Slush Feelings

We had a couple of hectic days of Slush last week. Once again, it was a great experience. Big thanks to the folks at Startup Sauna, Aaltoes and everybody else who was involved in the organization of the event! There was a lot more of everything than in the previous year: more visitors, more start-ups, the Jolla launch and more publicity for the whole event.

One thing that surprised me (positively!) was how much more knowledgeable the start-ups were about localization this year. Last year many companies hadn’t thought about localization at all, but this year that was the other way around. Most people we talked to were already doing something or seriously considering it. All services were available in English, but many were also starting out with at least languages of the nearby markets. Great to hear!

That is not only good news for localization services like ours, but also for the development companies themselves. Localization is not something you shouldn’t start doing before your application or service has been around for a couple of years. No, it’s something you can start doing from the beginning, or that you should at least take into account straight from the start, when you start producing code for your application.

By the way: If you are wondering, why the conference is called ‘Slush’, do check out this weather prognosis for Finnish cities from a week ago. Not much sun there!

Weather Forecast For This Week: Slush

We are looking forward to an exciting week, not least due to Slush on Wednesday and Thursday (Nov 21-22) in Helsinki. Last year we had a booth of our own but decided this year to concentrate more on listening to the great speakers (missed them completely last year) and just mingling.

We met some really great people and heard of many fascinating projects at Slush 2011. One of the best things was the positive atmosphere of the whole event and determination that people showed regarding their projects. By now, many of the businesses and ideas from then have developed and grown (yes, we too :)), others might have evolved into something completely different.

Looking forward to even more good stuff this year. See you there!

Performance Updates

In an ongoing effort to speed-up the service, we have today added more extra processing power to the system and at the same time pushed out optimisations especially to the file management side. This means faster uploading / downloading and decreased processing times.

In case you face any problems with performance (or any other matter), please let us know by opening a ticket to our support system at http://support.getlocalization.com. Thanks!

Localization With Crowd And Professionals

Earlier we elaborated a bit on crowdsourcing as a method of quality control. But that’s not the only step the crowd can perform in localization. Here are a couple of thoughts around why you might want to go with another combination of professional and crowdsourced work:

Crowdsourced Translation And Professional Editing

Typical reasons to engage the crowd for  the translation part might be for example:

• Target language doesn’t yet have an established terminology and you want to know what kind of terminology people actually use in their everyday life when using your product.
• Your application has a large and active user base and you know they want to help you with your product.
• You want to engage your users and have them develop the product with you.

With an active and large crowd you are able to produce large amounts of text in a short time. You might easily get several people  working on one language at the same time, continually improving each others texts and producing new translations.

You can also let the crowd agree on translations for new terms and concepts, so that you can be sure the application will speak the users’ language. This does not mean that a professional translator could not capture those terms, but  the professional translator might not represent the target group geographically or demographically, which might lead to something else than the desired tone.

Reasons for still giving editing to professional linguists in the same project might be:

• You want to be as sure as possible that e.g. all grammatical and punctuation errors are gone.
• You might have defined some style guidelines (maybe even a style guide) and want to check that the translations adhere to these.
• Your crowd is not big enough or you don’t know it well enough yet, so that you would feel comfortable relying completely on the quality of their output.

How do I know if a combination of crowdsourced translation and professional editing fits my localization needs? First you should ask yourself if you want to crowdsource. That decision should be determined e.g. by your revenue model, user base and content type. If the answer is yes, then take a look at the above listed reasons for having professionals give a finishing touch. If one or more of them apply to you, adding that phase is worth considering.