Localization Project Management Log

Get localization right, from the bottom up

“Here’s our pet rabbit. Can you change its DNA for us?”

“Nice house of cards. Could you replace the red one in the bottom row with this green one?”

“Good job localizing the Web site. Can you change all instances of usted to tú?”

Has this ever happened to you? It’s happening with one client on a Web portal we’ll soon roll out in Latin American Spanish.

***

In Spanish, there are two levels of address: formal (usted) and informal (tú). Historically, if you’re talking to the king or somebody whose business you want, you use formal address. If you’re talking to your friends or to a small animal, you use informal address.

A few years ago, this was a no-brainer in localization. Most software, Websites and marketing material still used usted because you’re talking to customers and you want to honor them. Trendy sites like AOL.com and terra.com used tú because they wanted to be your friend as quickly as possible.

NAFTA, the Web, immigration patterns and cross-border commerce have brought Mexico and the U.S. so close together that the old rules don’t apply as much anymore. Cell phone companies, auto dealers, even banks are using tú in customer-facing materials. There aren’t reliable rules anymore; the choice depends on the organization’s messaging.

***

We started localization about five months ago, assuming usted. We dutifully created a glossary and asked for in-country review by the customer, a wireless network operator. The customer must have been too busy, so we received feedback from a business development manager along the way. The comments gave us some terminology preferences, but no mention of usted vs. tú.

Now the portal is up in Spanish, and the customer has finally begun to review it. New and changed text is coming back to us with tú. They haven’t asked us to change the DNA of the rabbit yet, but sooner or later the usted and tú fronts will collide and we’ll need to work it out.

The moral: You should have learned long ago to have your customers specify the region for the Spanish (or French or Arabic or Chinese…) they want. Remember to ask them about usted vs. tú as well.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a localization project manager and consultant.

photo credit: bloomsberries

I like writing about the glossary (or terminology list). It connects the soft art of translation to the hard art of business practice. I’ll use the answer I wrote for a paper called “Opening the Black Box, Part I.”

To ensure uniformity of translation throughout the product (and, as the international effort grows, throughout the company), it is a good practice to put in place a glossary, which contains approved translations of key words and phrases. A translation glossary gives the equivalent of the key terms in the target language.

Translation Glossary/Terminology List - Example

The Explanation column in the example is very important for preserving contextual information for the benefit of the translators. Note also that the glossary plays the important role of dictating what should not be translated.

Here are some key moments in the life of a glossary:

1. Client hands off early version of product to localization vendor for creation of glossary.
2. Localization vendor compiles list of key terms, with contextual comments.
3. Client conducts training session for translators and editors (optional, and too often overlooked)
4. Translator translates (or, in some cases, doesn’t translate) into target-language equivalents.
5. Vendor returns glossary draft to client.
6. Client sends glossary out for review by stakeholders most likely to complain about undesirable translations, in order to avoid these complaints once the product has been released. (This is extremely important, and should be performed by in-country partners and co-workers whose livelihood depends on the quality of the translation.)
7. Client returns glossary comments to vendor, who incorporates them.
8. Once approved, the glossary goes to translators, reviewers, editors and client for continued reference.

A typical glossary will contain a few dozen up to a few hundred terms. It’s a big piece of the translation-quality puzzle and it represents the good business sense of establishing terms up front to avoid unpleasant surprises at the end.

“What would Microsoft do?” What do you do when you need to translate according to the terms Microsoft uses?

Microsoft has a long, storied past of localization, and a correspondingly colossal corpus of translated material. Until a couple of years ago, they made just about every string in dozens of their products available in .csv files via FTP for free download, subject to copyright. No doubt that became laborious for them – it certainly was for those of us who tried to keep up with them – so they’ve since switched from making all of the strings available to making 12,000 key terms available in up to 59 languages in a single, 10MB spreadsheet. The file is at www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/MILSGlossary.mspx

The winners in this simplified approach are those linguists creating a term list, or translation glossary, for a specific project that must adhere to Microsoft terminology; e.g., how Microsoft translates “Cross Array Link” in Korean. The losers are linguists who need to know, for instance, how “Completing the Hardware Wizard” or “Windows Security – Verify Publisher” is rendered in Slovak or Pashto.

The term list also takes aim at a long-standing problem with localization at Microsoft (or any large organization); namely, that there was inconsistency in translation among products. While not all translators will agree that these terms are ideal in a given language, at least this is a move in the direction of consistency, and sometimes it’s better to be consistent than to be right. It’s generally easier, anyway.

If you enjoyed this article, you may like another called “Where Do Your Glossaries Live?“

Have you figured out how to add value, even when you don’t get the job?

A client asked us to look into quotations on taking some marketing materials in MS Word and Adobe InDesign into Traditional Chinese. Our preliminary word count was around 15,000 total, and we spent time educating the client on how to deal with all of the graphics that had embedded text. Since they were marketing materials for an upcoming trade show, we put on our best neckties and helped the client think through the project as far as possible.

As we were preparing to analyze the files for a proper quotation and statement of work, I received this message:

“I wanted to let you know our Taiwan office has located a local translator that has quoted us $1800 for this job. Do you think your quote will be a lot higher? If so, there’s no need for you to proceed. Just didn’t want you to spin your wheels.”

We suspected our quotation would be 3-4 times higher than that. What would you do? Would you:

1. Doggedly pursue the business, refusing as a matter of principle to be low-balled?
2. Upbraid the prospect for falling for such a low price?
3. Do nothing, considering it beneath your dignity to reply?

You’d have good reasons for any of these responses, I suppose. I gave it a good, long think over last weekend and replied Monday:

“That is quite low. If price is your paramount criterion, then you’d better go with that quote. In any event, you should make sure it includes:

• second set of eyes (besides those of your in-country reviewer)
• translation memory
• glossary (terminology list)
• desktop publishing + PDFs

Let me know how it goes.”

We in the industry stand to gain nothing by scaring prospects, but since power in the Web 2.0 age seems to come from a delicate balance between giving everything away and keeping your families fed, perhaps our real value-add lies in helping prospects ask the right questions.

Your thoughts?

If you’ve enjoyed this article, you might like another one I wrote called “Why Are You Charging Me For That?”

Don’t take this question too personally. After all, I’m not asking whether you’ve cleaned behind your ears, or behind your couch. But last week I asked the digital question, “Where do your glossaries live?” and this week I’m asking about the state of their hygiene.

One of my client-companies is quite proud (and justifiably so) of the considerable work they did a couple of years ago in building out a 600+ entry glossary in ten languages. They (or their language vendor, really) have hosted it on the Web, with read-only access to any translator who does work for them.

This model of glossary has the inestimable benefits of being universal, up-to-date and centralized – there is only one glossary – instead of being a patchwork of spreadsheets and tables on several different hard drives in several states of accuracy. It’s set up for alpha-listed browsing and search, although the search function is not fuzzy unless you use wildcards, so some translators will not derive full benefit from it and may in fact miss terms.

While managing a sample translation for the client, I wanted to export the glossary to review it all at a glance, so I mentioned that. “Nope. That’s not possible,” the client told me, with more than a hint of pride. “We designed it so that there would be only one glossary in one format in one place. We don’t want it exported or circulated unnecessarily.”

Now, I’m in business to see my clients succeed, but that kind of mindset is just a tempting challenge to me, and as I managed the sample translation I deliberately looked for reasons why a hermetically sealed glossary like this was a bad idea. Naturally, I found one: The client had not cleaned very well behind their glossary.

Several industry-specific terms occur in the sample, and I knew the translators would be obliged to use the glossary. For instance, terms like “drive” occur in various combinations (“link drive,” “offset drive,” “drive mechanics,” “rack-mount drive,” etc.) in the glossary, and as I poked from one entry to another I noticed inconsistencies and contradictions in how “drive” was translated, notably in German. One entry gave “Laufwerk” as the translation, and another entry bore the note that “‘Laufwerk’ is obsolete.”

The online model for hosting this glossary is a good one for several reasons, but it’s not amenable to the healthy, periodic scrub that such databases should undergo. If the glossary were exportable, or at least visible in row-and-column format, these inconsistencies would be easier for translators to spot and address.

Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I’ve written called “Where do your glossaries live?“

The experienced project manager with your localization/translation vendor approaches a new client/project by asking you, “Has this ever been translated before?” Her big goal is to discover whether there’s a translation memory database floating around, to help her translators do their work more quickly and keep your costs low, and her background goal is to find existing documents with key terms already translated and approved.

Smart companies maintain these key terms in a “glossary” or terminology list. Glossaries are far less comprehensive than translation memory because they serve a slightly different purpose: Instead of proposing a fuzzy-match translation for an entire sentence, they serve as a reference for the translators. Good translators know how to find translations for generally accepted terms like “closed-loop servomechanism” and “high-definition multimedia interface,” but if the sales manager in your Shanghai office has already told you how he likes to see the word translated, everybody will be happier if that preference is observed.

So where do your glossaries live?

“Live” is the important word, because glossaries change and grow with time. Most glossaries I’ve seen are in a spreadsheet or word processing document. While that’s better than nothing, it can suffer from decentralization, since updates don’t always make it to everybody involved in the project, and some translators run the risk of using old terminology.

One of my more localization-savvy clients makes its glossary available on its partner portal, requiring a login and password. The php-based application, which is actually hosted by a translation vendor, allows searching in multiple languages. My client deliberately does not make the glossary available for download or export; this ensures that everybody is using the same version with all updates.

I like this model. The assets reside on the client/owner’s site, and the terminology “lives” with the linguistic experts, who can easily modify it. It’s a bit more work for the translator, who would rather have a flat-file document, but overall it serves linguistic interests well. It’s tried-and-true technology built in to most computer-aided translation tools.

What are you doing with your glossaries?