Best Practices Areas in

Internationalization/Localization
Daniel Goldschmidt
Angelika Zerfaß

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Agenda
• Globalization – Internationalization –Localization
• Internationalization
– Software
– Documentation
• Tools and Technologies in Localization
• Managing Localization

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 We are not going to talk about:
• Crowdsourcing
• Machine Translation
• Agile localization
• Managing teams
• Standards

• The conference program covers those topics

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Globalization –
Internationalization –Localization
(g11n, i18n, l10n)

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Globalization
Internationalization GERMAN

Localization FRENCH
CHINESE
LOCALIZATION
Adapting software and
JAPANESE
accompanying materials to
suitPORTUGUESE
target-market locales

INTERNATIONALIZATION
Engineering of a product to enable
efficient adaptation to local requirements

GLOBALIZATION
GLOBALIZATION
Expansion of marketing strategies to
Expansion of marketing
address regional strategies
requirements to
of all kinds
address regional requirements of all kinds

Berlin, June 8th 2010

Costs that are generated in one place become visible in
another.

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Globalization
Expansion of marketing strategies to address regional requirements of all kinds

IMPLICATIONS:
• International market research
• Prioritize local markets through business case analysis
• Development of separate business cases for emerging markets
• Product planning with serving of diverse markets in mind
• Tracking of revenues by locale
• Extensive liaison with foreign sales offices and resources

Globalization is a mind set as much as a task set.

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
Engineering of a product to enable efficient adaptation to local requirements

IMPLICATIONS:
• Removal of cultural assumptions (such as date formats)
• Implementation of support for global norms (such as language character sets
or accounting procedures)
• Writing/designing with an international audience in mind

Internationalization is an expansion of product capability to be local-generic.

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Localization
The process of adapting software and accompanying materials to suit a target-
market locale with the goal of making the product "transparent" to that locale,
so that native users would interact with it as if it were developed there and for
that locale alone.

IMPLICATIONS:
• Language and character set support
• Support for various format settings such as:
– decimal delimitation
– time/date display,
And other such norms
• Conformance with locale-specific technical norms

Localization imposes constraints on a product’s regional applicability.

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Localization
• Success
Product appears to be developed in the target market
• Failure:
We can easily notice that the program was adapted

Berlin, June 8th 2010

Internationalization

Products

Berlin, June 8th 2010

Internationalization

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
• String Externalization
• Collation (Luz Vs. Llama)
• Normalization (Ü Vs. U¨ , ç Vs. c ̧ )
• Numerical Format (10.5 Vs.10,5)
• String Length (Redo Vs. Wiederherstellen)
• Date / Time format (01/07/2006)
• Calendars
• The first day of the week (Monday? Sunday?)
• year length
• Week numbers (ISO? Other?)

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
• Encoding (Unicode, S-JIS, BIG5, Latin-X etc.)
• Shared messages
• Bi-Directional scripts
• Fonts (Unicode, Vertical vs. Horizontal)
• Color schemes (http://finance.cn.yahoo.com/_
• Segmentation (the Japanese example – no white spaces!)
• Alphabets (Traditional vs. Simplified)
• Morphology (how to perform search in Hebrew, Russian?)
• Decompounding (how to perform search in German?)

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
• Politics (Judea and Samaria? Palestinian Authority? occupied
territories? Which City is the capital of Israel?)
• Time zone (Midnight? Where? When?)
• Paper sizes (A4 Vs. Letter)
• Measurements (Inch, CMs)
• Cultural issue (the OK gesture)
• Casing (Turkish uppercase of the Latin lower case (i) is ”İ” )
• IDN: www.‫דניאל‬.com
• Functional Localization

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
The i18n and l10n are a mixture of:
• Technical Issues
• Cultural Issues
• Political Issues
• Linguistic Issues
• Esthetic Issues

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
The three layers approach:
• Transportation (handle with care sticker)
moving data from A to B
Usually not locale dependent

• Application
doing something with the data (e.g. sorting, searching casing, date/time
format etc.)
usually locale dependent

• Display
Localization readiness (resources externalization)
usually locale dependent

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
ROI of internationalization:
• Reduce total engineering
• Reduce localization costs
• Maintenance & consistency
• Translator productivity
• Testing & re-testing

Early i18n, better but not guarantied ROI

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization
Adding the
possibility to set
Adding a way the steering wheel
to attach on the right side
things to a
mobile phone
so that it can
be used in
Asia

Berlin, June 8th 2010

Internationalization

Documentation

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Internationalization of
Documentation
• One style does not fit all
• Text and graphics / paper size
• Provide whitespace for text expansion during localization
• Marketing material cannot be translated but usually has to be
re-created in the target language to be effective
• Renault Slogan
– Germany: Creáteur d'Automobiles
– UK: Cars for you

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Germany Japan

Multilingual Workflow
22
Management
Text and Graphic
When text is
separated by a
graphic, the
translator cannot
use a translation
memory system
effectively.

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Text Expansion
• Expansion rate per language
• Source text pages should leave enough space for translation

Multilingual Workflow Berlin, June 8th 2010

24
Management
 English
Font size 10

German
Font size 10
Text expands

Chinese
Font Size 10.5
Text decreases

Multilingual Workflow
25
Management
Tools and Technologies in
Localization

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Tools and Technologies
• Control of terminology in authoring process
– Up to controlled language for use with machine translation
• Translation Tools
– Translation Memory System
– Terminology Database (term check in authoring and translation
environment)
• Interfaces to project management systems
• Interfaces to content management systems
• Use of standard formats (TMX, XLIFF…)
 Tools
• Most solutions focus on one specific area of the process
– Select tools that already have an interface with each other
– Create your own interfaces
• Content creation and localization belong together and should
be seen as inter-dependent, not isolated processes

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Technologies
• Standard formats for
– exchange of translation memory data (TMX – Translation Memory
Exchange format)
– exchange of terminology data (TBX – Termbase Exchange format)
– file format-independent localization format (XLIFF – XML Localization
Interchange File Format)
• They don't solve all problems, but the most pressing ones

Berlin, June 8th 2010

Managing Localization

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 The Traditional Process
Leveraging

Content Preparing Effort assessment

providers

Linguistics
assets: Translating
TMs
Terms
Content Glossaries
Repository
Content
providers

Reviewing

Packaging and
delivery
Updating
Linguistics
assets Berlin, June 8th 2010
 Project Phases
• Kick off meeting
– Touch on a all aspects of project, size, timeline, number of languages etc.
• Analysis of source material
– Outline potential L10n/I18n issues with source code, documentation…
• Scheduling and budgeting
– Based on size, timeline, number of languages etc. schedule resources, quotes,
• Terminology setup
– Create glossary leveraging existing glossaries, adding additional terminology
• Preparation of Source Material
• Translation of Software / Documentation
– Translation, editing and proof-reading (TEP) of software
• Testing the Software
– Testing of software for functional, linguistic and cosmetic defects
• Screen Captures / DTP

Berlin, June 8th 2010

 Communicate
– The Project Manager is the central point for all
communication
• client PM
• client market centers
• product developers / product designers
• authors
• Translators / proofreaders / reviewers / editors
• testers
• Designers / DTP
– Timely communication on process, problems and
suggestions for solutions can greatly impact the success of
a project
 Thank you

zerfass@zaac.de
daniel@rigi-ls.com

Berlin, June 8th 2010