By Felicia Bratu
Your company is expanding to foreign markets and you've been
chosen to oversee the localization of your company's web site.
You built the web site and you know all about it: every page,
each navigation button; scripting, coding, applets, cascading
style sheets, etc. But you don't have a clue about the translation
process. At this point, you are doing some research about translation
and localization and may seek some guidance. You need a plan -
identifying possible challenges and implementing the most cost-effective
processes.
Here are some tips that can help you:
Carefully evaluate your business needs and establish
performance indicators to measure your success (or lack thereof).
Most managers these days demand return investment on all marketing
activities. It will be to your advantage to be able to show bottom
line improvements (i.e. online sales in Germany increased 20%
or support calls dropped by 10% after we launched the German web
site).
Some
of the web pages are simple HTML files which can be easily opened
and translated. But with anything non-HTML, the text often has
to be extracted. This category includes all the graphics that
contain text, Flash files, and PDF files.
Do not copy and paste every page of your web
site in a Word file. It is not necessary and can be time consuming.
Even though your translator can download all the files from your
web site, it is still a much better practice to hand over all
the files relating to the web site. Word count and cost estimates
can be very inaccurate if the translator doesn't have all of the
files to work with.
Actually, if you have a dynamic web site, the word counting could
be off by a long shot because of the unnecessary repetitions.
A TM tool keeps all the
translated material in a database and makes it available for any
future updates. Using a TM tool can help you save money, improve
consistency, and speed up turnaround. In addition, working within
a TM tool, tags and script code are recognized and protected during
content translation.
Provide your translator with any available reference material
such as translation guidelines, previous translations and glossaries.
The guidelines can address issues such as what terms should be
left in English, punctuation, adaptation of date/time format,
addresses, symbols, and measurement systems. A glossary is a multilingual
terminology list that defines how abbreviations, product names,
or industry specific terms should be translated. If the translator
is using a translation memory tool, these glossaries can be imported
to ensure consistency.
These will have to be localized as well.
It's in your best interest to send the native PhotoShop and Illustrator
files that were used to create the GIFs and JPEGs on your web
site! Also, some languages such as French and Spanish are often
longer than English. So, you should keep this text expansion in
mind when you create your initial graphics to allow for longer
text. The desktop publishing specialist at your localization company
will keep the background image and will reconstruct the layers
containing text and merge them to make the target language images
for web.
Check the visuals first. Then do some functionality
testing (such as creating and filling out a test form) to see
if any function was lost during the translation process. Check
to make sure that all necessary pages have been uploaded and translated,
all the links are working, and that the translated text can be
viewed properly (your developer should change the character encoding
according to the target language).
In addition, you should perform testing to ensure that your web
site works well on different platforms, operating systems and
browsers at this phase.
Make sure that the translator or agency understands how browsers
work with special characters (diacritics). If your localizer is
working or making revisions on the translated text in HTML mode,
be careful to never enter characters with accents into the code
itself. Certain browsers could display the web page incorrectly.
(the French file for home.html
will be named home_fr.html). When this happens, every link reference
in every file will need to be renamed to point to the right link.
This will be time consuming and it will increase the possibility
of creating errors. Instead of doing this, it is better to store
each language version in its own folder.
Everyone involved
in the localization process should have cultural sensitivity to
avoid offensive content.
Because these are right to left
languages, it is most likely necessary to redesign the layout
(especially when your web site has navigation bars on the left).
Also, the terminology your translators
prefer (however correct or appropriate) might be VERY different
from what your customers are using to find you. You must understand
how your customers search online to effectively achieve high rankings
and good online results. You should do research on what the major
local search engines are and what your competition is doing.
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