Translation and Localization Options

How do you identify the many options available for localizing your products or materials, and how do you select the right ones for your company?

Johnson, Dan. TechCom Manager (2005). Articles>Language>Localization>Translation

Web Retrieval Systems and the Greek Language: Do They Have an Understanding?    

Searching the web is a common activity of web users. English and non-English speakers utilize international or local search engines so as to satisfy their information needs. Most of the attempts at evaluation of search engines focus on English queries and on English document collections. In this paper an evaluation methodology is presented and the capabilities of international and local web retrieval systems using Greek queries are evaluated based on this method. We aim at identifying difficulties and knowledge requirements when using a Greek supporting search engine. The importance of interface localization and the effects of standard information retrieval techniques such as case insensitivity, stopword removal and simple stemming are studied in international and local search engines. The evaluation methodology is applicable to other non-English natural languages as well.

Lazarinis, Fotis. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language

Lost in Translation: Contributions of Editors to the Meanings of Text    

Authors of scientific articles in one language are often required to provide abstracts of their papers in a second language, and they use a variety of ways to achieve this.

Hartley, James, Alan Branthwaite, Frank Ganier and Laurent Heurley. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Language>Editing>Translation

Popularity and Findability Through Log Analysis of Search Terms and Queries: The Case of a Multilingual Public Service Website    

SHIL on the Web is the website of the Israeli Citizens' Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March—October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users' actual information needs.

Ravid, Gilad, Judit Bar-Ilan, Shifra Baruchson-Arbib and Sheizaf Rafaeli. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language

Could You Mind Your Language? An Investigation of Communicators' Ability to Inhibit Linguistic Bias    

Three experiments that examine communicators' ability to inhibit linguistic bias are reported. Research has shown that communicators use more abstract language (e.g., "Jamie is affectionate" vs. "Jamie kisses Rose") to describe more expected behavior. Recent research has shown that this bias may be overwhelmed by goals to put a "spin" on actions or to manipulate audiences' impressions of actors. Similarly, the present experiments show that people who wish to communicate without bias may often be able to do so. Inhibition occurred when participants selected descriptions from a list of alternatives and when they freely described both expected and unexpected behaviors. However, inhibition failed when participants were asked to freely describe either expected or unexpected behaviors alone.

Douglas, Karen M., Robbie M. Sutton and Katie Wilkin. Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2008). Articles>Language>Professionalism>Rhetoric

UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding

Character encoding and character sets are not that difficult to understand, but so many people blithely stumble through the worlds of programming without knowing what to actually do about it, or say "Ah, it's a job for those internationalization experts." No, it is not! This document will walk you through determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on the internals of character encoding.

HTML Purifier (2005). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Language

How to Correctly Initiate a New Localization Project    

Undertaking a localization project is a multi-step process. This article offers a step-by-step guide to localization that makes the project seem less daunting.

Freij, Nabil. Intercom (2008). Articles>Language>Localization

Controlled Language in Technical Writing  

The documentation used in manuals and other technical writing worldwide is predominantly created in English. Though much discussion has been devoted to it in academia and elsewhere for years, technical English continues to be written in a way that is difficult for many people to understand.

Braster, Berry. Multilingual (2009). Articles>Language>Technical Writing>Controlled Vocabulary

Coping With Babel: How to Localize XML

Translating XML documents presents many opportunities as well as challenges. There are clear do's and don'ts when it comes to designing your documents regarding translation. You can use also use XML to your advantage to reduce costs and increase quality. One of the most exciting ways to do this is via the use of the XML Text Memory Namespace - xml:tm.

Zydron, Andrzej. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Language>Localization>XML

Evaluation of International English and Machine Translation

Machine translation often gives humorous translations or incorrect translations. Usually, a bad translation is because the source text is not clear in a way that a machine can 'understand'. If text is optimised for machine translation, machine translation gives excellent results. There are two sets of texts. The first set is written in standard English. The second set is equivalent to the standard English text, but it is optimised for machine translation. Google Translate was used to translate the texts into Bulgarian and into Spanish.

Unwalla, Mike. TechScribe (2009). Articles>Language>Localization>Machine Translation

Machine Translation and International English

Machine translation (MT) is the automatic translation of text using only software without the help of a human translator. An alternative name for machine translation is automated translation.

TechScribe (2009). Articles>Language>Translation>Machine Translation

Why Qualified Translators Are a Must in Product Localization and Translation?

Money paid to qualified technical writers and translators in a localization project is money spent very well indeed. Why? Because the worst thing for a project is to have the customers or end users switch to another product since they either cannot understand the instructions and the way an interface works, or the localized copy contains embarrassing mistakes that damage the brand name and image.

Akinci, Ugur. Technical Communication Center (2008). Articles>Language>Localization>Technical Translation

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data  

Follow the data. Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data. Represent all the data with a data. Of course, we’ll find immense opportunities to create interesting data sets if we can automatically combine data from multiple tables in this collection. This is an area of active research. Another opportunity is to combine data from multiple tables with data from other sources, such as unstructured Web pages or Web search queries.

Halevy, Alon, Peter Norvig and Fernando Pereira. IEEE Intelligent Systems (2009). Articles>Language>Search>Theory

Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode

A little-understood corner of Unicode is its handling for bidirectional text (The spec is a little dry). While English languages are read left-to-right, plenty of scripts (notably Arabic and Hebrew) are read from right to left. When only a single direction of text is used in a document, it's fairly straight forward, but when texts with different directions are mixed in one document, some difficulty arises in determining direction. This document attempts to explain how bidirectional text in Unicode works and what this means for the web. In the Unicode standard, characters have a representational order in memory (which English speakers tend to think of as left to right, but is really start-to-finish in a file), which the bidirectional algorithm then operates on to determine the display characteristics.

Henderson, Cal. Iamcal (2009). Articles>Language>Localization>Unicode

Unicode Consortium Technical Report on Unicode Security Considerations

Unicode Technical Report #36 on Unicode Security Considerations "describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account [when using the Unicode Standard], and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems."

Cover Pages (2005). Articles>Language>Security>Unicode

Guide to the Unicode Standard

This document is mainly intended for “ordinary” people who read the Unicode standard in order to get information about some particular characters or character processing issues that are important to them. The standard, though available online, is difficult to use without some help, and you can easily miss essential information when looking up things in it.

Tampereen Teknillinen Yliopisto (2005). Articles>Language>Localization>Unicode

Writing Global English

Unfortunately, there seems to be no such thing as simplicity-checking software - even remotely like the description above. Audience Dialogue tried to persuade a few software developers to make their fortunes by writing this software, but with no success so far. In the meantime, there are a few widely available tools to use.

Audience Dialogue (2007). Articles>Language>Minimalism>International

Returning Language to the Spotlight: The Interdependence of Usability and Words    

that optimal word choices, good sentence structure, and general readability are the basics that comprise usability. “Writing is what most of us do most of the time.”

Marnell, Geoffrey. Intercom (2009). Articles>Language>Usability

Making Content Understandable: Inherent Usability in Plain Language    

Using an example from his personal life, Haller shows how government writing should be simplified to ensure that a reader can understand government documents. He also discusses the importance of passing the Brayley Bill, the plain language bill.

Haller, Thom. Intercom (2009). Articles>Language>Usability>Minimalism

Benchmarking Translation Agencies  

Whether you are new at the translation business or a veteran of many globalization projects, a benchmarking study of your translation supplier(s) is a worthwhile endeavor. In benchmarking, you compare suppliers against one another based on specific criteria. The suppliers’ performance in the study can reassure you that your current relationship is a good one, or can lead to you a more compatible agency.

Finan, Jill. STC International TC SIG (2001). Articles>Language>Outsourcing>Translation

Choosing a Translation Agency  

There is no single factor that will determine your best choice of a translation agency. It should not be based on price alone, because as the old saying goes, “you get what you pay for”. Nor should it be based solely on the company’s size, number of employees, or any similar strictly objective measurement factor. Although such information may be important, and should be considered, it is just part of the total picture you need to adequately evaluate an agency.

Nagy, Charlene. STC International TC SIG (2001). Articles>Language>Outsourcing>Translation

Client Language Review—The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly  

Your company's overseas personnel are important to its success. It's natural to want their input on translated documents. Including them in a review of the translation before it's published gives them a chance to contribute their knowledge. Understanding the purpose and structure of the review can help you avoid trouble down the road. Here are some details to consider in advance.

Smith, Jackie. STC International TC SIG (2001). Articles>Language>Translation

Evaluation of Machine Translation

Many methods and measures for evaluating machine translation (MT) systems have been developed over the years. The ISLE project, funded jointly by the European Union and the US National Science Foundation, is continuing the work started in the EU's EAGLES project on systematizing these methods and measures.

Klein, Fred. STC International TC SIG (2001). Articles>Language>Translation>Machine Translation

How to "Proof" a Translation

As the global economy expands, American companies are translating large numbers of documents into multiple languages. As a technical writer, my job is to read documents in German, Italian, Danish, French, Spanish, Greek, and Polish among other languages. I also review documents in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but the process is harder and less productive. This article will provide a few practical tips for "proofing" translations of Western documents.

Ribert, Roger. STC International TC SIG (2005). Articles>Editing>Translation>Language

Reducing Translation Costs

Over the past two years my team conducted an extensive review of translation process and costs, and we found a lot of ways to reduce translation time and costs. This including exploring use of machine translation. In the end, we found that machine translation created more hassles than it fixed. It was hard to explain to upper management, but the concept that helped most was explaining that translators aren't translating word for word, they're translating thought for thought.

Brewer, John. STC International TC SIG (2005). Articles>Content Management>Translation>Language