User Interface and localization

"We are Marketing. We own the user interface."

An engineer with one of my clients told me, with some bitterness, that a previous regime had summarized its hegemony over the company's software product with those two sentences. I'll grant you that it sometimes help in a company to know which lines are not to be stepped over, but I'll also grant you that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Most of us don't mind if Marketing dictates the user interface, unless people with our global perspective tell them that something in the UI won't work well when the product is localized and they refuse to accept it.

In this case, the fuss is over an HTML-based UI and help system that lives in firmware in a networking device. The old Marketing guard wanted a tabbed look with labels on the tabs (Connections, Security, Setup, Help, etc.), and the tabs had to be graphics. The graphics are .gifs, nobody knows where the source files are, and we're trying to find an expeditious way to localize the product, including the text on those tabs. (If you're in localization and haven't already faced this situation, I can assure you that you don't have long to wait.)

I've floated some ideas by them that might result in a more flexible approach for future versions of the product. The current Marketing team is not so doctrinaire as their predecessors, but they're not very engaged in this process, either. I offered Ockham's razor: Let's remove the tabs and replace them with hyperlinked text near the top of the page, and the problem will go away. They have yet to reply to that.

I'll give them another week, then make my own arrangements. After all, "We are Localization. We own the rest of the world."