How to deal with multiple languages in Photoshop

Question

I'm a software eng. with just a little bit of knowledge in design. When I build software it is easy to create localization settings that will translate and transform information for different user languages.

I'm working on a comic book project, that will be printed and I'm not sure about the best approach to deal with multi-language. I have the PSD files with text in English. I want to ask what is the best way to deal with another language.

From my knowledge, it is possible to group all texts and at the moment export them and decide which language I'm working on. On this approach, I'm afraid of exporting a file with something in the wrong language. It will be easy to deal with changes in design.

Another approach, which I think is safer is to duplicate the PSD files and have a single language inside of each copy. The trade-off there is much more disk space and if I have to change something in the design I need to duplicate the work.

What is the best way to deal with it?

Answer 1

The typical workflow for multi-language documents is indeed to group every language separately, and show/hide these language groups based on which languge you need to edit or export.

You can also lock all the groups, to make sure there are no accidental changes, and only unlock a group when you specifically need to make a change.

No need to be afraid of anything, every method has some downside. Just make sure you have backups, the more languages you're working with, the easier it is to mix up all the bits and pieces.