Writing Content for Localization

Localization in any organization doesn’t limit only to translating and adapting source texts and other materials to a target market. A good and also cost-effective localization process starts earlier than in the moment when the developers send texts to translators. It naturally contains all necessary technical steps, but we’ll skip them this time and focus on the translatable texts themselves and what you can do to make them efficient from a localization point-of-view.

Many of these tips are quite general so they will help you improve your original texts too. They have been written especially with UI, help and support materials in mind – writing for your landing page might be a completely different ballgame but many of the rules apply there too.

Fluent and Correct

Would you trust a linguist to do code for you? I wouldn’t either (and I’m a linguist). Don’t put too much trust in your developer’s linguistic ability either.

Software and other web content are nowadays mostly written in English, which often is a good choice for localization and translation purposes, as the most translators around have English as one of their source languages. But other languages are used too.

Whichever your writing language of choice is, make sure the texts are well written. If your own or your developer’s English is not that good, have the texts edited by someone whose knowledge is more solid. “Engineering English” might create misunderstandings for your users, and those misunderstandings will get multiplied in localization.

Consistent Terminology

Stick to the terminology you choose and make everybody who is writing content also aware of it. This also means not using one term for several concepts. This might in many cases leave the translator wondering which of the concepts you’re referring to – and even get yourself in trouble when you want to mention those two concepts in the same sentence. Put a system in place to manage and spread terminology in your organization.

Reuse

At school, you learn that you shouldn’t be overly repetitive when writing, so you don’t make the reader bored. This is mostly true, I don’t want to argue with your elementary school teacher, but when writing software texts, repetition is your best friend. And this goes for basically any help and support texts too – or anything you write with localization in mind.  Identify parts of text that appear in many places and don’t rewrite them. The commonly used localization tools identify what has been translated earlier and you can usually have those parts translated automatically. The more similarities the new texts have with old ones, the less their translation costs. Repeated terms and structures are easy for the translators.

Using the same terms and structures also makes things easy for your user: they will be more familiar with different parts of the UI and have a more fluent experience.

Be Concise

Don’t write overly long texts unless you have a true motivation for that. English is often shorter than many other languages, e.g. German translations tend to be around 3o% longer than English texts, so don’t aim at filling all available space already in the English version. Other than that, concise texts are mostly user-friendly, too. You don’t want your users to leave your page because of texts that take ages to read and are difficult to understand, right?

Localization cost is almost always directly tied to text length, so this point is also directly linked to your bottom line.

Text in Graphics

If you want to make localization easy, embed as little text as possible into graphics. Each time you localize texts that you have as graphics means manual labor, which means more costs. Each time you add a language you need to update all graphics manually.

Cultural References

Funny slang words can nicely spice up a text, as will idiomatic expressions. And make you sound like someone who really masters the language. But at the same time, they make localization more difficult and might even be nearly impossible to translate. For translators, there are ways to get around that, but you don’t want to make translating more difficult and error-prone. The same goes rid of jargon and metaphors, you need to get rid of them.

A Final Pointer

Being customer centric pays off in localization too: if a text is optimal for a user in your own language area, it probably is easy to localize.

Photo by Thomas Lefevbre.

Cloud, Crowd, and Professional Translators

Stas Kalianov – Localization Manager at Schneider Electric – spoke at the GALA conference in New York in March about the role of translation agencies in software localization, and about who are the most important people in this workflow.

Through a mix of technology, their internal crowd, and professional translators Schneider Electric has achieved a safe and robust process that gives them both lower costs and more user-friendly translations.

Listen below to how they achieved this with the help of Get Localization and how they chose to leave unnecessary steps out of the process (this re-recording of the presentation has been previously published by Stas Kalianov).

Personal Language

Research states that even newborns can recognize their own mother tongue, the language they have heard already before they were born. In the end of 2012 this was confirmed by a study at the PLU in Washington. It is actually quite astonishing that we have this kind of a sense for language so early on in our development. The way a newborn identifies sentences of her mother tongue might not be identical to how we grown-ups do it, but how they do it doesn’t matter, most important is that the special relationship is already there.

The same process might happen at the other end of our lives, but the other way round: Alzheimer’s patients might lose their ability to speak other languages than their mother tongue. We might forget all other languages we have spoken for years and perhaps mastered close to perfection, but the mother tongue stays with us.

So what do we do with this information? Maybe not that much in every day life, unless you work within geriatrics or are a language teacher. But this is yet another indicator of how important the mother tongue is for each one of us, how deep the connection to our primary language lies within ourselves. However, this is not something we would necessarily be aware of. Some of us might be more comfortable with speaking for example about professional topics in English than in our native language. Or we might consider ourselves even bilingual despite having learned a language only later on in their life. But deep down these newer languages won’t be so close to us as our mother tongue(s).

Then what, is all of this important to you? Well, for one you can take it for granted that merely understanding your message doesn’t guarantee that it will stick with your users. Common Sense Advisory’s research shows that people are also more inclined to buying from websites that speak to them in their mother tongue.

One of the ways to better attract users and make them stay longer on your website or use your app is to talk to them in the language that they have the longest lasting relationship with. And for most people on our planet, that language is not English.

Get Localization helps you talk with your clients by providing an easy solution for managing software localization and ordering professional translations.

Autumn is Conference Time!

 

This autumn we’ll again be heading out to visit a bunch great conferences. Here are a few places where you can find us in the next couple of months:

elia Networking Days in Tuscany (October 6-7), where Jari will be speaking about agile and lean in localization.

Web Summit in Dublin (November 4-6)

Slush in Helsinki (November 18-19)

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Meet Fiverr – World’s Largest Marketplace for Services

Today we got the chance to talk with Fiverr‘s Oren Ben-Ami about how they handle localization.

Q1. Tell us about Fiverr!

Fiverr is world’s largest marketplace for services, starting at $5. For example, if you are launching a website for a small business, you can go to Fiverr and order services to help grow your business, such as website creation and design, logo design, or even a video testimonial. The Fiverr community of buyers and sellers is far-reaching and diverse, including everyone from college students to professionals and housewives to senior citizens. On our site, you can find over three million services offered (known as Gigs®). Fiverr is a privately held company founded in 2010 with headquarters based in New York. I am part of the amazing Product team based in Israel.

Q2. Please tell us about yourself.

I came to Fiverr from MediaMind where I managed the localization process for our web-based platform (for Japanese and Spanish). At Fiverr, I assumed the role of Localization Manager and am responsible for the localization of the Fiverr.com site. My position at Fiverr is much more challenging, since it’s not just the user interface that is translated, rather, it’s supporting user generated content in various languages.

Q3. How are you using Get Localization?

Fiverr is split up into two areas, the user interface and user generated
content.

•  The user interface uses external files to display all the content on the site. The majority of the files we use are called YAML files (with the .yml extension). We also have a few JavaScript files (with the .js extension). First, it was my responsibility to validate all the English texts in those files. Once I felt comfortable with the English, I upload all the files to the Get Localization platform. Since we have a very large seller-based community, our co-founders Shai Wininger and Micha Kaufman suggested to have our own community translate the site. It’s in our seller’s interest to participate in this project as it can increase their offering to a wider audience.
•  The user content is the actual services that sellers offer. Once the user interface was translated, the sellers just follow the instructions in their language and create the service that they want to offer. Currently, we translated one language and are working on a few others.

Before we start with our next language, we want to integrate with
Get Localization’s API to make the process more automated.

Q4. Would you have localization tips or best practices that you would like
to share?

One of the most important tips is to make sure the English is written correctly in your files before you upload to Get Localization for the translators. Also, you should use the comment area within Get Localization for certain strings. For example, we had some strings that needed an explanation for context, so users know how to translate. We also have some texts that we want to leave in English or that we want to change just for a specific language. The comment area is very good for these types of issues. It’s also a good idea to have someone validate the translations. We were lucky enough to have some Fiverr employees join our Get Localization project and either translate texts or validate existing texts. The advantage that the Fiverr employees have is that they can sit with me and see the context of the translations and we can change it instantly.

Kymmypops – one of Fiverr’s top rated sellers

Thanks Oren for sharing insights into how Fiverr is getting localized!

iTunes Connect During Christmas

We’re well into December now and the holidays are just around the corner. All you iOS devs out there, remember that iTunes Connect will be unavailable from December 21 to 27. There’s a lot of downloading going on when those Christmas presents have been opened, so be early with your submissions as you don’t want to miss out on this traffic.

Take these schedules into account even in your localization plans. If you want to maximize your chances of getting downloads in non-English speaking areas too, there’s still time to get your apps translated.

Hidden Costs Of Localization

When you think about localization costs, what is the first thing that to your mind? Did you just say translation prices? You are not the only one who would say that. Sometimes that might even be true, but let’s consider a more likely alternative.

We have come across localization projects, where the actual translation cost is somewhere around 10% of the cost of the whole project (and no, I’m not exaggerating). It doesn’t take that advanced math to see where the possibilities for biggest cost savings lie in those cases.  To be honest the ratio of translation and other localization costs is usually not quite this extreme, but would most likely surprise you anyway.

What are those other 90% of costs then? Those costs can e.g. be related to various project management tasks and handling different file formats. Of course, you can’t take away all of that, but for sure some of it.

So here’s a short checklist for you. If you recognize some of the below tasks as something you or your colleagues often do in localization projects, then you have an idea of what hidden costs of localization are:

• Copy-pasting texts from your resource files to various file formats for translation and then again translations from various file formats to your resource files
• Sending emails to translators to check how much they have translated
• Converting your files to different formats
• Getting charged by translation agencies for converting your files to formats used by the translators
• Receiving several Excel worksheets with queries from translators

The key to getting rid of these hidden costs? To put it simply, a thought-out process and tools that are focused on you, not only the translation service provider. Lean localization is not a myth, but something most organizations can achieve by taking a critical look at their old habits.

Looking Forward to a Busy Autumn

Over here the weather is getting colder, but the conference season is getting hotter. We’ll be keeping busy and here are a few places where you can find us in the coming months:

Web Summit in Dublin (October 30–31)

tekom-Jahrestagung 2013 in Wiesbaden (November 6–8). Check out our presentation about Crowdsourcing in the Localization Process and our stand in booth 442 in Hall 4.

Slush 2013 in Helsinki (November 13–14)

Nordic Translation Industry Forum in Stockholm (November 21–22). We’ll be presenting on the second day about ‘Lean Approach – Better Customer Service’.

Looking forward to meeting lots of interesting people and hearing a bunch of killer presentations! Get in touch with us if you would like to exchange thoughts about localization, start-ups, your app, the weather in Finland – or anything else.

See you there!

Meet Innova

Today we’ll continue with short presentations of some of our awesome clients and meet Mika from Moscow based Innova.

Q1. Tell us about Innova!

We publish MMO games such as Lineage 2, Aion, PlanetSide2 among others and design iPhone based projects. If you have ever heard about DigitWar and Creativium they will be one of them. We also offer an online cinema store ayyo.ru and invest a lot of effort into the development of our online gaming platform 4game that lets you download and launch titles directly from your browser. There are currently around 250 employees all hugely committed and passionate about their work. Our offices are located in Luxembourg, Moscow and Yerevan.

Q2. Please tell us about yourself.

I am Mikael Geletsyan and have been in a Product Manager role for 4game from the inception of the project. I care deeply about each of our efforts and try my best to hear out any great idea that can add value to our project and take it on board. I make sure every detail, everything that ends up in front of our users’ eyes gets our best attention.

Q3. How are you using Get Localization?

We have been using Get Localization to support the multi-language availability of the gaming platform 4game. The program feeds us with all the texts on the website, emails and the game application. Currently we are maintaining Russian, English and German and Polish languages. We further plan to offer our users Korean and Portuguese versions. The implementation of Get Localization into our routine was quite smooth as it supports PHP Array, the most suitable format for us. That coupled with API allowed us to entirely and easily automate the integration across all our localization processes.

Q4. Would you have localization tips or best practices that you would like to share?

Here’s my tip: use Get Localization not only to translate texts but also to edit and copywrite them already after their publication. Just sign up your translators, editors and copywriters and you will see the synergy it will produce. We are already ripping these benefits.

Thanks for taking a few moments to chat with us, Mika!

Meet Any.DO

This time we’d like to present to you Any.DO, an app that was recently listed by Business Insider as one of the hot apps right now. We talked with Yoni Lindenfeld, Any.DO’s VP of Engineering.

 

 

 

 

Q1. Tell us about Any.DO!

At Any.DO we focus our efforts on building simple yet effective productivity tools with a big focus on mobile platforms. Our award winning To-Do application was launched in November 2011 and since than has been downloaded by millions of users. The application has been listed as one of the best apps for 2012 by Apple and has been featured a couple of times in Google play. Our vision through our set of products is to help our users get their things done in smart contextual ways. We are building all kinds of smart tools (some of them yet to be released) to make this vision come true.

Q2. Please tell us about yourself.

I am one of the co-founders and the VP of Engineering here at Any.DO. I come from a technological background and take care of the entire development efforts of the company. Our localization process was

first based mostly on professional translators, making it a time consuming and expensive process. I was looking for an alternative service that will allow us to leverage our big community of users to help us localize our products faster, cheaper and to more languages.

Q3. How are you using Get Localization?

We have been using Get Localization for a few months now, and the results are amazing. We already got more than a hundred translators on the system translating our products and adding new languages that weren’t supported yet. We still can’t base our entire localization process on the community but hopefully as more and more translators join we will be less and less dependent on professional translation services.

Q4. Would you have localization tips or best practices that you would
like to share?

My biggest tip would be to try and get as many translators to the system as possible – our way to do it is to actively approach our most dedicated users suggesting they become a translator. We also wanted a better way to access our group of translators so we created a Google group for all of them so we can announce new releases of the app that requires translation (this works great – maybe in the future this will be a part of the Get Localization service).

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks Yoni for sharing your experiences with Get Localization!

Please check out Any.DO or why not support them by signing up for translations.