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The Global Market: Translating and Localizing
October 29, 2007
By Lingo Systems
An excerpt from "The Guide to Translation and Localization: Communicating with the Global Marketplace" (Lingo Systems, Copyright 2006. Printed with permission.)
Your executive management finally made the commitment to sell your company's products to international markets and you were just given the responsibility for managing the localization process. This is an exciting time for your organization, and a significant challenge for you.
Localizing your products is a huge opportunity for your company. When done correctly, it will dramatically expand your markets, increasing both revenues and profits. Your company will also develop strategic and tactical international experience that will be invaluable in the future.
So how do you identify the many options available for localizing your products or materials— and how do you select the right one for your company?
It is time to define the scope of your project. To ensure that your expectations are met, accurate and realistic goals for timeline, cost, and quality must be made prior to project start; and you must decide which two of these variables are most important. Once you have a clear idea regarding what is needed, where you want to go—and when you need to arrive—you will be in a great position to discuss project planning with localization providers. Find out what services they offer, how much time they will take, and how much the localization will cost.
During analysis and planning, keep in mind that localization is a team sport. Most projects are relatively complex affairs that require numerous specialized resources, each functioning to provide unique and closely interrelated contributions.
The following provides a brief summary of the different options you can select to translate your materials. Although not an exhaustive list of all possible alternatives, it does cover most of the common and obvious ways to localize written materials into your target languages. As you will see, you have many options for translating from Albanian to Zulu…and everywhere else in between.
Localization Option: Acquaintance or Family Friend
• Characteristics: This is someone you know who happens to speak or has studied the target language.
• Benefits: Very low or no cost
• Limitations: Not a localization professional; Limited capacity; No QA steps; No tools; No process; No technical expertise; Extended timelines; Consistency and quality are probably poor; High risk of missing deadlines; Hidden costs; Updates are time consuming
• Considerations: Speaking a foreign language does not qualify someone as a translator and you frequently get what you pay for.
Localization Option: Bilingual Employee
• Characteristics: A bilingual employee is someone in your company who speaks the target language.
• Benefits: Low out of pocket cost and he or she may have subject matter expertise
• Limitations: Not a localization professional; Limited capacity; No QA steps; No tools; No process; Timelines uncertain; Consistency and quality are likely poor; High risk of missing deadlines; Hidden costs; Updates are expensive
• Considerations: Competing responsibilities at work, availability, and using in-house resources to review the final deliverable is highly recommended.
Localization Option: Overseas Distributor
• Characteristics: A foreign distributor, agent or representative's translation "cost" may be negotiated as part of overall sales agreement
• Benefits: Low out of pocket cost, may have subject matter expertise and someone else is responsible for project
• Limitations: Not a localization professional; Limited capacity; No QA steps; No tools; No process; Extended timelines; Consistency and quality may be poor; High risk of missing deadlines; Hidden costs; Updates are expensive
• Considerations: Everything should be negotiated "up front" when the distribution agreement is prepared and you may lose control over content and quality. Ownership, copyright, and IP issues are all a concern. Unauthorized changes might be made and go undetected and content consistency between different target languages can be difficult to maintain.
Localization Option: Individual Translator
• Characteristics: Independent contractors that specialize in one language are often locally available.
• Benefits: Offers easy access and a quick turnaround on small projects
• Limitations: May not have translation memory and other sophisticated tools; Limited capacity; Longer timelines on larger projects; No independent QA (if any); Quality may be an issue; Updates can be expensive; May have no DTP capability; One language pair only
• Considerations: For small, single language projects, this might be the right solution. Expect to provide a lot of project management support for ongoing single or multiple language translation efforts. But, with only one linguistic step, quality may be substandard.
Localization Option: Full-Service Multiple-Language Vendor
• Characteristics: These organizations are dedicated to providing a broad range of linguistic services.
• Benefits: Localization professionals; Unlimited capacity; High quality and consistency; Aggressive deadlines can be met; Multiple QA steps; Sophisticated tools, TM's; Technical expertise; Updates are quick and cheap; Proven process; Any number of languages; Project management provided; Full range of localization services
• Limitations: Can be overkill for projects with extremely limited scope
• Considerations: Use the right resources for the right job. Outsourcing localization allows you to focus on what you do best.
Who Does the Translation?
Let's begin with the end in mind: how do you want your target audience to perceive your company in the marketplace? Is so-so good enough? If you command a premium price by offering the best product, can you afford to have second-rate documentation—in any language? Similarly, if you value being first to market with a new product, is it worth saving a few dollars on localization, but taking an extra couple of weeks to release it?
When delivering a fully localized product, it should not be apparent to the end user that the content they are reading or the product they are holding has been translated into their language from another. The fact that your product was originally created in English (for example) and then localized into the consumer's native language should be totally undetectable. A properly localized product should have the look and feel of having been created specifically for the target market.
If you want to produce well-localized products, then a few of the options listed above can be eliminated from your consideration. In most cases, using either machine translations or non'professional resources such as bilingual family members, acquaintances, or co-workers, will not produce consistently accurate, stylistically natural, or professional quality localized content.
The use of locally based, single-language translators can be an effective solution for small projects with one target language. This option works best when translating from English into a common language (so that it is easy to find a linguist), the formatting is simple (such as Microsoft Word), subsequent updates are unlikely, timelines are flexible, and projects are infrequent. As the volume of material and/or the number of target languages increases, the limitations of this approach will become increasingly obvious. Keep in mind that with single-language translators, your management and coordination load will increase exponentially as the number of target languages grows. Furthermore, the efficiency and cost savings gained through the use of a dynamic, multi-step localization process and sophisticated localization tools (discussed in Chapters 4 and 6) will become more important as well.
Domestic vs. Overseas
You might be tempted to use your overseas office to localize your product. They speak the language after all, so it should be easy, right? The temptation is even greater if you have an in-country subsidiary or distributor offering to do the translation for you. While it is true that these options may be the best solution in some cases, it can also lead to other problems:
• Less control from headquarters,
• Difficulty in project coordination and communication (if nothing else, the time zones will be an issue),
• Unauthorized changes to the content,
• Risks to schedule, and
• Incorrect translations (these people are likely not professional translators).
When you send your materials to an overseas office or distributor, you create an opportunity for them to modify both your content and message. The in-country team may have different priorities from your US based team resulting in changes to branding, use of terminology, and perhaps features that have been disabled or removed from the US version.
Unfortunately, you might not become aware of these modifications until a problem arises or someone translates the in-country translations back to English.
Stories such as these can be avoided by choosing the right people for the right job. In most cases, the best result is obtained by hiring a professional localization resource for translation and then using your in-country representatives for terminology list development and final review of the localized content. This strategy enables you to coordinate the localization efforts centrally, while encouraging your overseas partners to buy in on the final product.
Your final choice is between hiring individual translators or a full-service localization vendor to manage all of your localization efforts. The considerations here involve time, quality, budget and the need for value-added services. Do you have the time and staff to hire and manage translators and assess the quality of their results? A full-service vendor can provide you with all the resources necessary to receive high quality translations on time and on budget, reducing your need to be involved in the day-to-day execution of the project.
As you consider all of the available options, let your project goals lead you to the best solution.
For a free copy of "The Guide to Translation and Localization," visit Lingo Systems at www.lingosys.com.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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