Stages in your company's localization-life

"So, where are we on this localization-thingee?"

Do you get questions like that from upper management? The question demonstrates complete cluelessness about the work involved in creating international versions of your company's products. Secretly, of course, you're gratified that it's on upper management's radar.

Here are typical steps in a company's localization-evolution:

1. No Clue - These companies find out the hard way, often by ignoring in-country requests, bulldozing the project through Engineering, shipping poorly localized product, and not figuring out in advance how to support it. The biggest shame here is the lost opportunity to get Engineering on board properly from the start; unfortunately, localization is going to interest engineers only once - the first time - so missing this chance is costly in the long run.
   
2. Some Clue - Companies with Some Clue designate a localization manager to act as champion (or at least as lightning rod) of the process. A wise investment at this level is in somebody who does in fact know something about localization (or global requirements and differences, anyway); such a person will help the company avoid most of the in-country problems faced by No-Clue companies.
   
3. More Clue - In time, the localization champion evangelizes internationalization/localization thinking to others in the company. People reflexively contact him/her whenever the word "international" is uttered because they correctly perceive that person as the hub in the international-product wheel.
   
4. Advanced Clue - This is the Great Engineering Leap. Along with all of the other fires that Engineering and QA put out, they now know it to be a priority to design their products and processes from the ground up for worldwide versions.
   
5. Total Clue - A company with Total Clue ships multiple languages simultaneously, has happy overseas offices and customers, and probably derives much of its profit from overseas sales. Things do not run on auto-pilot by any means, and the localization team must still crack the whip and pester people, but the entire organization lives with the charter of seeing beyond the home country's borders: the corporate version of the State Department.
   

It's common, by the way, for Sales and Marketing to drive this evolution, since they're closest to the pain caused by not evolving.

So, tell me: Where is your company on the localization-thingee, where does it want to be, and what do you have to do to help take it there?

Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I've written called "Whaddya know? They asked me first this time!"

Localizing the bad breath indicator

You know you've been in this line of work too long when you look at every innovation and wonder, "How are they going to localize that?"

China and India may have the growing numbers of cellular subscribers, but Japan and Korea are winning the race for edgy wireless applications, as the Associated Press/NewsEdge article cited below underscores. Still, I wonder how they'll localize it...

DoCoMo's prototype phone gives users fitness check
It can take your pulse, check your body fat, time your jogs and tell you if you have bad breath. It even assesses stress levels and inspires you with a pep talk. Meet your new personal trainer: your mobile phone.

The prototype Wellness mobile phone from Japan's NTT DoCoMo targets users with busy lives who want a hassle-free way of keeping track of their health, according to company spokesman Noriaki Tobita.

I applaud this novel use of mobile technology. Life sciences and telephones are snuggling up together in many other ways, and this strikes me as a good next step in the evolution.

But how do you localize the bad breath sensor?

I don't think they'll be able to do it correctly from Japan; it will require a lot of in-country research. What constitutes bad breath in Japan may be a breath of fresh air in Idaho, and vice versa, and it would be hard to get it right working only from the source country.

Can Trados handle that? What extension does a bad breath profile have: .bbp? How do you qualify translators for it?

"It's with you wherever you go, like a portable personal trainer," Tobita said.

Does every country have personal trainers? Do they do the same thing in every country? Will I be able to tell them to go away in my own language, and have them obey me?

The Wellness phone, developed by NTT DoCoMo and Mitsubishi Electric, also asks questions to assess stress levels, and offers advice.

Now that's nice. Are the questions the same in every country? I would bet that the definition of "stress" varies widely from culture to culture. I've wandered into markets in other countries that were so boisterous and nerve-wracking that I didn't even want to buy - let alone sell - there, but what struck me as panic was just day-in-the-life commerce for those people.

DoCoMo, Japan's biggest mobile phone carrier, has not set a release date or price for the Wellness phone and has no immediate plans to sell it overseas.

That's just as well; we localizers need a little more time to think this one through.

Full article http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?id_article=5956

Market Requirements for Localization

What good is all the market research if your product doesn't support the locale, and if Engineering can't get it to support the locale?

As product manager, you're pleased with your product's global reach. You've successfully localized for the low-hanging fruit (other Latin-based character sets like Spanish, German, even Nordic), and your product and Web site makes customers happy all over the Western world. You have established robust processes for:

• researching the needs of each foreign market
• making those needs an integral part of the product requirements
• working with Engineering on timetables for support of the needs
• working with QA to ensure the engineering work can be adequately tested
• releasing in foreign markets and enjoying success in them

Now talk turns to Asian markets, and multibyte enabling of your product and Web presence. You meet with Engineering and, as they've done for the European languages, they assure you that their code is, or will be, clean, and that you'll replicate in Asia the success you've had in Europe. Everybody nods, and it's just like Euro-success again.

But what if it isn't?

As product manager, you want to do your usual, excellent job of identifying market requirements and writing up the intelligence so that Engineering knows what the product needs to support. You'd better scratch a little harder, though.

1. How is Engineering going to validate the product for multibyte? Peer review of code? Bring in an internationalization engineer? Pseudo-translation? You can't just take their word for it; you have too much at stake.
   
2. Can your Web team create a staging environment and test cases close enough to what the production environment will be like?
   
3. Has QA done a good job in flushing out bugs in your other localized products? Look back at the bug reports from German or Finnish; did they really find many problems? Did they all get fixed? Do you know for sure that they're testing under production-caliber conditions and on production-caliber testbenches?
   
4. Do you really need to launch in Japanese, Korean and two versions of Chinese at the same time? Can you adopt a phased approach? Which market can give you the best support as you're enabling your product? (Hint: It's often Japan.)
   

This is the localization-equivalent of getting your ducks in a row. After you've done all the work of finding out what the market requires, you'd better be sure that the product you want to sell them really will perform as you claim.

Engineering, this is not business as usual. This is Asia.