Rubric - Newsletter

WELCOME TO THE RUBRIC NEWSLETTER

Hello, and welcome once again to the Rubric newsletter, where we bring our Better Localization Experience to your in-box. As always, this edition provides both business and technical insights into your localization processes. We encourage you to forward this newsletter to anyone interested in localization topics. If you are receiving this newsletter from a friend, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter; you will receive your copy as soon as it is published.

In This Issue:

"Our [Rubric] account representative has been responsive and helpful and has instilled in us a sense of welcome relief in Rubric's ability to service our translation needs."

Russ Foy
Senior Technical Writer,
Chordiant Software

RUBRIC NEWS: Recent news about Rubric and our customers.

BUSINESS — In-Country Localization Experts: Using in-country localization experts is not a luxury. It is essential to meeting the expectations of your foreign customers. In this article, we share why this matters so much, and where the extra value lies.

TECHNICAL — Testing, Localization's Achilles Heel: Many people in the technology business do not understand how testing is part of the localization project. Rubric shares with you why this is, what the testing points are, and how we make localization testing a better experience for you.

RUBRIC NEWS

Rubric and Powerway: Making ASP models global: Rubric helped drive Powerway.com's Web-based workplace for collaboration on product development processes into international markets. See how localization expertise applies to ASP businesses and web sites.

IN-COUNTRY LOCALIZATION EXPERTS

by Ian Henderson, CEO, Rubric

In-country means expertise

Effectively localizing your products is essential to opening up new markets: the investment you make in creating new country-specific releases will be repaid many times over through new and repeat customers.

Ultimately, quality of the product is the key buying criterion for most people—not only the quality of the functionality it offers, but also how that functionality is provided to the user via the user interfaces. Accordingly, when you are localizing your products, nothing matters more than the quality of the localization experts involved.

At Rubric we work exclusively with in-country localization teams. This article explains why we do so, and why this approach benefits you.

Ian Henderson
CEO, Rubric

Why local experts matter

Let's start with an example. Would you entrust your localization project to a company that promised that its "translators are well experienced and very perceptive of cultural essence"? Perhaps not.

This badly phrased statement (an actual quotation from a recent email we received) immediately makes one suspicious. If a localization vendor cannot write their own promotional materials in basic English, the company's localizations can't be very good either, and they aren't likely to be "perceptive of cultural essence." Indeed, you would be entitled to suspect that they are incapable of selecting the optimal local references or idioms when translating your work. Ironically, in the case of our example vendor, they have recognized the requirement, but have not met it.

At Rubric, we know that our in-country localization teams are experts—not merely able to translate text into their native language, but to convert source language idioms, images, and concepts into their local equivalents. Their translated passages will read like a text that originated in their home country. Our in-country staff also expedite contacts with governmental and other national organizations (such as standards committees) to obtain needed technical information.

This is very different from the work of an expatriate translator—one who now resides elsewhere than their country of origin. Such translators rapidly lose touch with changing usage, idioms, slang, and new words or expressions.

Slang, idioms, and ever-changing languages

Familiarity with their language also means that our localization teams know how best to render references or idioms when translating. Aside from simple step-by-step instructions, direct "word-for-word" translations are always ineffective, because the meanings and nuances of the source language are ... well... lost in translation.

For example, the German expression "Vieraugenprinzip" literally means "four-eyes principle" in English. But that translation would be the wrong one. IT security professionals use this German expression to mean "a level of security that requires two people to independently authorize an action" (and speaking of nuances, let's not forget that "four eyes" is English slang for people who wear glasses). The German phrase that expresses the concept of "security requiring independent confirmation" is handy and snappy—and it is the localizer's challenge to find an equivalent in other languages. The localization expert would have to be savvy enough not to be fooled by this expression's apparent (but false) similarity to "unter vier Augen" which means "secret". Rubric's localization teams are experienced, sophisticated, and linguistically current due to their in-country status.

A picture is worth 1,024 words

Localization expertise is not limited to words—it also covers graphics and other forms of non-language communications. You invest a lot of effort in designing icons and other images that help the customers by making your products more intuitive to use. But localization staff who are not resident in the target region may not take into consideration substitutes for your foreign markets. Take, for example, bats (the flying mammal, and not the stick used in baseball). Bats are good-luck symbols in Mandarin Chinese, but may evoke fear and thoughts of gothic horror in Western Europeans who were raised on vampire movies. Rubric's in-country localization teams can advise on appropriate icons and images for their language, based on your text and/or your current imagery.

Apart from our Translation Memory (TM) tools and our quality management procedures (which use project-specific, customer-approved glossaries), Rubric has another major strength in concise localizations: we always attempt to use the same translator for every project and every revision/release. Rubric provides these translators with new texts in the context of the materials they translated last time. This precaution ensures product consistency from release to release. Your products will be translated in the same way, using the correct terminology, consistently across product groups and releases. Your customers will not get the impression that your products are inconsistent, which they surely would if several different localization teams worked at different times on your products and releases.

How in-country reduces your costs

Rubric's in-country localization teams offer the added benefits of cost-effectiveness and flexibility. Our overall operating costs are minimized because we avoid keeping large teams of in-house translators based in one or more central locations. Naturally, we pass these savings on to you.

And herein lies one of the odd secrets of the language services industry: most firms have tremendous fixed overhead for in-house staff that must be made productive—regardless of how well or poorly they serve you. Indeed, firms may well assign translators to your project based on availability rather than suitability. You pay for that overhead and may get inferior translations in the bargain.

There is another facet to Rubric's flexibility. Not only does Rubric use the optimal number of appropriate experts to complete your project, but we also select them to minimize the time they need to complete the project.

Take for example a recent project where Rubric localized some online help text. The content included resource strings used for an installation wizard. The in-country localization teams delivered translated texts to the London-based project manager, who collated them and transmitted them to a software engineer in New Zealand. Due to the time difference, the software engineer was able to compile the help files and create the installation wizard while the rest of the team was off-duty, and return them to the linguistic QA teams for checking the very next morning (their time). This around the globe, around-the-clock capability expedites your projects and gets your products to market faster.

Consistency through project management

However, it is Rubric's project management expertise—touched on above—that extends the effectiveness of our in-country localization teams with the following advantages to you:

Repeatability: Whenever possible, we use the same project manager for all of your projects. The project manager knows the localization team from previous work and can tailor communications to expedite your projects.

Central contact for all localization questions: Imagine how much time could be wasted if several in-country localization teams noticed a mistake or inconsistency in the source text, and they all queried it? Or if some did not notice it, causing their translation to be incorrect? Our project managers collate queries, get the answers from the person you nominate, and then pass them on to every team member, ensuring optimal efficiency with minimal cost, and little chance of error.

Facilitated client/localization team communication: Localization is not a black-box discipline. It requires communication between all parties. Rubric project managers do more than simply ship client work to localization experts. Rubric project managers are your hotline to the localization teams, ensuring that the translation you get is the one you want. Our project managers comb through both the mundane details—such as the terminology you want the localization teams to use—and also more subtle points, such as the impression you want the product to make in the localized languages (i.e., do you want localized texts to be snappy, with short, terse instructions that leave gaps, or do you want them to give details that "hold the user's hand" while they take their first steps in using a computer?)

What it all means

Rubric's experienced project managers and in-country translators form teams of experts who guarantee that your localization projects run smoothly and efficiently, that localized texts are returned to you on time, and that their work contributes to the acceptance of your products. Above all, your customers in the target countries will enjoy high-quality products and documentation that truly suits their needs. It all adds up to a better localization experience from beginning to end.

TESTING—LOCALIZATION'S ACHILLES HEEL

by Guillaume Duprey, Testing Manager, Rubric

Testing is essential to software development. Testing your localized software is essential to the overall localization process.

Getting localization of technology right is important in ensuring that a high quality product can be shipped in a timely fashion at a reasonable cost. In order to strike the right balance, you may choose to outsource part or all of the testing process. Selecting those parts of testing that can be outsourced will depend on a number of factors:

Guillaume Duprey,
Testing Manager, Rubric

Hardware restrictions. Your application may require hardware prototypes that are in short supply (new printers, laptops, or custom-built hardware). This can be a difficult obstacle to overcome.

Turn-around time. The pressure to release product quickly is relentless. Consolidating localization work can reduce time to market. For example, outsourcing the translation but doing localization testing in-house is likely to take longer than assigning both of these tasks to your localization vendor. The reason for this is that shipping files to and from a vendor adds overhead and delays to the overall process.

Security. Is it possible to extend your internal security processes to an external organization? All products we work on are of a highly sensitive nature, and thus Rubric has developed compatible security practices. Question your vendor before committing to a project with them.

Labour cost. In the last couple of years the cost of testing has dropped sharply. Based on cost arguments alone, it is increasingly difficult to justify keeping localization testing staff in-house. Be wary of the myth that because testing staff "are there anyway" that internal testing "cost nothing".

Time to transfer knowledge. Your application may be complex or highly configurable. The time taken to transfer product knowledge may be out of proportion to the amount of testing to be done. For example, one Rubric customer has a 4-week introductory course on how to use their application; however, the testing time required is a mere week. Training a vendor to test the localization of this product would be cost-prohibitive.

But other factors can affect your choice in this matter. This particular customer is expanding the number of languages in which their product is available, and accelerating the number of releases. Together this means their original decision to keep testing in-house is no longer as cost effective as before.

There is no single answer to the question of how much localization testing to outsource—it is highly dependent on your product and the surrounding factors.

Sadly, the scope of testing and the subsequent results can vary widely when you decide to outsource part of localization testing. Poorly communicated expectations are the typical culprit. Every localization vendor performs different levels of testing by default. Therefore it is crucial that you understand and document what you expect from your localization partner. This avoids unpleasant surprises from vendors who lack the technical capabilities to meet your needs, but who take on your project anyway.

Having decided on outsourcing, a number of factors determine which parts of testing you want to outsource and how extensive this testing should be:

Platform testing. If, for example, your product works on Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, do you want to test every language version on every version of Windows, including various service pack levels? Your budget will quickly balloon if you choose to test every permutation.

Integration testing. The product may integrate with SQL server, Oracle and Sybase. Do you test the localized versions against all three? In order to contain costs, consider first determining the most popular databases in each language. Your Japanese customers may have a preference for Oracle, while German customers might predominately use SQL server.

Functional testing. Your source product has been stress-tested for use by 10-5,000 concurrent users. Do you need to load test the language versions too?

Character support and other internationalization issues. Will your application accept all German characters? What constitutes a German character? The € (euro) symbol probably needs to be included. Is the € (euro) symbol also to be included in the testing of the Japanese or Korean versions? The ° (degree) symbol is supported in the ANSI (Europe) and Shift-JIS (Japan) code pages, but not in the Korean code page.

User Interface testing. This is the type of testing most usually associated with localization. The issues you are hoping to eliminate are those of text clipping, hot-key conflicts, untranslated text, incorrect spelling, and use of gender.

Problems can arise when you decide to split the testing work between yourself and a vendor, as each party may have different ideas of what falls into each category of testing.

Let us assume that your product works in conjunction with Microsoft PowerPoint and you decide to do the integration testing yourself. Does this mean the localization vendor can test the localized version of the application against the English version of MS PowerPoint?

Another example might be data sorting and searching functions. Does this fall within the area of UI testing or functional testing? Testing if non-domestic zip codes or telephone numbers work could equally well be classed as UI testing or functional testing.

The point herein is that it probably makes little difference to your vendor how you define the project, but you need to be clear as to what is expected and what is not. Under-defining the scope of their work can lead to either insufficient testing or excessive testing that cripples your budget.

Better still, get your vendor to tell you what they propose to test—in detail. This way you can verify that it corresponds to your expectations. At Rubric we always provide a detailed test script of every single test we propose to execute. The customer signs this off before testing begins. The benefit is clear, as there is documentation of what will be tested and, just as importantly, what will not get tested.

It is Rubric's experience that linguistic testers focus on what they do best, which is checking for language-related issues. It is for this reason Rubric performs a second round of tests using engineers who focus on layout and technical issues. Our test engineers cover many issues such as ensuring that the translated user interface controls are properly aligned and of the correct height—right down to the last pixel. As the testing engineers work on several language variants, they are able to apply knowledge gained from one language to other languages. We have found time and time again that this extra effort yields a higher quality product compared to a single-pass linguistic test only.

When testing linguistic aspects of the application, you should insist on having native speakers of the target language testing your application. At Rubric we go one step further and use in-country native testers, for the same reasons we use in-country translation talent—they have the deepest set of skills and are best equipped to discover faulty localizations, both linguistic and technical. An added and significant benefit of this approach is that you do not have to pay for down time.

Supporting the in-country model poses several technical and managerial challenges. Machine setup and configuration, getting the team assembled and supervised, ensuring consistent and accurate testing across all languages, as well as having a solid way of reporting and regressing bugs—these are just some of the challenges of performing in-country linguistic testing.

Over the years Rubric has developed very sophisticated methodologies to overcome these problems, including our expertise in remote connectivity and our bug database—BugzNET™. With more than a decade of experience, Rubric localizes and tests products in more than 20 languages simultaneously.

Outsourcing part of a process you have previously done in-house always involves some risks; however, you reduce the risk by agreeing with your chosen vendor, in detail, what is the scope of the testing to be done.

You can reduce the risk still further by choosing an experienced and reputable partner to help you with your testing. This will make for a better localization experience.