Ever wonder how the subtitling and dubbing process actually works? It is a far cry from the sometimes badly-produced televised kung fu movies from the 80s and 90s that you may remember. As mentioned in our recent blog post on the art of subtitle translation, there's more to this than meets the eye.
Language is a fluid and dynamic means of communication. Historically, translation has been best performed by human beings who can accurately adapt and express this fluidity and dynamism in the face of the logical contradictions and irregularities that most languages present. However, in recent years, “machine translation” (or MT) has started to come into its own, as its once-stoic technology – the realm of 0s and 1s – catches up to human adaptability.
Ora Solomon, vice president of sales and operations at Acclaro, describes how machine translation can complement human translation in an article for Marketing Profs:
1. Human Translation
Definition
A professional linguist (most often, an in-country native speaker) reviews your project and, using guidelines agreed on beforehand, translates it to the language you require. The goal is to speak to your audience in the most natural, effective way. You can expect human translations to be free of idiomatic errors and to flow naturally and fluently.
In Spanish they say, “Lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno.” The good, when brief, is
doubly good. Brevity is considered a virtue in most communication circles. In
the world of translation, however, brevity is even more: it’s a money saver.
The first thing any localization vendor will tell you about the cost of translation is that it's a direct function of word count. The more words your document, brochure, program, app or website contains, the higher the cost for translating it. Rather straightforward, right?
Containing your localization budget through reducing word count at the pre-translation stage requires a challenging time investment on your part, as no one can really perform an “audit” of your resources in your stead. To execute this effectively, you need either to distinguish between must-have and nice-to-have content through a complete content review, or pare down all of your source texts across the board through avid and diligent editing. It would definitely be easier to simply send all of your files to your language partner and hope for the best.
Yet when implemented, this phase of content review will ultimately pay off two-fold: it will save you a good sum of money on translation across all target languages, and it will make your end product better, since content that has been reviewed with a global audience in mind can be rendered more accurately.
Here are a few ideas for reducing your content as you go global with your program or product.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
What are some ingenious ways to do away with words in the context of your product? You may have the ability to substitute appropriate imagery, for example. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Take the example of the Apple iPhone OS. English has the wonderful benefit of offering two practical and short words for the settings buttons: on/off. But in most languages, the translation would occupy the whole width of the phone screen and result in what we call TVA: total visual awkwardness. Here is what Apple did to solve that problem:
Writers these days, whether for websites, software, or documentation, face interesting
new challenges when communicating technical material and product info to a
broad-based international audience. In a recent article for the Content Wrangler, Acclaro President Michael
Kriz offers up compelling
insights and ten useful tips to help you create content for your diverse global
audience.
As we become an increasingly global economy, there is increasing demand on writers — particularly those who work with technical language that describes products and services — to adapt to the changing needs of companies’ customer demographics. When a product is slated to launch in 20 new markets, and over half of the markets require translation of documentation, it completely changes the game for the technical writer. So, to effectively scale a global business, you and your writers should keep a few things in mind.
1. Use global English – For every native speaker of English, there are about three non-native speakers. It’s important that your communication in English is understandable to all English speakers, which means short, simple sentences and no idiomatic expressions or cultural references.
Remember those badly dubbed Pippi Longstocking movies? A generation of Americans will never forget the way her out-of-synch mouth movements made her misadventures seem even more comical.
Successful voiceovers are
nearly imperceptible – they can make you think you’re watching a film in your
own language. Such inconspicuous dubbing isn’t easy. But with the right
localization partner and the right process, you can achieve flawless voiceovers
for local appeal in your target-language markets.
Just follow these five tips
to maximize your studio time, and avoid expensive re-recordings.
1. Determine your voice style. For each language market, do you want to convey happiness, expertise, excitement or professionalism? For example, in the U.S., enthusiasm and hyperbole are standard, but such pep could be seen as overdone in Germany, where a factual, instructional tone establishes more credibility.
2. Choose the right voice talent.
We’ve already written about the importance of a glossary and
why it’s important to create one before 
starting any major translation effort —
whether it be for technical documentation, marketing communications, web,
software, eLearning, or multimedia projects. Now, let’s look at what should be
included in a glossary.
What goes into a glossary?
What should a glossary look like?
A glossary can be a complex database or a simple spreadsheet. It depends on your global reach and the size of your overall globalization efforts. If you are just starting out, you may just want to use an Excel spreadsheet. Then you can work your way up to a more complex database.
Those of you who are new to localization may think that a
glossary is only used for term papers and reference books. You have yet to
discover how this very simple item can revolutionize your daily work life by
sparing you countless redundancies and/or inconsistencies in the original
English, as well as in the foreign language versions of your products and
documents.
Creating a glossary of approved terms in each target language at the beginning of your translation project is essential. It will not only save you time and money (not to mention headaches and sleepless nights), it will also guarantee successful branding of your products in foreign markets.
A glossary (from the Greek glossa, meaning obsolete or foreign word), ensures a consistent style and voice, an accurate rendering of the original text and a level of translation quality that is even throughout. Glossaries are especially critical in the case of technical translations and marketing communications, but should really be employed for any localization project.
YouTube, which already supported two dozen languages, has added four new languages (Croatian, Filipino, Serbian and Slovak) to its lineup, Wired reported last week. The supported languages are supplemented by a script translator that allows viewers to see machine-translated video captions in over 50 languages.
The Google-owned video sharing site was English-only until as late as 2007, when it expanded to Europe, Brazil and Japan, adding a slew of languages (image courtesy of Wired):
YouTube apparently intends to continue this global expansion trend, hoping to add as many as 12 more localized versions by the end of 2010. (Hebrew, which didn't make the cut this time around because of the complication of its bidirectional script, might get another chance.)
When you think of certain brands, you automatically think of high quality. You trust that brand and its products or services. You may pay a little more for it (the $100,000 Porsche, for instance). You may recommend it to a colleague or friend.
Quality can be more than the physical craftsmanship of a product or the expertise of a particular service. It can also be linguistic. Linguistic quality assurance (QA) goes the extra step to make your brand stand out among your competitors in any language. Instead of just getting the general meaning across, with linguistic QA you now have more clarity, eloquence and adherence to your overall brand guidelines. Linguistic QA is a best practice for anything that is translated or localized: documents, advertisements, brochures, websites, multimedia, software — anything. Even the language jumble of the sign above needs linguistic QA!
Professional translation ensures a correct translation, but when coupled with QA, it really makes it shine. If you’ve done your translation internally or through in-country partners, you should consider professional QA to double check that the overall meaning follows the original content, that the brand personality is adhered to, and that the translation is of the highest quality.
The Apple iPad is here. On launch day April 3, 2010, consumers bought a reported 300,000 of these color, touch-screen tablets. It’s still to be determined if it will revolutionize how people read a newspaper or watch a film — but what I really want to know is if it can teach you French.
One of the hypes about the iPad was all the apps that were going to be created for it — mobile apps on steroids. Productivity! Lifestyle! Light saber duels! Nearly 4,000 iPad apps and counting….
The following is a takeaway from a presentation delivered by Acclaro Program Manager Lydia Clarke at the 2010 California State University, Chico Localization Certification Program in San Francisco.
Content creators often do not consider the possibility that their material may one day be translated into another language. Therefore, they often write, organize, and present information for their target audience, whether that audience is English speakers or say, Spanish speakers. There's certainly nothing wrong with this sense of immediacy, but companies do expand into other language markets and should be able to use the same content for these new readers.
Enter translation, and its many challenges! Words and their many nuances aside, one of the most problematic parts of translating content — be it technical documentation, user interfaces, website pages, or marketing collateral — is images.
The good news is that you, as a content creator, can do a lot now to save yourself time (and money!) down the road:
What is multimedia localization? The word "media" covers a lot of ground. It could mean almost anything that's not text, or that doesn't fit into the usual localization buckets (software, documents, websites).
Here are a few examples of media that you might be looking to adapt to other markets:
Before getting started on your project, however, there are few tips that you might want to consider that can save you time and money in the long run.
1. Clean up your files. Define what needs to be localized, remove redundant items and clean up files for easy localization.
The Walt Disney Company is filming a new adventure movie for Indian audiences in the southern dialect of Telugu. The Hollywood entertainment giant will also create a dubbed version in Tamil, another southern dialect, to further broaden its localization efforts, reports the Associated Press.
In 2008, in partnership with Yash Raj Films, Disney released a Hindi animated feature called "Roadside Romeo," which was a huge success. The film used the voices of national Bollywood stars to increase its appeal to local audiences.
The storylines of the films are also adapted to local tastes: simple stories, mixed with singing, dancing, humor, and the "in your face" emotion typical of Bollywood productions, noted Forbes at the time of production.
Smart, fun and useful. Acclaro shares news and tips on translation, localization, language, global business and culture.