Localization Project Management Log

Would you rather expend or invest? Would your company rather expend or invest?

You walk into a pastry shop, buy a slice of cake and eat it. That’s an expense because it doesn’t last long and you can’t use it to make anything else. You walk into a bank, buy a certificate of deposit and reap interest a few months later. That’s an investment because it has some durability and you use it to make something else (more money).

A new client is testing the waters in Europe and Japan. To appear serious to prospects there, they asked me for a proposal on some multimedia projects they’ve hosted from their Web site. It took lots of phone calls and e-mail to ascertain exactly what they expected back, then lots of phone calls and e-mail to ensure that they had sent us everything we needed to estimate costs for a full, end-to-end solution.

They’re a small company with solid domestic revenues and negligible overseas sales to date, so they felt sticker shock at the $3-4000 per language that this was going to cost. One of their executives tried to think nimbly: “See whether they can just do the voiceovers and give them to us. We can have our in-house editors replace that layer in the media files.”

I don’t mind nimble thinking, and I appreciate her attempts to save money, so I won’t go into the many technical and quality-related concerns that this approach violates, but when I sent an adjusted quote, I wrote, “I understand that you had $1500/language in mind, but the original English media probably cost a good deal more than that, and you’ve likely forgotten what you spent on them because of how many prospects have clicked on them. I encourage my first-time clients to regard this is an investment, not an expense. If you choose your overseas markets and partners carefully, and handle translation and localization correctly from the start, your ROI will not be long in coming.”

Do you agree? Have you spent time trying to convince your company’s executives that good localization practices are an investment, not an expense? What’s your favorite argument?

If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy another one called “Why Localize at All?“

Do you have manuals, resource files, help projects or entire Web sites that you’ve been localizing for several years and through several versions? Have you thought about the “permafrost” in those files; i.e., the sentences, paragraphs, pages and chapters that haven’t changed in ages?

Are you being charged for them in your localization efforts?

In my experience, vendor pricing includes discounts for segments (usually entire sentences or bits of text surrounded by paragraph markers) with high match rates to text that has already been translated. So, a new 30-word sentence at $.25/word may cost $7.50, but a 30-word sentence that does not change at all from one version to the next may cost $.03/word, or $.75.

But why are you charging me for that?

Vendors have different rationales (and they are welcome to post them here) which often boil down to the necessity to “touch” the words in one way or the other: either in engineering unchanged paragraphs into the new manual, or in translation memory maintenance, or in the human editing pass when eyes land upon them. These words are the spare tire of localization, in that they haven’t changed, but they’re still along for the ride, and moving their weight requires some modicum of additional gasoline.

As a localization manager, try explaining that to your boss.

So, if I don’t want them to charge me for the words, or for any words that don’t require translation, what should I do?

• Perform your own triage. Pull out code samples, for instance, which will never need to be translated, and hand them to your vendor in a text file. Ask that they be aligned to themselves in TM so that the words fall out as 100% matched. The translators won’t touch them and you won’t (shouldn’t) be charged for them.
• Move to a CMS. Deploying a content management system is a long-haul solution; but if this is a long-haul problem for you, look into it. With a CMS in place and an interface between your vendor and the system, it becomes easier for you and your vendor to separate matched from non-matched segments. That which is easier, should cost less.
• Give instructions, not words. If you suspect that there have been only a few changes to a 40-page manual, use a diffing tool to find them, write up the changes, and hand them off to the vendor with instructions to charge you hourly for the spot-changes. If the vendor knows exactly what to change where, it eliminates the guess work, the TM analysis, the file preparation and the engineering. This lowers your costs of localizing the book.

You should be able to have a calm discussion with your vendor about these jillions of unchanging words, and arrive at one or more methods for eliminating unnecessary work. Try to go beyond “Why are you charging me for that?” to “What can we do so that you don’t have to charge me for that?”

Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I’ve written called “Why are you charging me for that? – Part 1“

“So, where are we on this localization-thingee?”

Do you get questions like that from upper management? The question demonstrates complete cluelessness about the work involved in creating international versions of your company’s products. Secretly, of course, you’re gratified that it’s on upper management’s radar.

Here are typical steps in a company’s localization-evolution:

1. No Clue – These companies find out the hard way, often by ignoring in-country requests, bulldozing the project through Engineering, shipping poorly localized product, and not figuring out in advance how to support it. The biggest shame here is the lost opportunity to get Engineering on board properly from the start; unfortunately, localization is going to interest engineers only once – the first time – so missing this chance is costly in the long run.
2. Some Clue – Companies with Some Clue designate a localization manager to act as champion (or at least as lightning rod) of the process. A wise investment at this level is in somebody who does in fact know something about localization (or global requirements and differences, anyway); such a person will help the company avoid most of the in-country problems faced by No-Clue companies.
3. More Clue – In time, the localization champion evangelizes internationalization/localization thinking to others in the company. People reflexively contact him/her whenever the word “international” is uttered because they correctly perceive that person as the hub in the international-product wheel.
4. Advanced Clue – This is the Great Engineering Leap. Along with all of the other fires that Engineering and QA put out, they now know it to be a priority to design their products and processes from the ground up for worldwide versions.
5. Total Clue – A company with Total Clue ships multiple languages simultaneously, has happy overseas offices and customers, and probably derives much of its profit from overseas sales. Things do not run on auto-pilot by any means, and the localization team must still crack the whip and pester people, but the entire organization lives with the charter of seeing beyond the home country’s borders: the corporate version of the State Department.

It’s common, by the way, for Sales and Marketing to drive this evolution, since they’re closest to the pain caused by not evolving.

So, tell me: Where is your company on the localization-thingee, where does it want to be, and what do you have to do to help take it there?

Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I’ve written called “Whaddya know? They asked me first this time!”

Have you ever gone to the extent of developing acceptance criteria for a localization vendor’s deliverables? Beyond that, have you ever sent a vendor an acceptance letter summarizing these criteria, and grading the vendor on each point?

After years of my simple handshake-and-phone-call approach to acceptance, one of my enterprise clients asked me to develop and communicate these criteria formally. It didn’t require too much effort, since I knew what I had liked and disliked about the vendor’s performance all along. Here are the points I drafted:

PERFORMANCE

• Responsiveness: You attended all conference calls and apprised me in a timely manner if you were unable to attend. You responded to e-mail very quickly.
• Delays, schedule: You reported only a couple of delays on the project, none of which was more than two workdays in length. In the main, you maintained your schedule day to day and week to week.
• Weekly reports: Your weekly reports were punctual and informative. They helped me to communicate accurately the status of the project to other members of the team at BigCorp.
• Issues, questions: Your process for moving the translators’ questions and my answers back and forth was simple but adequate.

TRANSLATION

• Quality: Preliminary reports show that our customers were satisfied by the translation work.
• Bug fixes: You incorporated feedback from the reviewers and me as we requested.

DELIVERABLES

• On-time delivery: You delivered all files to us in a timely manner. You delivered the final files 2-4 calendar days ahead of the final deadline.
• Project files: After giving us the main deliverables on time, you performed housekeeping on the supporting files and delivered them to us.

Frankly, I left out a few things, like the fact that conference calls were arduous because of their phone system, and the rather attention-getting directory that appeared on our FTP site one morning labeled “Trados_crack”. But the point of the message is to convey acceptance, and it serves that purpose well.

Did I leave anything out? Let me know.

When was the last time upper management was more enthusiastic about localization than you were ready for? Would you like to have that problem? Are you sure?

A colleague at a very large IT company wrote me that he started as localization manager four months ago, with the direction-from-above of taking his division’s products into 5-7 languages this year and twice as many in the next couple of years. Who wouldn’t want a charter like that? Most of us would sell our souls to Voldemort for it.

He’s discovering to his dismay that most of the software hasn’t been internationalized – lots of UI still embedded in code – which will drag out the timeline quite a bit. Instead of managing localization process, he’ll spend the foreseeable future managing architecture, internationalization and product. He was ready to jump on the localization horse and ride it into the sunset, but is now finding out that the horse hasn’t been born yet. It’s parents have barely met, for that matter.

That’s the result of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing: the right hand promises, and the left hand has to deliver. It’s not uncommon in most organizations, but in this case it’s overseas offices and customers who will suffer, as if they weren’t already marginalized enough.

My colleague laments, “This isn’t the 9-to-5 job I was expecting.”

As if.

Are you getting to the point where you need to consider decentralizing your localization project management efforts? That decision point usually comes with growth (more languages, more products, shorter lag-times). Here are some things to consider in distributed vs. centralized localization management models:

• Trying to plant and cultivate this expertise in each group (QA, product teams, release engineering, sustaining engineering) is pretty tough. One prospect appeared to manage things in a decentralized manner like this, telling me that “the car drives itself,” but I have my doubts. I’ve never seen any organization that did it well and robustly without a lightning rod or “localization czar” that ran around pestering people company-wide.
• Frankly, I think decentralization is difficult because, for all but the largest, best funded firms, it’s just plain hard to find and keep that many individuals interested in driving international products. I suppose it could be built into the company’s incentive structure, so that managers understood it was part of their charter to localize, but that wouldn’t guarantee that they would actually care about it, and caring is at the heart of long-term localization management.
• Until somebody really cares about it, most internationalization/localization projects have an out-of-band feel to them. It takes a long time before they feel familiar, and the sooner everybody knows that there’s somebody (besides them) responsible for putting out the Japanese version of the product or Web site, the sooner everybody can get back to work.

For these reasons – and a few others – I counsel companies to dedicate a single project manager , preferably with domain expertise, to as many localization projects as practical, rather than to expect each project manager to handle the localization aspects of his/her own projects.

That model will last a good while in most companies.

This question seems more dangerous than it really is.

You should be asking it at the beginning of your localization lifecycle, because you need to convince yourself and others in the organization that the effort will pay off, or at least that the gamble is worth it. The decision to go global ripples to every department in the company, and some companies in certain vulnerable points in their life are not ready for it.

But you’ll transform the question from, “We shouldn’t localize at all,” to “We shouldn’t localize right now.” So you engage in healthy waiting.

Later in life, after a few rounds of localization, somebody will pose the question again. “The extra revenue isn’t worth it. We’re spreading ourselves too thin. Why localize at all?” This too is healthy questioning. (There’s usually a “Why don’t they all just learn English?” from somebody on executive staff. It’s best to just smile and steer the conversation away from such ratholes of hopeless ethnocentrism.)

At this point in company history, you’ll likely rephrase the question to “Are we really localizing as smart as we could be? How can we do it more efficiently and only for the most profitable regions?” You’ll introduce more efficiency and raise the profile of localization.

Go ahead and keep asking “Why localize at all?” It’s good for you and for your organization. Start worrying when nobody poses the question any more.