Localization as a “red pill”: recipe and instructions for use
So, the release of the product took place: critical bugs were eliminated, useful features added, the threshold of the first thousand users was overcome. The developer begins to make a plan to conquer the world, and immediately faces a choice: to develop "in depth" (add new features) or "breadth" (attract new users)? The second point is not only advertising, but also translation of the product into foreign languages.
We will never know about a thousand cool apps and games, because their developers have chosen the “blue pill” - product development. Technology support and product development has already been tested. The “blue pill” is, to one degree or another, a trodden path: just take it and do it. And when it comes to the “red pill” and, in particular, localization, it is not clear which side to take at all. Misunderstanding causes failure. Is it time to remove uncertainty and reduce entropy?
Usually, before the operation, the doctor tells the patient what will happen while he is under anesthesia: clarity gives confidence. Suppose you took the "red pill" - decided to localize. In this article, we , the localization company Alconost , will tell you what will happen to yourbody as a product during the localization process, answer questions that will certainly arise during localization, and go all the way from making a red pill solution to the result — a new language version of your applications.
')
Neo from the movie "The Matrix" chooses a red pill
This is the first question to be answered, thinking about localization. If you leave the localization at the last moment, it can turn into inaccuracies in the formulation of the problem (some lines get lost, something will be remembered at the last moment ...). There is another nuance: time limits will limit your choice of localization company. You have to choose by the criterion "who is faster", and not "who is better."
It cannot be said that the “quick” result will be guaranteed unsatisfactory or that the deadlines will be disrupted. However, the risk of both the first and the second when performing localization in an emergency mode is much higher than when working at a quiet pace.
In addition to the actual translation, be sure to provide time for linguistic testing. This is a procedure in which a translator tests a localized product, corrects an inaccurate translation, reports layout errors, problems with the encoding, too long lines that do not fit in the space allotted to them, and other evil that is unavoidable with any localization.
Planning a release date for a new language version, accept for granted that there will be some changes, line replacements, word changes. And not because the translator is an idiot, but because the translator is not a telepath. After all, when localization is of great importance context - the situation of the use of a word or phrase. Vocabulary accurate translation of phrases does not guarantee exact correspondence of the translation to the context. Thanks to linguistic testing, these inaccuracies will be identified and corrected.
Then the updated strings are integrated into the application and linguistic testing is repeated until the perfect result is achieved.
The answer to this question is not as simple as it seems at first glance. The fact is that in addition to the "obvious" texts, the license agreement, instructions, FAQ, promotional site, installation wizard may need to be translated.
You might not have noticed how your product was “overgrown” with thousands of text marks. Perhaps at the first stage you decide to translate not everything - putting off, for example, the translation of user reviews. In any case, collect all the texts that exist in the product (buttons, functions, error messages ...) and around it (help, FAQ, website ...), calculate their volume in signs with spaces, prioritize and then decide what will be translated first.
By not doing this work, you can approach the localization with an erroneous idea of its volume: “ Only 10 thousand characters, what to worry about, we'll do everything in a week! ". An inaccurate estimate of the scope of work may knock you out of schedule and lead to an unanticipated increase in budget.
If you translate your product into a certain language for personal reasons (love of language) or due to certain circumstances (a company from a certain country expressed interest in your product, and you are doing localization specifically for it) - skip this paragraph.
If your goal is to make money on a product, it makes sense to think about which language version will bring the greatest return financially. If you yourself did not conduct research on this subject - pay attention to the report “Europeans and Their Languages” published by the European Commission in 2012. We translated the most important of it into Russian , but if briefly and in a projection on localization issues, the essence is this: entering the European market, it is advisable to make several language versions in the main European languages and promote them in countries where these languages are owned by the largest number of inhabitants. It is possible to add localizations to other less popular languages later, if the economic feasibility of this will be confirmed by statistics and other weighty arguments.
To enter non-European markets, one can take into account the number of Internet users for whom a certain language is native .
Do not trust theorists? Learn a practical case study on how an iOS app developer has increased the number of installations of his product 7 times (!) By translating keywords into several languages.
If we disregard all sorts of nuances and give a recommendation to the spherical project in a vacuum, we would advise starting with the localization of the Russian-language product into English. The presence of the English version will simplify translations into other languages, including the “exotic” ones, and make the product accessible to those to whom English is the second native.
A separate headache for a developer who decides to localize is created by “drawn” texts: slogans on flash banners, inscriptions in illustrations. If your product is a game, then 99% of such “hidden texts” you have are: inscriptions on game objects, signs on buildings in the game world, names on game directories. This problem is not critical if you foresee ways to solve it. You may need to perplex the illustrator or animator to embed the translated texts into graphic files, and ensure that unique graphics are loaded into each localized version.
If your product is currently at the development stage - make sure that the existence of such texts is documented, or if possible, abandon the graphic execution of names, labels and slogans. Take note of this and in case your product is ready, so that future updates do not complicate localization. And if the inscriptions from graphic content need to be translated - be sure to mark this when setting the task for the translator: personally add these words to the text packet sent to the localizers.
If the dubbing is used in your game (the voice of the announcer, the replicas of the characters), you must decide whether it will be translated as well. Localization of audio and video content is not an easy process. Selection of announcers (especially if it is necessary to make a character voice), recording, rewriting (if the announcer did not get into the mood and intonation), mixing and mastering - all this requires a lot of time and money.
With a modest budget, the sensible solution would be to avoid re-voicing in favor of subtitles.
Suppose you have exported all texts from a product to a table or database. But a good translator is a meticulous translator: after all, not abstract phrases are localized, but a specific product — with its own specifics, its own color, and its own context. The simplest example is the word edit: even if we forget about the shades of meaning (“edit” or “edit”), it is not clear without context that this word is used as a verb or as a noun.
The best option is to give translators constant and full access to the product: so that they themselves are users of the program (games, mobile applications). If this is undesirable or impossible for any reason, it means to provide a complete set of screenshots, and for games to make a video with the passage.
If this is not done, the translator will be forced to do the translation blindly, which will increase the number of corrections that need to be made to the translation during the linguistic testing stage.
You will not believe it, but sometimes it is remembered after the localization of the product is completed. Developer’s nightmare: the program was released in Chinese, but before the first payment was made in RMB, the support mail was filled with dozens of letters with hieroglyphs. All of this suggests that the ambitious plan to conquer the Chinese market began slightly not as planned.
In such a situation, the “solve problems as they come” strategy takes effect. There are always exits. For example, there is our wonderful Nitro - fast online translation by native speakers (you can translate a question from Chinese into Russian, write an answer in Russian and translate it into Chinese, and all this within 24 hours - or even faster). In the end, there is an automated and free translation, and if you teach a help desk specialist how to use it correctly , it will help to somehow solve the problems of Chinese users (at least you can let them know that their requests are not ignored and have support, if not technical, then moral).
Add-ons, improvements, patches - almost any changes to the starting version of the product will contain new lines. It is best of all if the translation of both the starter version and the updates will be carried out with the same hands: this will preserve the uniformity and avoid blunders (for example, when the same option is called with different names). To localize the product, it is advisable to find a permanent partner who knows how to do it and who will care.
Appealing to specialists is not the only way to localize your product. You can try to translate the product by the online community - that is, by crowdsourcing . The undoubted advantage of this method is the absence of direct financial investments. The minus follows from the plus: volunteers do not owe you anything. This means that the pace of their work is weakly amenable to adjustment, and a decent level of translation (like the very fact of its successful completion, at least sometime) is not guaranteed.
If someone in the development team is fluent in a foreign language and is enthusiastic, he may be visited by the idea of translating on his own. At this point, the project manager is best to direct the energy of an enthusiast in some other direction. Why? Localization by a programmer is the same as writing a code linguist. Both programming and localization are specific crafts that require specialized education and require knowledge of specific work techniques. A professional localizer has a lot of nuances in his head, which is not something that the developer - just any normal person - would hardly have thought at all. We live in an age of specialization, and the cook should not manage the state: everyone should do his own business.
All selected "red pill" localization doctors Alconost are invited to the reception .
about the author
Alconost is engaged in the localization of applications, games and websites in 60 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.
We also make advertising and training videos - for websites selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliners, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.
Read more: https://alconost.com
We will never know about a thousand cool apps and games, because their developers have chosen the “blue pill” - product development. Technology support and product development has already been tested. The “blue pill” is, to one degree or another, a trodden path: just take it and do it. And when it comes to the “red pill” and, in particular, localization, it is not clear which side to take at all. Misunderstanding causes failure. Is it time to remove uncertainty and reduce entropy?
Usually, before the operation, the doctor tells the patient what will happen while he is under anesthesia: clarity gives confidence. Suppose you took the "red pill" - decided to localize. In this article, we , the localization company Alconost , will tell you what will happen to your
')
Neo from the movie "The Matrix" chooses a red pill
1) When is the release expected?
This is the first question to be answered, thinking about localization. If you leave the localization at the last moment, it can turn into inaccuracies in the formulation of the problem (some lines get lost, something will be remembered at the last moment ...). There is another nuance: time limits will limit your choice of localization company. You have to choose by the criterion "who is faster", and not "who is better."
It cannot be said that the “quick” result will be guaranteed unsatisfactory or that the deadlines will be disrupted. However, the risk of both the first and the second when performing localization in an emergency mode is much higher than when working at a quiet pace.
In addition to the actual translation, be sure to provide time for linguistic testing. This is a procedure in which a translator tests a localized product, corrects an inaccurate translation, reports layout errors, problems with the encoding, too long lines that do not fit in the space allotted to them, and other evil that is unavoidable with any localization.
Planning a release date for a new language version, accept for granted that there will be some changes, line replacements, word changes. And not because the translator is an idiot, but because the translator is not a telepath. After all, when localization is of great importance context - the situation of the use of a word or phrase. Vocabulary accurate translation of phrases does not guarantee exact correspondence of the translation to the context. Thanks to linguistic testing, these inaccuracies will be identified and corrected.
Then the updated strings are integrated into the application and linguistic testing is repeated until the perfect result is achieved.
2) What is the amount of work?
The answer to this question is not as simple as it seems at first glance. The fact is that in addition to the "obvious" texts, the license agreement, instructions, FAQ, promotional site, installation wizard may need to be translated.
You might not have noticed how your product was “overgrown” with thousands of text marks. Perhaps at the first stage you decide to translate not everything - putting off, for example, the translation of user reviews. In any case, collect all the texts that exist in the product (buttons, functions, error messages ...) and around it (help, FAQ, website ...), calculate their volume in signs with spaces, prioritize and then decide what will be translated first.
By not doing this work, you can approach the localization with an erroneous idea of its volume: “ Only 10 thousand characters, what to worry about, we'll do everything in a week! ". An inaccurate estimate of the scope of work may knock you out of schedule and lead to an unanticipated increase in budget.
3) What language do you need to translate?
If you translate your product into a certain language for personal reasons (love of language) or due to certain circumstances (a company from a certain country expressed interest in your product, and you are doing localization specifically for it) - skip this paragraph.
If your goal is to make money on a product, it makes sense to think about which language version will bring the greatest return financially. If you yourself did not conduct research on this subject - pay attention to the report “Europeans and Their Languages” published by the European Commission in 2012. We translated the most important of it into Russian , but if briefly and in a projection on localization issues, the essence is this: entering the European market, it is advisable to make several language versions in the main European languages and promote them in countries where these languages are owned by the largest number of inhabitants. It is possible to add localizations to other less popular languages later, if the economic feasibility of this will be confirmed by statistics and other weighty arguments.
To enter non-European markets, one can take into account the number of Internet users for whom a certain language is native .
Do not trust theorists? Learn a practical case study on how an iOS app developer has increased the number of installations of his product 7 times (!) By translating keywords into several languages.
If we disregard all sorts of nuances and give a recommendation to the spherical project in a vacuum, we would advise starting with the localization of the Russian-language product into English. The presence of the English version will simplify translations into other languages, including the “exotic” ones, and make the product accessible to those to whom English is the second native.
4) What else besides the texts needs to be translated?
A separate headache for a developer who decides to localize is created by “drawn” texts: slogans on flash banners, inscriptions in illustrations. If your product is a game, then 99% of such “hidden texts” you have are: inscriptions on game objects, signs on buildings in the game world, names on game directories. This problem is not critical if you foresee ways to solve it. You may need to perplex the illustrator or animator to embed the translated texts into graphic files, and ensure that unique graphics are loaded into each localized version.
If your product is currently at the development stage - make sure that the existence of such texts is documented, or if possible, abandon the graphic execution of names, labels and slogans. Take note of this and in case your product is ready, so that future updates do not complicate localization. And if the inscriptions from graphic content need to be translated - be sure to mark this when setting the task for the translator: personally add these words to the text packet sent to the localizers.
If the dubbing is used in your game (the voice of the announcer, the replicas of the characters), you must decide whether it will be translated as well. Localization of audio and video content is not an easy process. Selection of announcers (especially if it is necessary to make a character voice), recording, rewriting (if the announcer did not get into the mood and intonation), mixing and mastering - all this requires a lot of time and money.
With a modest budget, the sensible solution would be to avoid re-voicing in favor of subtitles.
5) How can translators get familiar with the product?
Suppose you have exported all texts from a product to a table or database. But a good translator is a meticulous translator: after all, not abstract phrases are localized, but a specific product — with its own specifics, its own color, and its own context. The simplest example is the word edit: even if we forget about the shades of meaning (“edit” or “edit”), it is not clear without context that this word is used as a verb or as a noun.
The best option is to give translators constant and full access to the product: so that they themselves are users of the program (games, mobile applications). If this is undesirable or impossible for any reason, it means to provide a complete set of screenshots, and for games to make a video with the passage.
If this is not done, the translator will be forced to do the translation blindly, which will increase the number of corrections that need to be made to the translation during the linguistic testing stage.
6) How will users of localized versions be supported?
You will not believe it, but sometimes it is remembered after the localization of the product is completed. Developer’s nightmare: the program was released in Chinese, but before the first payment was made in RMB, the support mail was filled with dozens of letters with hieroglyphs. All of this suggests that the ambitious plan to conquer the Chinese market began slightly not as planned.
In such a situation, the “solve problems as they come” strategy takes effect. There are always exits. For example, there is our wonderful Nitro - fast online translation by native speakers (you can translate a question from Chinese into Russian, write an answer in Russian and translate it into Chinese, and all this within 24 hours - or even faster). In the end, there is an automated and free translation, and if you teach a help desk specialist how to use it correctly , it will help to somehow solve the problems of Chinese users (at least you can let them know that their requests are not ignored and have support, if not technical, then moral).
7) How often will the product be updated?
Add-ons, improvements, patches - almost any changes to the starting version of the product will contain new lines. It is best of all if the translation of both the starter version and the updates will be carried out with the same hands: this will preserve the uniformity and avoid blunders (for example, when the same option is called with different names). To localize the product, it is advisable to find a permanent partner who knows how to do it and who will care.
I want to do everything myself!
Appealing to specialists is not the only way to localize your product. You can try to translate the product by the online community - that is, by crowdsourcing . The undoubted advantage of this method is the absence of direct financial investments. The minus follows from the plus: volunteers do not owe you anything. This means that the pace of their work is weakly amenable to adjustment, and a decent level of translation (like the very fact of its successful completion, at least sometime) is not guaranteed.
If someone in the development team is fluent in a foreign language and is enthusiastic, he may be visited by the idea of translating on his own. At this point, the project manager is best to direct the energy of an enthusiast in some other direction. Why? Localization by a programmer is the same as writing a code linguist. Both programming and localization are specific crafts that require specialized education and require knowledge of specific work techniques. A professional localizer has a lot of nuances in his head, which is not something that the developer - just any normal person - would hardly have thought at all. We live in an age of specialization, and the cook should not manage the state: everyone should do his own business.
All selected "red pill" localization doctors Alconost are invited to the reception .
about the author
Alconost is engaged in the localization of applications, games and websites in 60 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.
We also make advertising and training videos - for websites selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliners, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.
Read more: https://alconost.com
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/221419/
All Articles