Passport? Check. Money? Check. Cat sitter? Check. Global SEM strategy? Ch…huh? Planning for a global website launch requires some forethought, much like planning for a trip around the world. Our Top 10 Tips article gives you our suggestions for making the most of your global website launch. From internal code to external user-facing content, we know how to take websites global, and we want to share our tips with you.
Everyone needs a little help sometimes. That’s why no software product release is complete without user assistance and support documentation. And any software release that includes multiple markets in multiple languages will, of course, require technical translation of the help section. User assistance documentation translation is usually is the last step before product release, yet this final stage of the release process is complex enough to warrant a process of its own, which can be costly and time consuming if you don’t plan for it. Here are some of our best tips for smoothing the process.
Our resident globalization architect and localization geek, Jon Ritzdorf (see his Geek2Geek webpage) answers your localization and translation questions. Read on for the most recent Q&A about multimedia localization and how to manage a successful multilingual video project.
Our resident globalization architect and localization geek, Jon Ritzdorf (see his Geek2Geek webpage) answers your localization and translation questions. Read on for the most recent Q&A about externalizing strings using a grep tool or Lingoport's Globalyzer, and what Jon has to say about internationalization.
Our resident globalization architect and localization geek, Jon Ritzdorf (see his Geek2Geek webpage) answers your localization and translation questions. Read on for the most recent Q&A about graphics and tools, and what Jon has to say about them.
Our resident globalization architect and localization geek, Jon Ritzdorf (see his Geek2Geek webpage) answers your localization and translation questions. Read on for the most recent Q&A about graphics and tools, and what Jon has to say about them.
Our resident globalization architect and localization geek, Jon Ritzdorf (see his Geek2Geek webpage)answers your localization and translation questions. Read on for the most recent Q&A about graphics and tools, and what Jon has to say about them.
Our resident globalization architect and localization geek, Jon Ritzdorf (see his Geek2Geek webpage) answers your localization and translation questions. Read on for the most recent Q&A about graphics and tools, and what Jon has to say about them.
When it comes to translation on a budget, less is more, as we saw in Part One of Localization Cost Savings. The more you can reduce the word count of your content, the bigger your savings—25% fewer words, for example, will earn you a no-nonsense 25% translation discount.
So let’s say you’ve already taken a knife to your content; you’ve gotten rid of verbosity, eliminated text repetitions and honed in on the most essential content for your specific markets. How can you shave additional dollars off of your localization budget and finally secure that executive buy-in to move forward with your project?
Launching your software in new languages within global markets doesn’t have to be a “break the bank” proposition. While many companies fear that localization will meet or exceed the costs of their English release, sensible strategic preparation, a little enlightened testing, and a streamlined process can help ensure your software localization project is on time and under budget.
In this post we’ll provide an overview of the top ten tips from our Q4 2011 newsletter article to help you tackle technical translation projects affordably. Taken directly from our experience working with clients on global releases, each tip is designed to minimize headaches and maximize your localization dollar.
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.
At many large companies, all of the various components of a typical localization project — from organization to process to budgets and schedules — are in the hands of a project manager (or PM). This is no small task even when all the pieces fit together well...and when they don't, your typical localization PM has a lot to juggle. If you're tasked with producing localized content at your organization, Acclaro CEO Michael Kriz discusses ten best practices for project managers in an article on Content Management.com, and we've got a sampling of it right here.
Russian, ostensibly full of complicated grammar and vocabulary that can seem unfamiliar to other languages, has gotten a bad rap as far as learning languages goes. With the right techniques, though, it's not as bad as it seems. A little working knowledge of Russian can go a long way, as it is either the primary or secondary language of some 300 million people, according to Wikipedia, a large majority of which are located in growing global economic centers. Susanna Zaraysky demystifies the process and provides some great techniques to get you started. Next stop: Novosibirsk!
If you’re thinking about testing—or even diving into—the waters of the rapidly growing Chinese social media market, now is the time to start doing your research. With more than 400 million Internet users, most of them young, educated, and savvy about games and web socializing, there’s ample opportunity for well-prepared businesses to succeed.
We’ve got a few ideas to help you get familiar with Chinese online channels as you start out, and expand into this lucrative market in a way that’s culturally appropriate. More detail can be found in our full newsletter article.
Managing a far-flung localization team can sometimes feel like governing a small country with five official languages and three time zones. But if you ask yourself the right questions and work with the right localization vendor at the start of your journey, you’re far more likely to choose the best road for localization management. And what is that road? Well, in our not-so-humble opinion, that road is a centralized localization model.
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?
The Acclaro blog entry below is featured today on the Japan Intercultural Consulting Blog. Japan Intercultural Consulting is an international training and consulting firm focused on Japanese business.
Translating content into Japanese presents a variety of challenges, most notably capturing the natural flow and tone of Japanese sentences. In American business, writing tends to be more informal, yet if translated into Japanese, it would seem too casual and possibly even rude. Translating English content, which is more than likely not in the appropriate tone for Japan, into Japanese is challenging, but not impossible. Read these tips to achieve high-quality, natural Japanese translations when working with a translation vendor. Also refer to our tips for preparing for any translation project, no matter what the language.
Our recommendations for translation into Japanese:
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