During multilingual localization of catalogs, product manuals, or magazines, AI can quickly produce a first-pass translation for an InDesign file. Before final delivery, however, the translation usually still needs review by translators, clients, or marketing teams.
The challenge is that not everyone involved in review uses InDesign. If a designer manually copies source text and AI translations from an INDD file into Excel, then pastes revisions back one segment at a time, the process is slow and can lead to lost formatting, missed or incorrect pasted content, and version confusion.
This article explains how to export a bilingual Excel file containing both source text and AI translations after completing an AI first pass in SimplifyAI, send it to a translator or client for review, and import the revisions back into the layout project.
The drawbacks of manual copy and paste
Many growing global businesses and small translation agencies still handle InDesign files with a highly manual workflow:
- It takes a long time: For a 50-page product catalog, extracting and copying the text alone can take hours.
- Formatting is easily lost: If one word in a paragraph is bold or red, that rich-text formatting can be lost when content is copied into Excel. When pasting it back into InDesign, the designer must manually restore the styling.
- Content is easy to miss: Text on Master Pages, in complex tables, or inside embedded charts can be overlooked.
The workflow: export the AI first pass for bilingual review
A bilingual Excel file is not an empty translation template. It includes the AI translation as a first draft, so reviewers can edit the translation column directly. The relationship between the text and its original layout position is retained at the same time.
Step 1: Upload the InDesign file and complete AI translation
Upload the .indd file to the SimplifyAI workspace, choose the target language, and start translation. Once the first draft is generated, you can review the source and translation online to confirm overall quality and terminology direction.
Step 2: Export bilingual Excel
Download the bilingual Excel file from the translation results page. The spreadsheet includes the source text, AI translation, and the information needed to map content back to the layout. Because the translation column already contains a first draft, translators do not need to start from a blank sheet.
To reduce unnecessary work, clearly non-translatable segments such as standalone numbers, symbols, and URLs are not exported. Repeated segments appear only once, with the number of occurrences shown in the Reuse column.
Step 3: Have the translator or client revise the translation column
Reviewers can edit the Translation column directly, focusing on terminology, tone, numbers and units, and wording accuracy. Columns such as Source and ID, which map text to its source and location, should not be deleted or renamed.
Step 4: Import revisions and regenerate the layout
Import the revised Excel file back into the original project. The system applies only content that has changed relative to the current translation. If the same content was edited online, the online version is retained by default. After confirming the revisions, regenerate the layout file and check the result in preview.
Advanced option: automatic layout reflow for overset text
Because text length varies across languages—for example, English translated into German or Russian can expand by more than 30%—importing translations back into InDesign can often create overset text ("Text Overset," the familiar red overflow indicator).
During file reconstruction, SimplifyAI performs automatic layout reflow. When translated text does not fit in its original text frame, the system can adjust character spacing, leading, or font size to help reduce overset text and save prepress designers time on rework.
Conclusion
Whether you are an in-house marketing team or a professional language service provider (LSP), a workflow of “AI first pass + bilingual Excel review + automatic write-back” can reduce the time and error risk associated with copy-paste and manual re-entry.
If your team already uses Trados, memoQ, or translation memory, learn more about how to choose between Excel and XLIFF review workflows.
In the SimplifyAI workspace, you can upload an InDesign file, complete an AI translation first, and then send the bilingual Excel file to a translator or client for review.