Localization Still Needs You - The Myth of the Global Brand

Will your job go away as the world gets flatter? Not likely, according to an article by Eric Pfanner in the International Herald Tribune (link below).

Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at the market research firm Millward Brown, argues that instead of becoming more alike, people are more eager than ever to assert their differences. And marketers - at least those who want to create global brands - ignore this at their peril.

This approach, which marketers refer to as "global/local," has been around for a while, and Hollis has a vested interest in supporting it.

"The vast majority of people still live very local lives," Hollis said. "By all means go global, but the first thing you have to do is win on the ground," he added. "You have to go local."

As localization manager, of course, your job is to keep your company's eye on the local side of global/local.

Do your execs think that the only thing people want to personalize is the choice of music on their iPod? How about the language in which they deal with you and you deal with them?

One size still doesn't fit all. Nor does one language.

Here's the link to the Pfanner article. Happy reading and happy localizing.

If it isn't broken...break it!

What's the most effective way to bump up your translation costs unnecessarily?

Probably by localizing something that nobody will ever want in a foreign language, of course. But nobody would ever approve an expense like that, so it wouldn't have the opportunity to affect your translation costs.

There's a much sneakier, more pernicious way of wasting translation money: Tinkering with the original text (for example, English).

Suppose you localized your product or documentation from 2002 through 2007. You'd have five years' worth of translation memory (TM) economies and glossary entries going for you, with thousands of exactly matched words that incurred no translation cost from one version to the next. Then suppose that someone decided in 2008 to go in and "clean up" the original English text to make it more "readable" or "user-friendly."

What do you think would happen the next time you handed off this content for TM analysis? Suddenly, non-matches would pop up where exact matches used to be. Among the causes:

• Combining short sentences together
  
• Breaking long sentences apart
• Making stylistic changes to common terms (e.g., changing "phone" to "telephone" or "handset")
• Standardizing disparate terms (e.g., selecting one of "Proceed as follows," "Perform the following steps," "Following is the required procedure" and propagating throughout the documentation)
• Typographical or grammatical corrections
  

You might tolerate these modifications in the interest of improving your product in all languages - not just English - but the sad truth is that you may find that they make no difference in the localized products. You'd pay for words that the translator did not need to touch. This is an unfortunate artifact of the way in which translation jobs are estimated, but the analysis software cannot predict that the changes will make no difference to the translation; only the translator sees that.

Note that re-organizing content should not cost you additional translation money; as long as the sentence is the same (i.e., an exact match), it doesn't matter where it's located in the product.

So, are you better off leaving errors and other undesirables in your original-language content? No. It would be a mistake to let concern for translation cost impede your product improvement effort, like having the tail wag the dog. Still, to the extent you can control it, you should try to avoid purely stylistic changes that make no difference in how your customers use your product. A good editor can make a hundred such changes per hour, not realizing the ramifications on translation costs.

If you learned something from this post, you might like to read Improved Docs through Localization or Getting the Writers to Care about Localized Documents.

Amtrak.com in deutscher Sprache!

This is probably more in the domain of John Yunker, whose Global by Design site focuses on American companies coming out of their americocentric stupor, but I'll mention that Amtrak's site has been localized into Spanish and German.

This is a hot one. Passenger train travel is not exactly all the rage. The network is not expanding noticeably, and even after Antarctica melts, Americans still aren't going to get out of their cars and take a train, except to amuse their children. Why throw marketing dollars at a localized Web site?

Why Spanish? Because hundreds of thousands of Hispanic Americans need to move from city to city, and if they're going to take the train, it's easier for them to research routes and schedules in their own language. On the other hand, the railroads in Mexico, in particular, are a popular joke, and buses long ago displaced trains as the default means of intercity passenger transportation. So it seems that Amtrak sees the demographic potential, but may have some cultural baggage to overcome in attracting this new ridership, not to mention the issue of whether their sector of the Hispanic market uses the Web (yet).

Why German? Because Germans (and Austrians and Swiss) believe in the trains, I suppose. This is even more intriguing than the Spanish site, because it required more research than simply picking up the newspaper and reading that Hispanic buying power in the U.S. will have risen 347% to almost $1 trillion from 1990 to 2009 ("The Multicultural Economy, 1990-2009", from the Selig Center for Economic Growth). The move to German must have involved polling actual passengers and getting hip to the fact that these people not only think in terms of train travel, but also use the Web to research it.

Both Spanish and German sites are more than mere afterthoughts; they seem to be comprehensively translated, several levels deep. Notes:

• They even translated "California" as "Kalifornien" in the state drop-down menus, no doubt as a nod to the governor.
• Don't use accented characters when you enter your name on the Spanish site. The error message telling you what you did wrong and how to rectify it is still in English.
• I don't know which credit card the Spanish- and German-speaking travelers are likely to use, but the only choices are Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Diners and Discover. No debit cards, no PayPal.
  

Sometimes the mechanics of a localization project are less compelling than the story behind it. If you know the story behind the Amtrak localizations - or an offbeat story behind a project you've done - please post it here.

(Blogger's note: Travel between San Diego and Los Angeles by car has lost all of its allure, and I opt for Amtrak whenever I can. I have had multiple pleasant conversations in Spanish with people on this train route, usually people from Mexico visiting family in Southern California.)

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?

Offshoring and localization projects, Part II

Are localization projects, jobs and expertise going offshore, never to return?

Well, frankly, those of us in the industry were offshoring long before it was fashionable. Our projects have been globally distributed, multi-time-zone, polyglot undertakings for a long time, and so the recent hue and cry (in the U.S., anyway) strikes us as inapplicable, the kind of thing that auto workers and steel unions should worry about.

Renato Beninatto of Common Sense Advisory writes, "Don and I just came back from China where we visited several LSPs and several offshore development companies. To answer your question, I wouldn't say that LSPs [language service providers] are losing work to offshore companies. Some LSPs are moving some of their back-office and testing labs offshore, and Chinese LSPs are using language services to upsell testing services. The language part of the business does not seem to have been affected. We will be publishing soon a report on our findings in China. Stay tuned."

The furor also strikes Paul Samuelson, economics writer for Newsweek Magazine, as overblown:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18699042/site/newsweek/
though for different reasons and for different industries.

Still, offshoring is beginning to feel like the new "inconvenient truth." There's no doubt that Indian and Chinese LSPs are gathering steam, and there are almost certainly instances in which prominent, traditional LSPs are losing business to them (see Part IV).

At the same time, though, the pie is getting bigger. The developing world is demanding more content and software in its own languages, and it will require more LSPs to meet that demand. "All boats rise in a high tide," I quoted eruditely to my 14-year-old son last week.

"Except for the ones with holes in them," he sagely countered.

If you're worried about your localization career-boat not rising in the incoming tide, figure out how to get the holes fixed.

Who owns this Localization Project?

It's almost time to ship. Do you know who's running your localization project?

Recently I met with a technology company whose Web-based service is already in seven languages. Non-US revenues are a high percentage of their total, and even though their product is available in both free and paid versions, most customers overseas pay. They take their overseas markets seriously, to the extent that they have an International Product Manager (IPM).

They contacted me about an upcoming push into Asia, and had me attend their weekly engineering meeting. Everyone in the room and on the conference bridge (probably 25 people in total) introduced him/herself, and after the last introduction I paused and said, "Nice to meet you all. Now, where is the localization manager?"

They don't have one, of course, though the IPM performs most of those duties. I rubbed my hands mentally and thought I heard a cash register ringing, until I remembered that they were live in seven languages and doing quite well without a localization manager, thank you very much.

How do they do it?

A lot of the localization expertise resides in the teams, so they told me. Documentation, Web team, Engineering, QA, and Release Engineering all have rather deep, in-group experience that shows in the localized products. That, however, doesn't explain how it all comes together at showtime.

Can you do it without a localization project manager? If so, does that mean that you've done things so masterfully that localization is completely mainstreamed in your organization?

Must be nice...

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.

Why Localize At All?

This question seems more dangerous than it really is.

You should be asking it at the beginning of your localization lifecycle, because you need to convince yourself and others in the organization that the effort will pay off, or at least that the gamble is worth it. The decision to go global ripples to every department in the company, and some companies in certain vulnerable points in their life are not ready for it.

But you'll transform the question from, "We shouldn't localize at all," to "We shouldn't localize right now." So you engage in healthy waiting.

Later in life, after a few rounds of localization, somebody will pose the question again. "The extra revenue isn't worth it. We're spreading ourselves too thin. Why localize at all?" This too is healthy questioning. (There's usually a "Why don't they all just learn English?" from somebody on executive staff. It's best to just smile and steer the conversation away from such ratholes of hopeless ethnocentrism.)

At this point in company history, you'll likely rephrase the question to "Are we really localizing as smart as we could be? How can we do it more efficiently and only for the most profitable regions?" You'll introduce more efficiency and raise the profile of localization.

Go ahead and keep asking "Why localize at all?" It's good for you and for your organization. Start worrying when nobody poses the question any more.