With the continuing assault on pricing in the translation – localization industry, we are taking a few minutes this week to ask some pertinent questions. What happened to quality in localization and translation? And how can one get a quality result without exceeding the budget?
Bidirectional support is one of the toughest internationalization (i18n) issues that face software publishers, localizers and translation service providers.
Have you seen offers on the web promising delivering within the day (or even the hour!) the best quality translation at 7c per word? If you haven’t it is not hard to find half a dozen of them online.
In the previous blog titled 5 Most Important Factors in Document Translation, we discussed the factors to consider for document translation before you select a professional translation company. We argued that price, although important, should not be the sole factor in the equation.
On a daily basis our sales team gets requests for quotes where the deciding factor is often based only on price. In a soft economy as the one the U.S. is going through right now, everyone can appreciate the importance of keeping budgets and expenses in check. But should price be the sole factor to consider when evaluating multiple bids?
Imagine you are tasked to organize people in different countries, operating in different time zones, with different cultures and languages, not reporting to you, to participate in what will be a very laborious task. In addition, these people are committed to doing other jobs that normally take up all their work time. Finally, it is very likely that you cannot offer them incremental pay!
One may argue that desktop publishing is a slowly dying art. As technical communicators transition to the use of structured XML tools and writing scripts to automate the creation of instructional help, the art of desktop publishing (DTP) will forever disappear.
By: Ugur Akinci, Technical Communication Center “Enabling Globalization: A Guide to Using Localization to Penetrate International Markets” by Nabil Freij, the President of the localization company GlobalVision International Inc. is a must reference for everyone thinking to market products and services globally.
Some in our industry argue that an in-country proof is not needed after the translation of a product is completed. I can’t disagree more, particularly when new products, staff or relationships are being established. In-country staff possess a wealth of information about the local market and the way products are intended to be used there. They cannot be factored out of the translation or localization process.
We often talk to prospective clients that are interested in localizing their products and are looking at having their international distributors or value added resellers (VARs) perform their product localization.
Our team just finished delivering a large project to one of our clients where both quality and schedule were essential. With localization, the schedule typically drives the need for resources. We apply a sophisticated mathemat…
Technical communicators have influenced the localization industry for many years. The tools they adopt and the processes they follow impact what we do for localization. For instance, in the 90s they adopted RoboHelp and FrameMaker for online help and manuals. Then in the early 2000s some migrated to FrameMaker and Webworks Publisher in an attempt to use only a single-source. Recently they transitioned over to using FrameMaker, Flare, X-Metal and AuthorIT in structured XML authoring mode. The localization industry has had to pay attention to their moves and adopt the tools and processes they adopted to deliver files in all the languages and formats they required.
