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You intend to internationalize your software or app and you find out that it is essential to translate your product to the target market’s language. However, you may not know that beyond translation, software localization is one complex process that you should take into consideration. In today’s article, we’ll guide you how to supercharge your software localization and the detailed process for the beginner.
The length of text with the same meaning also varies among countries. For instance, the length of Japanese sentences is often shorter than in English although it indicates a similar meaning. Meanwhile, Chinese is usually longer than other languages when describing the contexts. Therefore, a test to visualize the user interface for suitable modification is necessary since Chinese texts may spill out of your menu bar if you keep the size originally from the English version.
Localization also includes the process of converting the non-linguistic elements. An experienced localization team will help you to examine your symbols, icons, photos and guarantee that they have a specific meaning, and avoid offensiveness. One practical example is a mailbox with a red flag notification, which was used to illustrate a new message. Unfortunately, several users from other countries are aware that this symbol exhibit spam or some kind of restrictions
A few years ago, people often used a spreadsheet to store source and target language data. This process required developers to copy and paste strings and source content into the spreadsheets before delivering it to various translators. Next, translators had to put in their translations, and some sort of quality assurance measure will be applied to ensure translations were accurate before inputting the localized strings to the software. This traditional process will fit with the project which contains an average number of words but it would be intricate when it comes to a bigger project. A more commonly adopted option that helps programmers save time and also qualify the project is to utilize the localization platform.
Read more: The Role of Translation in Manufacturing Industry
What you have at the beginning is software full of the original language. Therefore, you‘ll need to extract textual files that are supported automatically by several localization platforms. These applications will collect all of your source strings and make them available for translation.
After finishing the translation and review step, you’ll need to copy these files into your code structure. Effective translation platforms will possess an option to pull the translated files that are ready for use with your application. After this, you should import these files into your application and deploy your localize application with the new translations.
If you take the content out regularly, a software localization platform will be most beneficial since it can make continuous localization a part of every release cycle. Then, when you insert or adjust your source files or you simply need to localize the new content, you can push them to translate and merge the new translations back into the code. On the client aspect, the software localization engineer liaises between the developers and the localization vendors.
It’s very essential for you to test localized software versions as strictly as the original ones. Observing a foreign language in context within your software might be a different experience to determine feasible mistakes. In this step, engineers will revise the user interface, functions, currency format, date & time format for that specific country.
The software localization process is a seemingly complex process with the involvement of various stages and people. To develop native software for a specific target market, don’t hesitate to connect with Wise-Concetti Today for diligent consultation.
