadline, a bilingual version of the guide Malaga City Council. The institution and its headquarters with an accurate translation, a perfectly adapted layout, and exhaustive quality control.
This initiative is an example of how editorial translation, with its stylistic, narrative, and visual particularities, can be successfully applied to an institutional publication. It combines the language of the public sector with the standards of the publishing sector.
The sum of linguistic specialization, attention to detail, and agile coordination with the client made an excellent result possible, even with very tight deadlines.
