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Internationalization and Localization Tasks

By Tiziana Perinotti

If you want to provide your customers in the world with a universal product solution that can handle multiple languages properly, including Asian, East/West European and Middle-Eastern languages, you need people in the Engineering/Product group who can take charge of the internationalization efforts across your current suite of SW products, and can help formulate your programming practices to account for internationalization from the design stage onwards.

Two roles are needed in the Engineering department to ensure that US products are internationalized from the very beginning:
Internationalization SW Development
Internationalization SW Quality Assurance.

When developing new products, many companies do not plan to include support for engineering issues such as (but not limited to) handling non English characters (e.g. special characters needed in other languages), sorting and string comparison, case conversion, parsing input, word delimiters, concatenated strings, date/time/calendar/numeric formats, measurement scale, and placing all text visible to the user in resource files to avoid hard-coded strings that cannot be translated.

Internationalizing products prior to localizing/translating them is very important because it reduces the time to market: companies can avoid the full development and testing cycle for each localized version and can ship localized versions at the same time they ship their US version, thus increasing their overall revenues. It is also critical to reduce a product's maintenance cost: you only have one set of source code to maintain.

The major consequence of not including support for non-English languages is that you increase the localization cycle since you have to fix "bugs" during translation. That causes inevitable delays and increases the cost of the localized products.

The Engineering teams should be provided with general guidelines and be trained on how to write code for an Int'l audience. Marketing Plans and Product Specifications should include Int'l feature requirements. Engineering/product teams should be given the time to include Int'l support at the early stage of the product development process, when it is less costly to implement new features.

The Localizer's tasks include:

Collect input from Int'l sales offices for Int'l product features and schedule
Prepare all translatable components for translators
Select and purchase tools to localize the product's components
Prepare cost estimates for localization and evaluate bids from different localization vendors
Finalize contracts, schedule and action plan with the selected localization vendor/s
Prepare instructions, guidelines and documentation for the translators
Prepare all files and images to be translated for the translators
Assist translators during localization: answer questions, resolve issues, etc
Report "bugs" found during localization to the Engineering/Product team
Prioritize bugs to be fixed in current release
Test for translation accuracy
Resize dialog boxes to accommodate translated text strings
Test translated SW against translated manuals to ensure consistency
Prepare screendumps for localized manuals
Send translated SW and documentation to Int'l offices for feedback and approval.

Some of the above tasks require some iteration to make sure that the quality of localized versions is as good as in the domestic version. Only if your organization has dedicated resources in the above roles, you can facilitate the job of the Localizer.