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If your native language is English, you’re at a minor disadvantage when you set out to learn a new language – you’ve never had to deal with accents. Not the accents that inflect our speech (English-majority regions have plenty of those), but the ones that adorn written words.
Think back to high school, or perhaps earlier… remember your first days of learning a second language? Even if you quit studying Spanish once you’d fulfilled your school’s foreign language requirement, wasn’t there something fun about having to stroke in the á in más, the tilde in niño? Or when you learned to put the special upside-down punctuation at the start of a question or exclamation… ¿remember that? Then came those moments of hilarity when you learned that a missing accent can change a word’s meaning with, well, low results (look up the difference between tengo 20 años and tengo 20 anos, and be thankful for that tilde). If you learned French, you had even more of an adventure, with five accents to contend with. And if you were able to take German, you added a new letter (ß) to your alphabet.
Pretty soon, these new symbols lost their novelty and became frequent nuisances, easy to forget, and liable to lose you a few points on a test if you forgot to pencil them in where they belonged. Your language teacher was right to dock points for that – those accents are in place for a reason!
So why am I mentioning this? If you’re working with TrueLanguage, the odds are excellent that your source language is English, which would place the responsibility for accents and typography in your final documents squarely on our shoulders (though if you are curious about incorporating foreign accents in your writing, you can find some tips here). I’m bringing this up as a reminder, as if one were needed, about the importance of native-language professionals at all stages of a project: translation/proofreading, desktop publishing, editing, review, anything else your project requires. Say you’re typesetting a French translation, but you don’t know any French yourself. As you work, you might be able to follow the general shape of the text, to make sure all the content is there. Yet would you trust your non-francophone eye to recognize that all of the accents were in place, that none were missing?
Take a look at Wikipedia’s Vietnamese home page, and imagine having to worry about typesetting all of those marks and accents yourself. That’s the value of professional native-language resources!
