Language Assistance Services → Written Translations → Fonts

Fonts Used by the LASU Translation Team

The Translation Team uses specific fonts when producing documents in various languages. For most languages based on the Roman alphabet, Times New Roman is the standard font, but most other fonts are supported. If the font used in the original English document is available on the Translation Team computers, there will be no font substitution required in producing the translated document in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, Indonesian, or Haitian Creole (Kreyòl).

The fonts for other high-frequency languages can be found in the following table. This list is not exhaustive, but is meant as a guide for troubleshooting font issues.

Language Preferred Font; and Other Options
Amharic Abyssinica_SIL, GF Zemen Unicode, Any Ge'ez unicode font
Arabic Traditional Arabic, Times New Roman, Arabic Transparent, Arial, Simplified Arabic, Any Arabic unicode font
Bengali Vrinda, Any Bengali unicode font
Chinese PMingLiU, MingLiU, MS Gothic, MS Song, MS UIGothic, NSimSun, SimHei, SimSun, Any Chinese unicode font
Farsi Traditional Arabic, Times New Roman, Arabic Transparent, Arial, Simplified Arabic, Any Arabic unicode font with Farsi character extensions
Hebrew David, Times New Roman, Aharoni, Arial, David, FrankRuehl, Levenim NT, Miriam, Narkisim, Rod, Any Hebrew unicode font
Hindi Mangal, Arial Unicode MS
Japanese MS Mincho, MS Gothic, MS PGothic, MS PMincho, MS Song, MS UIGothic
Korean Batang, BatangChe, Dotum, DotumChe, Gulim, GulimChe, Gungsuh, GungsuhChe
Russian Times New Roman; most fonts that work with the Roman alphabet also have a Cyrillic range of characters that will work for Russian, but not necessarily for all languages that use extended Cyrillic alphabets
Tigrinya (*) Abyssinica_SIL, GF Zemen Unicode, Any Ge'ez unicode font
Urdu Traditional Arabic, Times New Roman, Arabic Transparent, Arial, Simplified Arabic, Any Arabic unicode font with Urdu character extensions
Vietnamese Times New Roman; MS Arial Unicode; although the Vietnamese writing system is based on the Roman alphabet, one must use a unicode compliant font with the full range of Vietnamese letters and tone marks; several common fonts do not work well with Vietnamese

(*) Tigrinya is also spelled Tigrina or Tigrigna

Online Font Resources

A large variety of fonts, many of which are available for free, can be found at Wazu Japan's Gallery of Unicode Fonts.

Information on the writing systems and fonts for various languages can also be found at the Omniglot - Writing Systems and Languages of the World website.