Putting More "Sim" in your "SimShip"

How are you doing on your simultaneous shipment ("simship")? This is a common term in the industry that refers to releasing your domestic and localized products at the same time. Is your organization getting closer to simship? It shouldn't be getting further from it.

What measures have you put in place to reduce your time to market for localized versions? It's never easy to pry finalized content from writers and engineers in time to have it translated, but that's the dragon that most of us have to slay, so we focus on it a lot. How can we peel off content and get the translation process started sooner?

In the same way that eating lightly 5 times a day keeps you from getting really hungry and eating voraciously 3 times a day, we've found that handing off smaller bits of content even before they're finished keeps us from having to panic when somebody calls for a localized version.

We manage projects for a client who has the advantages of lots of sub-releases (3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.1.5) between main releases (3.1, 3.2), and few overseas customers who want the sub-releases. (They also have the disadvantage of lacking a content management system that would make this much easier.) Even if your situation is not an exact match, you'll find that some principles apply anyway.

• The biggest nut in the product is a 3500-page API reference guide in HTML. (Most products have a big, fat component that dwarfs all of the others.)
• One month before each release, we assume that any new pages are about 95% final, so we hand them off for translation.
• By the release date, we know whether we need to release a localized version of the entire product or not. If so, we proceed to hand off all of the rest of the product for translation, knowing that there will be some re-work of the new pages handed off a month before; if not, we hand off only the changed pages.
• Thus, we almost always have pages from the API reference guide in translation. If we need them for a release, we have a lot of momentum already; if we don't need them for a release, we put the translations into our back pocket and wait until it's time for the next localized version.
  

This costs some more money than normal because of the inevitable re-translation that goes on, not to mention the hours refreshing the localization kit, and preparing files for translators. But this cost is acceptably low compared to the look of anguish on the international product manager's face when we have to say, "It will take about three months to finish the Korean version because of all of the change since we last localized it."

We also need to assume that, sooner or later, there will be a request for the product in certain languages. If business conditions change and the new translations never see release, then the effort has been wasted for those languages, but that's a normal business risk.