Mr. Bean and Localization

Mr. Bean's Holiday features Rowan Atkinson taking a vacation in France, and running a gauntlet of slapstick all the way from London to Cannes. Most of the humor is infantile, by which I mean that even an infant (or a person willing to behave like an infant (by which I mean "me")) finds it funny, and I observed one bit of localized humor lost on all but the most astute francophone.

Bean hitches a ride from Sabine (he takes ample comedic advantage of the similarity in their names) in her own Mini somewhere in rural France. As they're tooling down a two-lane road, a much more powerful car roars past them aggressively.

Sabine hollers "Espèce de conard!" which means something like, "You ba****d!" and which the subtitle renders as "What kind of idiot do you think you are?!"

Bean, attempting to say the same thing, hollers "Espèce de canard!" thinking he's similarly denouncing the driver. The subtitle renders it as "What kind of duck do you think you are?!"

I suspect that the canard/conard play on words has been used before, but the subtlety here is all the more appealing amid all the blatant slapstick.

If you found it humorous, you can thank your friendly localization manager or translator.

Right hand and left hand in localization

When was the last time upper management was more enthusiastic about localization than you were ready for? Would you like to have that problem? Are you sure?

A colleague at a very large IT company wrote me that he started as localization manager four months ago, with the direction-from-above of taking his division's products into 5-7 languages this year and twice as many in the next couple of years. Who wouldn't want a charter like that? Most of us would sell our souls to Voldemort for it.

He's discovering to his dismay that most of the software hasn't been internationalized - lots of UI still embedded in code - which will drag out the timeline quite a bit. Instead of managing localization process, he'll spend the foreseeable future managing architecture, internationalization and product. He was ready to jump on the localization horse and ride it into the sunset, but is now finding out that the horse hasn't been born yet. It's parents have barely met, for that matter.

That's the result of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing: the right hand promises, and the left hand has to deliver. It's not uncommon in most organizations, but in this case it's overseas offices and customers who will suffer, as if they weren't already marginalized enough.

My colleague laments, "This isn't the 9-to-5 job I was expecting."

As if.

Localization in the news

Have you ever stumbled onto something in the course of localizing a product that was private, or maybe even a bit compromising? Here's a news item from telecoms.com that falls into that category:

This time round, Apple is supposedly prepping its iPhone to be a portable gaming machine, wading into a market already dominated by the likes of Nintendo and, to a lesser degree, Sony.

Although the 'official' iPhone applications market is noticeably void of any games at the moment - mainly due to the fact that Apple has banned third party apps from running natively on the device - some hackers claim to have found tell tale signs that games are indeed on the way.

Apparently, the iTunes localisation code makes some reference to a string asking the user if they want to remove the games in question. Naturally, this gave way to rumours that Apple has had a games developer partner lined up for some time and plans to offer gaming products via iTunes. [emphasis mine]

Some alert hacker (or maybe even a translator) must have lobbed a note about this string into the blogosphere, or otherwise publicly asked the question, "Why would they want to remove games?"

Who says there's nothing proprietary or confidential in software resource files?

Localization - Top 5 Web searches

What is your most frequently used Web search regarding localization? Are there search phrases you check every now and again to see what new results they yield?

Over the last couple of years, I've tuned the keywords on this blog and on our Web site, www.1-for-all.com, for both pay-per-click and search engine optimization. I have a pretty good idea of which search topics bring people to this blog, and here are the top five topics, with my comments:

1. Localization of HTML help projects (Robohelp, CHM, etc.). I can't tell whether people have trouble with this, or whether they're poking around to find out whether they are going to have trouble with it once they undertake it. My hunch is that Robohelp, the dominant product for creating HTML help, either doesn't do a good job creating localized help systems or doesn't do a good job in explaining how to create them. Our experience has been that double-byte localization requires a specifically enabled, separate version of Robohelp, which strikes me as silly, but perhaps Adobe has addressed this by now.
2. How much to charge/pay for translation. Everybody wants to know this. Responding to the frequency of these queries, I wrote an article called "Going Global Without Going Broke" to help people who want a few benchmark figures from which to cobble together a budget. If you're any further along than that, you should just contact a vendor, push your files to him and get an estimate. If you're a translator or want to become one, phone a localization company, tell them what you can do and find out what they'll pay you.
3. Localization project manager/management. I would guess that about half of these are vendors (a.k.a localization service providers, or LSPs) and half are companies with localization needs to fill.
   
4. Localization jobs. Most of these queries come from Ireland. There's a relatively high concentration of localization talent in that country, and perhaps a high rate of turnover as well.
5. What is localization? Again, the frequency of these queries prompted me to write articles called "Opening the Black Box." I'm glad to see people asking this question, because it demonstrates continuing and continuing interest in this specialty. At the same time, however, I notice that some of these queries come from China and India, suggesting to me that the IT shop which has just promised you it can localize your software for one-seventh the price you've gotten from other vendors, is now trying to figure out what's involved in fulfilling that promise.
   

At the other end of this list are the searches we're not seeing: questions we believe people should be asking but aren't.