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!

Localizing Apps Webinar

We had a webinar about apps localization & translation with Nokia earlier. It’s meant for Nokia Asha developers but provides a lot of general information about app localization as well.

So here it is, finally:

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!

Giving Back – Get Localization and Plan

Today we would like to tell you about a client that is especially dear to us. Since 2011 Plan Finland has been using Get Localization to coordinate their voluntary translation work. We actually started our relationship by offering them a slightly different service, but soon discovered together with the folks at Plan that the best solution for them is to use Get Localization to coordinate all translation activities of their volunteer translators.

But enough from me, now I’ll give the word to Plan Finland’s Lotta Kallio:

Q1. Tell us about Plan!

Plan is an international development organization promoting children’s rights.  Plan has been operating in Finland since 1998. Plan International was founded in 1937. Today, around 30,000 people in Finland support our work. Plan is the largest organization practicing child sponsorship in Finland. Plan has no religious or political affiliations. Plan International works in 69 countries and runs development programs in 50 countries. There are fundraising national offices in 22 countries. In Plan’s world, human rights are respected and children realize their full potential as members of society. In addition to development projects and child sponsorship in developing countries, we also work on a national level in Finland, focus on corporate partnerships, advocacy work and communication.

Q2. Please tell us about yourself.

My name is Lotta Kallio and I work as a Sponsorship communications coordinator here at Plan Finland. I oversee the correspondence between our Finnish sponsors and sponsored children around the world. I also coordinate our office and translation volunteer workers.

Q3. How are you using Get Localization?

I’ve found that Get Localization is a very effective way to coordinate translation work to our volunteers. Documents are mainly Plan’s reports of sponsored children’s communities, overviews, annual reports, area updates etc. and the translation languages are English and Finnish at the moment. Get Localization provides a great way for our volunteers to do work from home, it’s easy to access and user friendly. Also, the translation memory is a great feature when the documents have similarities in structure. Loading the documents is simple to and from the program.

Q4. Do you have translation tips or best practices you would like to share with other NGOs?

Our volunteers have been very pleased with this program. Because the documents are “cut” in smaller fragments, a person can translate a few lines at the time so there’s no pressure of having to translate a whole document in a certain timeframe. I’ve found that this encourages our volunteers to do more translation work than via e-mail.

We want to thank Lotta for taking the time to inform our readers about Plan and their experiences with Get Localization! It’s our pleasure to help.

To all our readers, please check out the Plan website. Maybe it could be something for you too? If you want to know about other ways the localization and translation industry is giving back to society, you can check out Translators Without Borders.

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!