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21 August 2012 November 2012

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The old Disney song “It’s a Small World After All” wasn’t kidding. These days the world is growing increasingly small and that means enterprises have to cater to foreign markets with content tuned to the local language, culture and currency. This eBook explores some of the issues they can face when dealing with translation and localization—from getting translations in and out of content management systems to finding ways to take translations mobile.

The fact is, you can’t just confine yourself to the United States anymore (if you ever could). While it’s a big market, there are growing opportunities outside U.S. borders if you learn to take advantage of them. Research has shown that people react best to websites when they are tuned to the local norms. That means making note of small things like phone number format and currency type, as well as larger cultural norms such as not mentioning U.S. holidays or using words and phrases that could offend local cultural sensibilities.

This eBook opens with a look at why you need to be thinking about localization. As one expert pointed out, just by being on the web you are an international presence. The more you plan for that, the more likely you’ll be able to take advantage of markets outside of your home country. Of course, you can’t accommodate every language and culture, so you have to formulate a strategy to meet the needs of the markets that matter most to you. You can always expand later on if need be, as you explore opportunities across different regions.

As you begin to accommodate new languages and cultures in different regions of the world, you have to make sure your web content management system, workflow and translation/localization vendor are tuned to work together to create the most efficient system possible. This is critical because you want to avoid doing more translation work than you absolutely require. Don’t assume translation

software works with your web content management system even if the specifications say it will.

You can let machines translate some of the content, but choosing which content you want machine translated is another important decision in the process. Machine translation is not for everyone or every type of content. It can be comically wrong sometimes; but for certain purposes—especially when it’s repeatable content, such as hotel information on bed types, room types and so forth—it can work. But you need to know when it’s a good idea to let machines deal with the translation and when you should leave it to humans, even if it’s more expensive (which it will be).

And speaking of machine translation, when you choose how you’re going to translate—whether machine or human—consider the impact it’s going to have on your search engine optimization. According to experts, it could have an adverse effect and it’s something you need to be worried about. Many visitors will find you through search engines. If you’re getting a negative impact from using machine translation, it could affect how easily people find you.

Finally, the eBook looks at mobile translation. You might not think it’s different, but consider it’s sometimes hard to fit translated words on a smaller screen. What’s more, the translation isn’t just from one screen size to another, it usually involves adjusting the website for mobile and using less content. You also have to worry about translating mobile apps, which may fall outside of your web content management translation process.

We’ve created this eBook to give you a broad overview of translation and localization issues and decisions you need to make related to that. There’s too big an opportunity in foreign markets to ignore it or risk executing it poorly. As with anything, it takes research and planning and this eBook maps the issues you need to consider. We hope you find it useful.

RON MilleR editor /// Fiercecontentmanagement

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3Why

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It Can Be a Challenge

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In an increasingly global world, it’s important to not just translate your web site, but also to make sure it’s tuned to the cultural touch points of the local markets. That requires planning and a deep understanding of each market to avoid missteps that could offend local sensibilities. But the good news is if you plan carefully, there you can expand successfully into foreign markets.

Don DePalma, Chief Strategy Officer and founder at Common Sense Advisory, a market research company specializing in globalization, localization and translation says smart companies want to expand outside the US because of the tremendous

market potential. “The US is the world’s largest market and accounts for about a quarter of global GDP. That means that there’s another three-

quarters of economic potential that is not resident in the United States. If American companies want to tap into that other 75%, they need to think beyond their border,” he said.

Kit Brown-Hoekstra, principle at Comgenesis, a company that specializes in internationalization, says by virtue of having a web site, it makes you an international company whether you know it or not. “If you have a website, you are potentially an international company because anyone with a web browser can find you,” she said.

So what does this suggest in terms of planning for your web site? DePalma says it all comes down to knowing your audience and he says that means adapting your product and message to local markets in a way that reflects a keen understanding of that market.

“Language is the starting point. We keep coming back to the dictum that ‘People don’t buy what they can’t understand.’ Our research consistently shows that people respond best when they’re addressed in their native language. But there’s more than just the right language – people need to feel that the materials ‘speak’ to them”, he said.

In practical terms says Irina Guseva, senior analyst at Real Story Group, a consulting firm that looks at content management and all related entities including localization, says when you’re dealing with web and print content, it is important to keep in mind the difference among translation, localization and internationalization. “Proper localization of your content may help you get closer to specific audiences, using dialects, cultural meanings, expressions and idioms in their own language. It will also help you avoid localization faux-pas that lead to ‘lost in translation’ situations where only machine or human translation has

Why Localization Mattersby roN miller

been applied,” she explained.She added that internationalization

is another step in this process such as when you make an effort to make your web site behave appropriately for visitors who read right-to-left, or you accommodate pages that contain special characters not accounted for in your English-only design. These small steps can go a long way toward what DePalma referred to as making the materials speak to each individual visitor regardless of where they live in your market.

Brown-Hoekstra says it takes a team effort to do this well. “Localizing your website requires collaboration between your content/website development teams, your in-country teams, and your localization teams to ensure that it’s well-internationalized as well as localized,” she said.

All of this requires paying

attention to your different markets and being very careful about your messaging to each one. DePalma advises addressing the nuances and acknowledging sensitive issues in a country before you enter the market. “Remember that every market has its own values, religion, culture, and other defining factors that make it a unique place. Without being attuned to those issues, companies stand the risk of falling flat in their target markets,” he warned.

Brown-Hoekstra says you could write a book on what not to do around localization, translation and internationalization; but she encourages companies to make translation part of their overall corporate marketing strategy and warns against ad-hoc approaches. “Globalization should be incorporated into the overall corporate strategy, based on market research and customer needs.

Upper management needs to promote a global view throughout the company. Products and content should be designed with the global market in mind,” she advised.

Guseva agrees adding, “One of the biggest mistakes is probably not hiring the right professionals to do the job. Not many things are worse in our global world than content full of grammatical mistakes and misspellings,” she said.

It all comes down to paying attention to detail when it comes to opening up foreign markets. You can’t simply go in there without a plan or let a machine deal with translation. You need to a go-to market strategy just like you do at home and that must include clear plans for translation, localization and internationalization of your web content or you risk looking very foolish and alienating potentially lucrative markets. l

“The US is the world’s largest market and accounts for about a quarter of global GDP. That means that there’s another three-quarters of economic potential that is not resident in the United States. If American companies want to tap into that other 75%, they need to think beyond their border.”

Don Depalma, Chief STraTegy offiCer anD founDer aT Common SenSe aDviSory





It’s one thing to find translation services, it’s another to integrate those translations smoothly into your workflow, and in and out of your content management systems. You need to put systems in place so that content flows smoothly, but you have to analyze your content and decide which is core and needs to be translated for each country or left in your main language, which is usually English.

Irina Guseva, senior analyst at Real Story Group, a consulting firm that looks at content management and all related entities including localization, says the key to successfully integrating your translations into the content management system (CMS) is to plan carefully ahead of time. “Usually, when dealing with a combination of a

CMS and translation management software, it is crucial to establish a strategy before sending every article you possess to the translation agency. Similar to a content strategy exercise, you want to determine which pieces of your content do need to be translated, what the language pairs are, and what are the specific workflows that need to be in place between your company and the translators,” she said.

But Don DePalma, Chief Strategy Officer and founder at Common Sense Advisory, a market research company specializing in globalization, localization and

translation says merging translations in a content management system is a classic data integration problem. “In short, any time you take something out of

one system and put it into another, you run the risk of contamination or other errors,” he said.

Kit Brown-Hoekstra, principle at Comgenesis, a company that specializes in internationalization, agrees and says it’s a real challenge for companies to integrate translations into the CMS. “Localization is very much a garbage in garbage out process. If you have an issue in the source content that isn’t caught, and say it costs $50 to fix. Multiply that $50 by the number of languages and you will see that the costs add up quickly. Part of good internationalization is good QA

When Localization Meets Content Management, It Can Be a Challengeby roN miller

in the source,” she said.

Guseva warns to stay away from the quick fix when it comes to translation, even if it integrates easily into the CMS. “I am not a proponent of using automated translations services like Google Translate that many CMS vendors, for example, boast integrations with. What’s important here is knowing exactly which content needs to be translated and what the source-target language pairs are,” she explained.

She adds, “ It usually helps a great deal when there are proper integrations in place with translation management systems and translation memories that are specific to your industry. A specialized workflow should help you avoid dealing with emails back from agencies with Word documents attached, and you instead can see your content uploaded right back into the CMS.“

Brown-Hoekstra says there are ways to build automation into the system, but it depends on the CMS and the localization vendor. She recommends having a status associated with the content like “Ready for Localization” and automating regular drops to the vendor, preferably pushing it from your CMS directly to the vendor’s system. She also likes have an automatic email that lets project managers on both sides of the translation project know exactly

what the status is of the material to be translated as it travels to the vendor and back to the CMS.

DePalma says the best way to facilitate a smooth process is to use a structured approach to content, but even this isn’t a foolproof process. “Approaches centered around XML and DITA are meant to eliminate some of these transfer issues by clearly delineating the content from the structures that define them. However, there are still massive amounts of non-XML content flowing from companies to their translation vendors,” he said.

When it comes to translating other content beyond the core website, you have some decisions to make. For blogs, DePalma recommends including it in your translation process, but he says for customer forums, you might want to use a customized machine translation engine, rather than a generic cloud service.

Guseva sees it differently. “Customer forums should, in my opinion, be authored in specific languages, along with the main

company language, which is usually English - for speakers who may speak more than one language; but the idea here is to make sure that all customer support related content on the forums is available in all languages,” Guseva said.

Interestingly, Brown-Hoekstra lands somewhere in the middle encouraging companies to figure out the best course. “I think each company would have to do a cost/benefit analysis on whether it’s worthwhile to translate this content...It might be that a well-designed and primed machine translation system would be sufficient for most uses,” she explained.

There are no simple answers when it comes to marrying your translation needs to your CMS, and the course you take really depends on your individual company requirements, but for your most critical content, you want to make sure you have a good system in place to move that content between your translation vendor and your CMS in a smooth fashion. l

“Usually, when dealing with a combination of a CMS and translation management software, it is crucial to establish a strategy before sending every article you possess to the translation agency.”

irina guSeva, Senior analyST aT real STory group

“Approaches centered around XML and DITA are meant to eliminate some of these transfer issues by clearly delineating the content from the structures that define them. However, there are still massive amounts of non-XML content flowing from companies to their translation vendors.”

Don Depalma, Chief STraTegy offiCer anD founDer aT Common SenSe aDviSor





You’ve gone to all the trouble of carefully translating your website and hired local people to make sure all the localization bases are covered. But after all that, will your target audience be able to find this content that you so meticulously crafted? Not unless you localized your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts too. And that is no small task since you dare not let machines do for it you.

“Don’t skimp by translating with machine translation as it can have adverse effects on your SEO rankings and provide a poor user experience,” advises Brady McCollum, executive vice president and COO of Crunchyroll, a leading

global video streaming network for Japanese Anime and Asian media with more than eight million registered users worldwide.

“Search engines may penalize machine translated sites as they may be flagged since it’s a common content farm technique,” he added. “Rather, leverage native speakers of the language you’re looking to localize in.”

This is a lesson hard learned by many large companies operating internationally already.

“After the initial rush to incorporate automatic translation widgets onto websites several years ago, most large companies have now removed them and limited themselves to just a handful of languages, translated professionally,” says Ben Jones, an expert translator specializing in Japanese, who has localized content for high profile entities such as Walt Disney, Penguin Books, Microsoft, and several governments.

There is other work besides

translation that humans need to do to ensure search engine rankings are the best that they can be. First on the list is grasping which search engines you’ll actually be working with in the various countries.

“Keep in mind that people search differently in differently countries. For example, Baidu is really big in China and Yandex is really big in Russia,” says Dave Crader, a web marketing strategist at Evolve

Don’t Forget Translation SEO by PAm bAker

“Don’t skimp by translating with machine translation as it can have adverse effects on your SEO rankings and provide a poor user experience.”

BraDy mCCollum, exeCuTive viCe preSiDenT anD Coo of CrunChyroll

continued on page 13

2. routeChanges are routed into an automated workflow where strings can be approved for translation.

3. Translate, Qa & publishTranslators are set into action, with access to fully-integrated translation memories and glossaries. They are also given full visibility into how their work impacts the design – eliminating the need for additional staging and QA.

And even though translation proxy is highly automated, it is also highly customizable, with options to override changes, hide strings or pages, and approve and publish changes at a very granular level.

Why use TRaNslaTiON PROxy?• no iT involvement. no

hardware. No software. Translation proxy requires no installation and leaves your tech team out of the process.

• launch translated websites rapidly. Unlike traditional methods, translation proxy allows you to get the ball rolling on your projects very quickly.

• flexible translation options allow you to choose which approach best suits your needs, whether that’s human or machine translation or some combination of the two.

• preserve the brand experience and user functionality of your primary

website without compromising your translation and localization strategy.

• Seamless updates simplify your website management.

The Lionbridge Translation Proxy solution is offered at an affordable price point, with three strategic tiered packages. The three main pricing components include onboarding costs, hosting costs and translation costs.

Download our eBook to find out how translation proxy can simplify and streamline your complex website localization process through a seamless, cloud-based solution. l

abOuT liONbRidgeWe support our customers at every stage of the Global Customer Lifecycle, helping them raise their online search profile, engage their global customers with locally-relevant content, and translate and test their products and applications. Based in Waltham, MA, we operate across 26 countries and enjoy thriving, trusted relationships with more than 500 clients.

For more information on translation proxy or any of our other solutions, visit www.lionbridge.com

A big part of tuning your content for local markets is maintaining a web presence in each of the local markets where you do business. Regularly updating content and keeping branding consistent for every target market is essential, but it can be a daunting, time consuming task.

The traditional approach to managing multilingual websites has a lot of steps – making it take too long – and a lot moving parts – creating a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong. And it only gets worse when you add other digital channels to the mix: things like email, paid search, social media, and blogs.

But there is a better way.Translation proxy is a cloud-

based platform that allows you to create, manage, and optimize locally relevant, globally consistent websites and other digital content in any language. It is a fundamentally new approach to multilingual websites that allows you to manage just one single language in your web content management (WCM) system, while turning the translation process over to a highly automated and efficient system.

With translation proxy, the traditional, cumbersome process of translation management is broken down into three automated steps:

1. DetectTranslation proxy automatically detects all changes to source content.

A Simpler Method for Managing Website Translation

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It’s common knowledge that mobile is a rapidly growing content distribution channel as the number of mobile phones proliferate throughout the world. In fact, it’s highly conceivable in many economies, users are more likely to access the Internet via their mobile devices than a PC. That means if you’re creating a mobile website or app, you need to think about the impact that has on your localization and translation plans because just like your website, you need to make sure you translate accurately and that you localize to avoid offending the local population.

It’s easy to think that the issues are the same, and to

some extent they are, but very often when it comes to a mobile site, it’s really not just the same material on a smaller screen. It’s different content or at least presented differently to make it

more attractive in a mobile context.All that said, Translation and

Localization consultant Angelos Tzelepis says when it comes down to it, text is still text. “There should be no reason to leave established methods behind, text is text, and the mobile site needs to be populated from somewhere. The translation process for mobile web sites is really no different from translating traditional ones,” he said.

But he adds, that there are special considerations to keep in mind when it comes to mobile. “Screen size, for example: most translations will have 5-40% more characters than the source English. Will your message fit in a button in German or Russian, and still be legible? If your design is responsive and your CSS will shrink the content to fit the screen of the device, will the font wind up too small?,” he asked.

Irina Guseva, senior analyst Real Story Group, a consulting firm that looks at content management and all related entities including localization, says firms should be planning to write content once and use it across multiple channels to save money and redundant effort. “ I think it’s less about technology and more about the content strategy and proper re-use of content for multi-channel delivery. If you start jumping around various translation jobs, assigning one for web and the other one for mobile, chances are you will double the effort and, in the end, the total cost of translation requests,” she said.

Tzelepis says it’s imperative to implement testing for legibility and proper font rendering. “Languages that have a lot of diacritical marks

If Your Content is Mobile, Your Translations Should be Too by roN miller

“There should be no reason to leave established methods behind, text is text, and the mobile site needs to be populated from somewhere. The translation process for mobile web sites is really no different from translating traditional ones.”

angeloS TzelepiS - TranSlaTion anD loCalizaTion ConSulTanT

continued on page 14

We Solve the Puzzle for You.Translation. Localization. Optimization.

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In the automation age, using machine translation (MT) tools to localize content seems the obvious choice. After all it is faster and cheaper, two signifiers of profits to come. And indeed, machine translation is found at one level or another in almost every translated work for this reason. “Realize that if you are paying for professional translation, you may already be benefitting from machine translation – you are probably getting the work faster and cheaper than you would have two or three years ago,” says Ben Sargent, senior analyst at independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory. That being the case, the natural inclination is to wonder why one should go to the

expense of human translators at all if said translators are using machine translation anyway? Cost is always a prime concern so why not go straight for the bargain?“Google ‘lost in translation’ or ‘Engrish’ and you will find

countless tales of woe caused by reliance on cheap machine translation or inexperienced translators,” says Ben Jones, an expert translator specializing in Japanese, who has localized content for high profile entities such as Walt Disney, Penguin Books, Microsoft, and several governments. “I remember seeing the website of a ‘five star’ hotel in Italy which in Japanese ended up being portrayed as ‘fifth rate,’ and one in the US which advertised itself with the memorable phrase ‘waterfall the Niagara wine, casino, romance’s leave,’” he adds.Faced with a long chain of evidence of just how wrong cheap translation can go, some may jump to the conclusion that going solely with high-end human translators is the only safe course. After all, paying less money for a translation that

makes your company a laughing stock is no bargain at all.“The downside, of course, is that this costs money,” says Jones. “If even a small, typical website contains over 250,000 words as Wrensoft, a search engine software company, says, translating this manually in its entirety into just one foreign language would cost, say, $25,000 and take

several months -- and don’t forget that all updates and revisions also need to be translated. The cost of a machine translation, on the other hand, would be effectively zero, and it is instantaneous.”Few companies can go to such expense and fewer still can bear the brunt of lost sales and abandoned content during the months taken to translate, so would it be better then to just use the cheaper, faster machine translation and hope for the best? At least the content would be in front of users faster and at least some sales should result, right?“Machine translation can often sound awkward and could be the first cause of new potential customers abandoning your site due to ungraceful language and unnatural flow,” warns Brady McCollum, executive vice president and COO of Crunchyroll, a leading global video streaming network for Japanese Anime and Asian media with more than eight million registered users worldwide. “It is definitely worth investing in professional translation by native speakers who intimately understand your product/service/vision and represent it accurately in the new

Just Let the Machine Do It, It’s Cheaper by PAm bAker

languages you deploy,” he said. “Make sure that none of your core products or company name sound similar to swear words in the local language or slang that would provide initial negative connotations. In the event there are such references, it would be worth exploring re-branding the affected term for the respective market.”Despite the appearance of a hopeless cause in determining which method is best, there are best practices to follow that will allow your company to reap the benefits of both machine and human translations. In general, follow these tips from Guy Smith, principal at Silicon Strategies Marketing:

• Never machine translate marketing materials (including your website) for any market you are serious about.

• Machine translation for tech support is OK, but be aware it can produce errors.

• For non-marketing materials that are not time sensitive, some folks are using the following steps:

a. Use translation memory (term-specific translations) first

b. Machine translate the rest

c. Have a native speaker read for obvious errors before publishing

Also look for reasonable ways to control user expectation and offer translation choices thereby containing your costs while lowering

downsides and increasing upsides of both translation methods. Specifically:

Nix MachiNe TRaNslaTiON fOR Public-faciNg cONTeNT (WiTh ONe caveaT): “The first principle is: don’t use raw MT output on customer-facing content but there are important caveats,” says Sargent. “If you allow a reader to take the step on their own volition, by providing an in situ ‘Translate this’ button, then the website visitor understands that the result will be raw MT output and may or may not reflect 100% accurate information or a respectable style. If you publish content already translated, then MT can make sense in your publication workflow, but only if it is reviewed and approved by content specialists who are native speakers of that language – journalists, editors, translators, or other content mavens. Tweaking raw MT output as part of a content production workflow is call post-editing.”

use PaRallel cORPORa fOR laRge-scale iNfORMaTiON PublishiNg: “For large-scale information publishers already in control of their language assets, there is the notion of building ‘parallel corpora’ for MT training,” says Sargent. “Parallel

corpora means you’ve got identical or largely similar masses of content in two parallel languages. Statistical MT systems use these information banks to learn about terminology, grammar, and style characteristics of a particular company’s content. MT training improves the raw output, in some cases enough to use in some customer facing environments without post-editing. But that is typically technical support or user-generated content. For brand-level content, pre-sales information, or professional editorial content, MT training sill does not produce raw content of publishing quality.”

cONsideR MachiNe TRaNslaTiON PRiMaRily as a TOOl fOR huMaN TRaNslaTORs. “The cost and time of human translation continues to fall, due to improved tools and more efficient online production models,” says Sargent. “MT is making its way into the toolset for more and more translators as a productivity booster. But this level of MT is built into an individual’s work process, and those content professionals still control the final output they submit for publishing. Serious implementation of MT within the publishing environment is increasingly common, but it does require significant resources and a long term commitment to make it work.” l

“Realize that if you are paying for professional translation, you may already be benefitting from machine translation – you are probably getting the work faster and cheaper than you would have two or three years ago.”

Ben SargenT, Senior analyST aT inDepenDenT markeT reSearCh firm Common SenSe aDviSory





Creative Group. “Google hasn’t taken over the world... yet!”

Why is it important to know which search engines you will be dealing with in advance? Because each has its own set of rules and its own top listing keywords. Knowing this will help you define which keywords you need to be using in each country.

It helps to also know that search engines have a thing for localized web addresses too.

“Make an investment in local hosting and country-specific top level domains (TLDs),” advises Nadene Evans, an International SEO Strategist at Dominion Enterprises, a marketing services company specializing in classified advertising. “Make sure you find quality, relevant, localized link partners.”

There are additional gains in search rankings to be had with using TLDs too.

“With the added value of localized content for each TLD you can expand the depth of the number of indexed pages for your site as well as the breadth for all of the languages you support,” says McCollum.

Always be aware that search engines can squelch your content despite all your SEO efforts if any of the content is considered culturally

offensive. So check your content for potential censoring problems.

“Beware of areas of your site that need to be adapted to fit the market culturally,” says McCollum. “For example, in our case we had to take into account that different countries have different tolerances for permissible violence and romantic scenes within video content.”

Be careful with the settings of your automated language selectors too. Just because a user resides in the country you localized the site for doesn’t mean that’s the language they are most comfortable using. Personalizing the language can help the user search your site for specific information or products.

“Some sites determine language strictly by IP address and referring country but that can be challenging for countries that have more than one official national language, such as Singapore, Switzerland and

Belgium, as well as frustrating for users who prefer not to view your site in the majority language of the country they access the site from,” explains McCollum.

McCollum says Crunchyroll deals with this problem by “initially selecting which language to serve up based on the browser language set and then allowing a user to override that selection based on their preference which we save and use for future visits.”

At the end of the day the thing to remember is that humans are searching for your content and while SEO helps them do that, you will lose advantage if your focus is only on machine generated keywords.

“The main goal should always be building the regionalized sites from the perspective of the local user base via both design and search-engine friendly content,” says Evans. l

“Make sure you find quality, relevant, localized link partners.”

naDene evanS, an inTernaTional Seo STraTegiST aT Dominion enTerpriSeS

continued from page 7 continued from page 9

can get too muddy to read at a size that is acceptable for the standard roman character set. Make sure your CSS and other code is easily adaptable. Do pseudo-localization, test multiple character sets in the same build, look for trouble up front,” he explained.

He says, it’s all comes down to good upfront planning. “Internationalization planning is the key. That’s where the checklists come out. Take care of everything up front, then at the end, it really is as simple as translating the text, doing some testing, and fixing the inevitable glitch but not having a nightmare process,” he said.

Guseva says in the best case you manage the content from a single repository. “Ideally, your mobile content and web content is managed from one repository. On the delivery side, you’d just

utilize different mechanisms for delivery to mobile vs. web. With that in mind, I believe that workflows for mobile content, from a consistency perspective, should be handled the same way as web content workflows. Organizations that employ content managers and content strategists are the ones that usually have a team of people, along with the marketing department, who are in charge of content - be it for web, mobile, email, print or social channels,” she explained.

As for apps that may fall outside of the standard content management process, Tzelepis says, “With the proper planning for internationalization/localization at the start of the project, and development with those guidelines and principles in mind, a Linguist experienced with software localization experience can then translate the text, and a

knowledgeable project manager can look for standard trouble spots based on experience,” he explained

Nicos Hadjicostis, CEO at Eazyspeak, which makes the Doki language learning apps says when you develop an app, keep it as simple as you can. “We slowly-slowly realized that we had to simplify our English “mother-script” in order to make it easier for it to be translated,” he said. That meant shorter sentences, less secondary sentences or phrasal verbs and less technical jargon.

He also said to watch for keywords in the Apple App store because words that work in one language may not work well in other. He uses the word “Kids” versus “Children” as an example.

Whatever you’re translating, a mobile website or an app, you have to keep the same principles in mind as the web site -- and translate and localize being sure to take the small screen size into consideration, while trying to keep the process as streamlined as possible.l

“With the proper planning for internationalization/localization at the start of the project, and development with those guidelines and principles in mind, a Linguist experienced with software localization experience can then translate the text, and a knowledgeable project manager can look for standard trouble spots based on experience.”

angeloS TzelepiS - TranSlaTion anD loCalizaTion ConSulTanT


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