When companies create multilingual marketing materials, the text is not always stored in Word documents. Product messaging, packaging instructions, campaign posters, and social media assets are often spread across Illustrator artboards.
Translation teams then face a common challenge: How can you extract all text from an .ai file for translators without asking designers to manually paste every translation back into the artwork?
The problems with manually extracting Illustrator text
In a traditional workflow, designers open Illustrator, select text objects one by one, and copy them into a spreadsheet or Word document. This may seem straightforward, but several problems quickly appear:
- Small text is easy to miss: Warnings on the back of packaging, footnotes, corner labels, and notes beside icons can be overlooked.
- Multiple artboards are difficult to manage: Text across dozens of artboards needs manual identifiers, or it becomes hard to find the correct location when translations are added back.
- Context is missing: Translators see isolated strings without knowing which artboard or layout area the text belongs to.
- Writing translations back takes time: After translation, designers must paste each string back into Illustrator and check its placement and styling.
When a project needs several target languages, this process is repeated for each language, increasing the likelihood of missed or misplaced text.
A better workflow: extract text based on the design file structure
The goal of Illustrator text extraction is not simply to pull text out of a file. It is to preserve the relationship between the text and the original design.
A translation-ready extraction should retain as much of the following as possible:
- Which
.aifile and artboard the text came from. - The connection between source text and translated text.
- Location context for text objects in the artwork.
- The ability to write translations back into a new Illustrator file after translation.
This lets translators work with the text while allowing designers to continue visual review in the translated design file.
How SimplifyAI handles .ai text translation
With SimplifyAI, you can upload an .ai file directly. The system identifies translatable text on the artboards and brings it into the translation workflow.
After translation, the translated text is written back to the corresponding text objects where possible, creating a new Illustrator file. This reduces the need to maintain a separate source-text, translation, and artboard-location spreadsheet, while helping prevent missed strings, missing pasted translations, and text placed in the wrong location.
For design files with multiple artboards or multilingual versions, this workflow can be especially useful for an initial machine translation pass, internal review, or pre-delivery preview.
Which Illustrator files are suitable?
This workflow is well suited for:
- Multi-artboard advertising assets.
- Product packaging and labels.
- Campaign posters and trade show visuals.
- Product graphics with substantial explanatory text.
- Brand assets that need multilingual versions quickly.
If some text has been converted to outlines or embedded as an image, it may not be extracted like a standard text object. In these cases, it is still best to retain the original editable text layers whenever possible.
Conclusion
For Illustrator localization, the most time-consuming work is often not translation itself, but text extraction and writing translations back into the artwork.
If your team is working with a large number of .ai design files, upload them to SimplifyAI to first check which text can be identified for translation, then decide whether to generate translated design files.