Translation non-savings, Part II

Again I ask: How far will you go to improve your localization process? If a big improvement didn't save any obvious money, would your organization go for it?

I selected a sample of 180 files. In one set, I left all of the HTML tags and line-wrapping as they have been; in the other set, I pulled out raw, unwrapped text without HTML tags. My assumption was that the translation memory tools would find more matches in the raw, unwrapped text than in the formatted text.

I cannot yet figure out how or why - let alone what to do about it - but the matching rate dropped as a result of this experiment.

	Original HTML Formatting and Tags	Unwrapped, unformatted text
100% match and Repetitions	65%	51%
95-99% match	9%	14%
No match	9%	15%

This is, as they say in American comedy, a revoltin' development. It means that the anticipated savings in translation costs won't be there - though I suspect that the translators themselves will spend more time aligning and copy-pasting than they will translating - and that I'll have to demonstrate process improvement elsewhere. If I can find an elsewhere.


True, the localization vendor will probably spend less time in engineering and file preparation, but I think I need to demonstrate to my client an internal improvement - less work, less time, less annoyance - rather than an external one.