Links – Do the links within the localized content point to correct pages?īehavior – Is the application behaving as it is supposed to? Typically, they’re displayed in the shape of empty boxes or question marks, but in some languages, such as Arabic and Vietnamese, it’s almost impossible to detect corrupted letters if you don’t speak the language. Proper character display – It’s not uncommon to see corrupted characters in localized products. Images – Are the images localized properly? Culturally appropriate? Remember the famous Microsoft photoshop slip? Testing is your chance to avoid similar disasters. Testers make sure that this “someone” isn’t the end user!Ĭonsistency with the source – Is everything laid out properly? Is there any truncated text? Misplaced line breaks? If they miss part of the text, they’ll never know it until someone who can understand the language notices. Missing content – Engineers who build a localized product most likely won’t speak the target language. (Especially the translation is done by more than 1 person, solution: term base, glossary, TM) Usually, a QA tester will analyze the product in three ways:Īccuracy of translation within context – Some words/sentences may need to be translated differently depending on their usage.Ĭonsistency of terminology – “Submit” or “Send”? While these two words are quite similar, they can confuse a user if they are used inconsistently. With the rise of digital content and localization activities for mobile applications, software and websites, localization QA became a necessity in the translation process and ensures the quality of the localized product. In the past, when much of translation was focused on documentation, final reviews were typically completed by translators just before the files were sent to publishing. The localization QA can make the final product really shine, personally, I think it’s as important as the translation process. German, make sure it would not be too long since we don’t want the developers to rewrite the codes for the software UI. Chinese is a very compact language, however, if you want to localize Wordfast into European languages, eg. We need to pay attention to the length of your translation. You can see, the word orders stay almost the same, and you don’t need to move tags. What’s shown in the upper right was how I finally translated this segment. So, in this case, we should really use our brain to come up with a translation that keeps the same word order. Although you don’t understand Chinese, from the arrow lines, you can see how the Chinese word order differs from the English one and you need to move the tag into the middle of the sentence. Normally, if I translate this sentence into Chinese, it would be like the upper left one. Translation Using a Word Order Friendly to Tags It seems easier or at least faster translating short segments, but we did encountered many challenges. Each segment is very short compared to what we normally translate, which mostly will be a sentence. We two split the task and each of us translated two files. These files can be imported into Wordfast, and you can start translating. They may help you locate the string and figure out its meaning.įour json files will be given from Wordfast developers with the total word count of 21,275. Brackets and Notepad++ are text editors for coding. We use Wordfast Pro 5 as the CAT tool for translation and review, because you can get familiar with the software in a short time and refer to listed functions immediately. The following picture shows the tools that we used. Since I was mainly involved in the translation and QA step, I’m going to explain more about these two steps which you will probably be doing if you are going to localize Wordfast Pro. The localization project can be divided into four steps, including getting the product localization ready(sometimes can be called internationalization), which was mostly done by developers, translation and review, localization quality assurance and product release. With this blog post, I’m going to share some of my own experience localizing the Wordfast Pro 5 and what I’ve learned from the trip to Portugal. Invited by John Di Rico, the Sales and Marketing Manager of Wordfast, I went to Cascais, Portugal as a speaker at the Wordfast Forward User Conference and made a presentation on the Wordfast Pro localization project. Among these projects, the localization of Wordfast Pro is the most challenging. Starting from this year, I have been working as the localization project management intern at Wordfast and managed several localization projects, including the localization of Wordfast Pro 5, the localization of Wordfast product brief, training video and website.
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