When it comes to launching your product in
new languages, translation is only one part of the picture. Your brand lives or
dies with your international customers during runtime, and there’s only one way
to ensure you make a good impression: localization testing. If it sounds familiar, pat yourself on the back, because you have probably seen it before in our top ten tips article.
Before the press releases go out, get your translation project “outside the lab” for a little real-world, in-context experimentation. In this post, we’ll review three of the most important zones for localization QA, and give you an idea on how to get the real deal when it comes to customer perception.
When thinking about translation, we know idioms commonly used in English (like "it's raining cats and dogs" or "lame duck") are difficult to translate. But what about simpler things such as names and dates? As it turns out, they’re not so simple when it comes to software localization, as LinkedIn found out in this post on their website. With languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Russian you must understand not only new character sets, but also date ordering (month/day/year? year/day/month? day/month/year?) and even spacing — in our world, these fall under the umbrella term of "internationalization". Let’s take a proper look at proper names in translation.
Conventional wisdom has it that the best, highest-quality translation method is human translation and editing (as opposed to a rules- or statistics-based machine translation tool, à la Google Translate). Certainly when style and nuanced meaning are important, there’s really nothing that takes the place of the human mind for intelligent, effective, accurate localization. But there’s also a great tool that aids our linguists during translation, adding the power and speed of computers to the fluidity and contextual smarts of the human cerebellum.
That tool is translation memory, or TM, and it helps us create better consistency both within and across projects for our clients. Translation memory can also lower costs and speed up timelines for greater efficiency.
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.
The First Three Steps
of Software Localization
Now that you’ve decided to enter into the rich global software market (after internationalizing your product, of course), what’s next? Well, it’s a fascinating – and fairly complex – process. You’ll definitely want to partner with a localization company that’s skilled and experienced in adapting software to make it easy to use and appealing to your future customers around the world.
Let’s take a look at what goes on behind the scenes at your vendor as they localize your software. We’ll sketch out the first three steps below. And if you’re serious about your pending software localization project, we invite you to read our more thorough explanation here, complete with all six major steps.
Step
1: Preparation and Analysis
The first step is to identify the source files that contain the localizable
text, zip them up and send them off. Your source files may be in formats such
as java properties files, .net resx files, traditional windows resources, xml
or even just text or table formats. Your agency will prepare them for
translation, carefully locking down the non-translatable code to ensure that
the localized software functions exactly as it does in English.
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.
If you’re developing, selling, or
marketing web-based software, standard desktop software, or mobile 
apps, you’ve
probably already heard about internationalization, and you know why it’s
important. If not (or if you’d like a quick refresher), read on.
Internationalization is the process through which you enable your software to handle the language and conventions of your target global markets. Internationalization wipes your product’s slate clean of language bias and removes the assumptions of a “default” culture.
Why is it so important to internationalize your product?
Once upon a time,
a chicken and a pig met and decided to open a restaurant that served only the
best ham and eggs in the land. The pig would supply the ham, an assignment she
took quite seriously as the ham would come literally off her own back. The
chicken would supply the eggs, naturally without the same sense of sacrifice as
our friend the pig.
This charming fable is often used to explain the characters involved with agile software development, with its continuous software releases, self-organizing teams, and fluid team assignments during sprint times.
Scrum masters and
facilitators, dev team members, and product owners are the pigs, with a lot of
skin in the game. Vendors, customers, and managers are the proverbial chickens,
who can 
continue their normal, day-to-day lives.
To understand how localization plays into agile software development, let's imagine that our chicken and pig will soon be opening a restaurant in Mexico that serves chicharrones and huevos.
How can they localize their product for the new language market in a way that makes sense? What questions do they need to answer ahead of time? And what role will each play in the process?
Read on for our quick take on the question of how to get your software localized when developing via the agile model. And get the whole story in this full-length article.
World-ready has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Interested in learning how to take your software global by making it world-ready? Join us this Thursday for a complimentary software localization webinar and take your first step towards tapping into new international markets.
The global software market today is valued at $272 billion. Europe (key languages include French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese) generates 36% of global revenues, while 22% is generated by Asian-Pacific markets (key languages include Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog and Thai). How can you get your software into these lucrative, international markets?
Our webcast will break down the internationalization and
localization processes into bite-sized, manageable pieces perfect for the
amateur or “localization newbie”. Consider it akin to Software Localization
101. If you have the desire to go global but not a clue as to where to begin,
this is a must-see presentation for you.
Through a series of basic steps, we will highlight the best way to approach the process of internationalizing your software and then adapting it to new foreign cultures. From initial preparation to linguist/cultural adaptation and finally testing/QA, we will demystify this seemingly convoluted process.
Computers across the globe speak the same language – a dialect composed solely of zeros and ones - but we humans make numbers much more complicated. If you are in software and have global ambitions for your program, sooner or later you will have to tackle international treatment of numbers.
Whether
dates, financial figures or something as simple as the time of day,
global-ready software must accommodate different linguistic protocols for handling
numbers. The earlier you approach this
process in your software development cycle, the more money you will shave off
of your production costs..jpg "Software Localization Locale-Awareness")
Let's take time for example. Did you know that there are time zones with half hour increments? New Delhi is currently 10 ½ hours ahead of New York. Time zones in Europe are more standard but time is told differently there than it is in the U.S. 15:30 would seem like a ratio in the States (i.e. there are 15 children and 30 people total on the bus) but in Italy, this number would be interpreted as a time of day: 3:30 pm.
Take today’s date as another example: February 14th, 2011 (Happy Valentines Day!). Here are three different ways to transcribe this date, according to country:
USA: 02/14/11
France: 14/02/11
Japan: 11/02/14
Getting time and date to display correctly in each language market is essential.
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.
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.
If you saw an arrow on upper left side of your browser, you'd think it means "go back," right?
Not if you were looking at it from the viewpoint of a speaker of a language that reads from right to left, such as Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Urdu, Hebrew, and Yiddish.
These languages are often referred to as "bi-directional" languages, or "bidi" for short — even though they really only run in one direction. Writing begins on the right-hand side of the page and concludes at the left. However, numbers are generally written left to right, and text written in other languages (English, French) maintain their left-to-right status, so the final text really is bi-directional.
So what does this mean for your localization efforts?
Below are some takeaways on bi-directional language markets from today's webinar on The Basics of Software Localization. (In case you missed it!)
sense in left-to-right placements, such as the "Back" and "Go" buttons in a browser, will have a different (often exactly opposite) meaning in bidi languages.The following are some useful snippets from a webinar on The Basics of Software Localization that will be presented on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at noon ET / 9am PT by Acclaro's own Jon Ritzdorf.
Software localization is more than just a seven syllable term; it's a complex, important process you need to go through to make your software useful in new language markets.
And working with all the different resource formats, linguistic construction of strings, and user interfaces can be mind-boggling. Luckily, there are few things you can do to help — not hinder — the translation process.
Continue reading for three simple but helpful tips to simplify the software localization process.
Anyone who has ever released a software product to international markets knows that it is no walk in the park.
There's a complex (but necessary!) process that has to take place before your translation agency can confidently deliver those final foreign language versions of your software.
Many companies fear that such a thorough process equals high cost and loss of control. What they might not realize is that this is actually an opportunity to help control costs.
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