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WELCOME TO THE RUBRIC NEWSLETTERWelcome once again to the Rubric newsletter, where we bring Rubric's Better Localization Experience to your in-box. Past editions of the Rubric Newsletter can be found on our web site.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: RUBRIC NEWS: Success with EFI, kicking high tech into high gear. |
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RUBRIC NEWSRubric and EFI — Taking digital printing global: Dominating fast moving markets require both speed and accuracy. EFI partners with Rubric kick their high technology into high gear. EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINTSBy Françoise Spurling, COO, Rubric |
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Rubric customers are an astounding source of intelligence, and not just because they partnered with us.
As part of our ongoing efforts to create a Better Localization Experience, we interview executives within our customer organizations. These interviews are geared toward understanding the changing business realities of progressive firms, and learning where Rubric needs to change to meet these new demands. Over the past year we have seen changes of focus within our partners that reflect the influence of globalization, reduced trade barriers, and the omnipresent Internet. Here are some of the most significant business issues Rubric customers whispered to us. |
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The chain is a source of painAs globalization becomes pervasive, supply chains become more of a problem. Dynamic companies are integrating their supply chains through automation to reduce delays and inventories (think "just-in-time" inventory management), and to cut costs.Rapid globalization has created new problems. In the past, when huge inventories were carried throughout the supply chain, occasional errors in multi-lingual communications via fax or even email would rarely delay production. But today, when inventories are kept at bare minimums, such communication errors are unacceptable. Thus automated tools remove much of the human element from routine communications. But poorly localized supply chain communications can cause problems just as quickly as the organic variety. A variation of this includes product design phases. Rubric customer Powerway, who provides integrated design collaboration solutions, is acutely aware of how multinational communications work. Their customers use Powerway's ASP offering to create new products. The common thread in collaboration and supply chains are the use of specific terminology. Automation within a global economy requires technical and industry terms to be clearly and precisely defined, localized throughout the supply chain. It also requires that the use of the selected terms be enforced. Automation solutions help greatly in eliminating sloppy terminology use, but require that software be properly localized initially and that vocabulary databases be localized and monitored. Support, the overlooked costMany Rubric customers noted that support is both an expense and a differentiator. Good support creates customer loyalty, but costs money as well.The logical extension of this is that bad online support creates costly offline support. If materials on the web are confusing, then customers call your support center. A number of Rubric customers noted that their early attempts at creating foreign support content did not reduce their support manpower budgets, typically because the online support localizations were performed in-house and were inconsistent and unclear. This creates a bit of a cost/benefit calculation nightmare for business managers. How much should a company spend on localizing their online support to reduce support center calls? There is no universal rule, but several Rubric customer executives noted that the average cost per support call was easy to estimate, as was the call load reduction for individual online support pages. Some simple spreadsheet computations based on the frequency of calls on a topic should show where a point of diminishing returns lies. It may be nice to localize all your online support documents, but it certainly is not necessary. The more difficult measurement is brand loyalty. Good support creates happy customers, and happy customers preserve and grow brand preference. But measuring brand loyalty from the backend is nearly impossible. Rubric customer Ixia noted that people complain when localizations are poor, and are silent when they are great — or what we at Rubric call a "pain measurement." The problem is that silence says nothing about how positive the level of customer satisfaction is. But eliminating negative feedback is a good first objective. Quality means market shareMany of you may be old enough to remember the 1970's, a time when Japanese manufacturing was accelerating and Japanese products were rapidly dominating store shelves (much like Chinese goods do today). In those times, the term "Jinglish" entered the slang dictionary, and described the poor translations of documentation that often came with Japanese products.The effect Jinglish had on customers was not good, and it quickly became an indication of inferior products. From packaging to user documentation to marketing, when localization was ineffective, market mindshare was reduced. Japanese manufacturers quickly corrected localization defects, and today most Japanese products are considered equal, if not superior in quality. Market share is directly impacted by localization quality, and the measure of quality is purely local. For example, if you exported a product to Germany, and the localization came across as being a poor translation of American English, then the local measure (native German) would demote your brand. Many American software firms learned this the hard way. Thus, localization quality is a critical element. But measuring quality of localization is rarely performed, and often is at best a guess performed by your regional offices (who do not have the English skills, much less the time and patience, to provide an accurate rating). Customer feedback surveys and focus groups are routine methods for judging the quality of localization, but so are "quality audits" performed by a second localization company. These audits do not need to be performed with every release of a product, but are good benchmarks for major releases or when a new localization crew is used for a mature product. Parallel roll-outsBrands are global, or at least can be. But to achieve global brand relevance, localizations often must be parallel.Our friends at Powerway and Toshiba know this well. Since Powerway provides an ASP-based solution, they create brand loyalty by localizing in parallel for more than one locality. If done piecemeal, their product would provide different levels of functionality or usability in different regions at different times. In a wired world, this is not an option. Toshiba has a different reality, but one where parallel localizations make a difference. Toshiba does "sim-ships" of products, which means when a new product is created, it is unleashed upon the global market at the same time. English, German, Spanish, French and other versions of the product start rolling off the assembly line at or near the same time. This gives Toshiba marketplace advantages and momentum in their PR efforts. It also endears Toshiba in corporate accounts of multi-national companies. For Powerway, Toshiba, and most companies, parallel localization is becoming the norm. The key is having a vendor localization that can ramp-up on new projects, preserve product and localization intelligence from release to release and product to product, and manage multiple translations at the same time. Such a localization partner will put you one step ahead of your competitors. Need speedInternet driven markets have accelerated global market dynamics. In other words, you have to be fast to be first. But being fast is not a smart move by itself. You can spend a lot of money being first though localization, and still not be profitable.Localization speed has a number of interesting factors, the first of which is that it is not necessarily universal. Our friends at Ixia noted that certain markets adopt new and revised products faster than others (for example, the Japanese adopt Ixia's high performance IP network testing solutions faster than any other region). This is different than the parallel roll-out situation faced by Powerway and Toshiba. Thus getting a Japanese localization done quickly is essential for Ixia to keep competitors at bay in that market. Before committing to parallel localization, see if you can or must be selective in which regions are localized quickly, and which can wait. Generally speaking though, localizing quickly is imperative. The Internet changed the way products are promoted. In many cases, you can demonstrate and promote a product via the Internet... and your competitors will. A common strategy for competitors is to target one or more foreign markets for exploitation, and use the Internet and rapid localization to secure a foothold or create a wedge between you and your customers. If you are advancing on a foreign market, or defending against aggressive competitors, then rapid localization is essential. The extension of this is what we call the "continuity of experience." Rubric endeavors to use the same localization experts for the same product lines every time. This creates institutional memory (not to mention your translation memories) for a product. This speeds localization of future revisions or for new launches of similar products, and has the added benefit of creating a more seamless experience for your customers. Global is localGlobalization will not be reversed. It won't even be slowed down. To compete in the new global market requires localization agility, which means:
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PSEUDO-TRANSLATIONS: PART 2by Ian Henderson, CEO, Rubric |
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In part one of this series, we examined what pseudo-translation is, how it helps reduce localization cost while speeding product release, and the use of simple text conversions as one alternative. We continue with more on text manipulations for pseudo translation. Simple text modification: One tool at your disposal simply encloses text in brackets. It is a very simple approach and surprisingly good at uncovering coding problems, and it easily deals with many of the problems we have discussed thus far. The "translated" text is easily readable. There is no pretence of being a real translation, so there are no problems with out-of context translations. Every phrase in the software is modified, assuring end-to-end testing. And lists are not randomly re-sorted, making the application easy to navigate. |
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Additionally, testing personnel can easily spot concatenation problems. Take as an example a variation of the opening sentence in this paragraph. It may look pretty innocuous in the original form, but the pseudo-translated version appears as: ((An additional ))((benefit ))((of this approach is the ))((ease ))((with which you can spot concatenation problems.))You could be pretty sure of encountering testing problems when this is compiled into the software. However, this approach does not uncover hard-coded shortcut keys. For example if your engineers hard-coded the letter "O" in "OK" as a short-cut keystroke, it would still work in the pseudo-translation "((OK))." But the Spanish translation "Aceptar" has no "O" in it and thus the short-cut key would be disabled. The simple test modification approach also ignores issues involving foreign character sets. The common parenthetical delimiters "(" and ")" do not uncover display problems. In fairness, you can use other characters, including characters from other character sets, which will partially address the foreign character set limitation. Character mapping: The idea behind character mapping is very simple and easy to implement. And yet it is remarkably effective in uncovering internationalization issues. Each character is mapped to an equivalent looking accented character in the target language. For example, the previous sentence might appear as "Éáçĥ çĥáráçŧér ïš máþþéð ŧó áñ éqüĩváĺéñŧ ĺööķĩñĝ áççéñŧéð çĥáráçŧér." As effective as character mapping is, there are limitations to this approach. Several of the characters we used in this example are not supported by a single code page, and the letter "q" is not mapped at all. These limitation have work-arounds. The alternative to mapping "l" to "ĺ" is to use the digit 1, and "I" can be mapped to "!" rather than "ĩ" as in the example above. Though this work-around helps in a simple pseudo-translation, the results can be very hard to read. In the end, you may have to compromise, where readability eventually takes precedence over complete character mapping. The pseudo-testing environment Software companies frequently encounter problems when trying to build pseudo-translated version of their products. This is a good thing, and exactly the point of pseudo-translations. Pseudo-translations may immediately identify either code that is not ready for international use, or issues with the original build rather than the translated one. Build environments can be very complex, in part because they are often created and modified over time. These obscure conditions likely need to be addressed before the build will work for internationalized products. For example, references to a particular machine may be embedded in build scripts. Since localized versions of operating systems typically reside on separate machines, the machine named in build scripts will inevitably cause a problem. Testing is the final stage in the pseudo-translation process. A comprehensive test script is required to make sure that the entire software application is properly exercised. This may sound onerous, but it is not. It is an essential testing process in localization, and the same testing scripts are recycled for the final product that has been localized and translated by Rubric's in-country experts. Anticipate the end product The purpose of pseudo-translation is to anticipate and eliminate internationalization problems in software before actual localization starts. By uncovering internationalization issues early, your engineering team will have more time to fix errors. This helps you to meet planned release dates with a quality product, and that leads to dominating your foreign markets. |
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