One of the items that is often missed when handing off files for translation to your translation / localization vendor are graphics files. Oftentimes, a company will provide flattened images that are not editable, such as .jpg (JPEG) files to their localization vendor. If graphics do not have text in them that requires translation, that's okay.

However, if the graphics do have text in them, your localization partner will need to receive the original, layered, text-accessible graphics source files that were used to create the original English graphics. This allows for translations of graphics text to be inserted in place of the English without the graphics having to be created from scratch. And thus, this saves both signficant cost and time, and is conducive to overall quality and consistency of look-and-feel of graphics throughout your documentation.

If the source graphic file is not available, the flattened version can still be edited but it may take much more effort, and therefore time and cost. Flattened images can be edited in photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop, where the pixels will have to be "erased" so that a text layer can be created over the image. The amount of text in the image and the background on which the text appears are major factors in the effort necessary to localize the image.