Translation & Localization

Copyright © Venga Localization, 2014. All rights reserved.
Jose Palomares
CTO, Venga Global

About the Presenter
Jose Palomares is the Chief
Technology Strategist and
Miracle Worker at Venga
Global. Armed with powerful
magic (some people insist in
calling it technology) and
untiring resolve, Jose’s role at
Venga is to define, design and
bring to life new tools and
strategies that help customers
get internationalization,
localization and translation
done as effortlessly and
efficiently as it gets.

the 3 secrets I
learned as
a classroom
instructorAlways wear comfortable shoes.
PowerPoint skills don’t grow over time.
That guy that laughs at all of your jokes is
planning on giving you the lowest score
possible.

translation

User experience

we are different
we think different
we speak different
we expect different
we perceive different

localization

global

the ‘global’ opportunity
- 72.4% of consumers say they would be
more likely to buy/use a product with
information in their own language
- Content offered in only one language can
address at most 30% of the total online
population
- It would take over 7,000 languages to
reach the whole world population, but it
only takes 83 languages to reach 80
percent of it

Fortune 500-proven
- 73.6% of technology-driven training at
Fortune 500 companies comes through
networked, online and mobile methods.
- In 2012, businesses that expanded their
translation budgets were 1.5 times more
likely than their Fortune 500 peers to
report an increase in total revenue.

Fortune 500-proven
- The companies that translated information
in order to communicate with and retain
their partners were 2.67 times more likely
to experience revenue increases. They
were also 2.6 times more likely to
generate improved profits.
Source: Common Sense Advisory

Customer service, branding, and
market share outrank revenue
growth as the top three reasons for
translation among the Fortune 500.

YOU HAVE TO TRANSLATE
YOUR
E-LEARNING CONTENT
- If you have
- A translated product
- Branches / offices abroad
- Offshore production
- Local sales teams
- Local business partners
- Local instructors
- If you are required by law

YOU WANT TO LOCALIZE
- If you’d like to
– Open to new markets and countries
– Open to new target segments
– Strengthen your global brand
– Increase global revenue
– Improve user adoption
– Support diversity

YOU SHOULD LOCALIZE
- If you’d like to
– Communicate effectively in a foreign market
– Maximize your design, authoring and
development investment
– Engage local communities
– Build credibility
– Streamline user experience
– Avoid disastrous mistakes

excited

the importance of mobile

Do you know your locale?

global ?

global-ready !

INSTRUCTIONAL SYSTEMS
DESIGN meets MOBILE
LOCALIZATION
METHODOLOGY

ADDIE
Analyze
Design
Develop
Implement
Evaluate

ADDIE
Analyze
Design
Develop
Implement
Evaluate
LOC-

beware of the “LOC”

LOC-ANALYZE

LOC – ANALYZE: Context
- Socio-cultural reality: Computer literacy,
status, management chain, leadership,
work ethics
- Legal and accreditation requirements
- Culture-dependent learning ‘attitude’
– problem-solving vs. hierarchical system
– logical learning vs. self-explanatory
- Usage analytics/research

LOC – ANALYZE: Viability
- Neutralize your course as needed.
It may not work at all. Ex. leadership
program couldn’t work in hierarchical Asia
- Define and align learning objectives with
business goals
- Define step-by-step strategy
- Revise law and policy compliance before
start
- Cookies?

LOC – ANALYZE: Effort
- Technology available: Devices,
connectivity, delivery network
- Special needs, disabilities
- Adapt examples, case studies, research
- Analytics
- Video / animation
– Voice over / Lip sync
– Subtitling
– Stage

LOC – DESIGN: Screen size
- Maximize the space available for text
– Eliminate all that is superfluous, keep only
pertinent content
– Apply clear, light typographies. Use weight
and color to create highlights
- Consider using Maxed-out English
- Aim for bite-sized chunks
- Be as ‘responsive’ as possible, but not too
much
- Focus on interaction design

Size matters
Chinese 61% Hebrew 83%
Czech 117% Hindi 83%
Dutch 128% Hungarian 113%
English 100% Italian 109%
Esperanto 92% Japanese 115%
Finnish 103% Portuguese 110%
French 111% Russian 115%
German 108% Spanish 117%
Greek 128% Swahili 88%
Korean 123% Swedish 95%

Bad
Good

LOC – DESIGN: Face
- Optimum length is 45-75 characters per
line
Use margins if you need to fill the screen
- Don’t clutter. One thing at a time.
- Push course guide, calendar, links,
account info, etc. into slide-in sidebars or
dropdowns
- If you use ‘phonetab’, use icons only

LOC – DESIGN: Visuals
- Consider cultural meaning of colors
- Think of multilingual e-learning as face-to-
face classroom in terms of cultural
considerations: gestures, tone, pausing,
greetings…
- Substitute human talking heads with
characters
- User center-crop style for images

LOC – DESIGN:
Learner-centric content
- Reduce the number of screenshots,
remove those not relevant
- Use culturally-neutral images; don’t use
images to convey emotions or
metaphorical concepts
- Keep all images/graphics text-free.
Substitute as much as needed.

font

LOC-DEVELOP

LOC – DEVELOP: Structure
- Set browser-safe Unicode fonts and
fallback fonts through font family stacks
- Use structured content and XML to
subdivide content and maximize the
possible reuse
- Apply metadata even if you don’t have a
clear use for it
- Mobile first? Not necessarily!

LOC – DEVELOP: UI
- Resource your strings, including punctuation signs
- Never concatenate: “2 days left to complete the
module”
- Never hardcode dates, times or currencies
- Use UTF-8. It works 99% of the time
- Keep always present the locale:
– do me a ‘favor’ or a ‘favour’ and that they know
whether to take the ‘elevator’ or the ‘lift’, and that they
know whether $100.00 is expensive
- Don’t base language on the device language
- Be aware of RTL

global English
your authors and creative team
won’t like it

translation
OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK,
AND WEEKENDS TOO.
source
OPEN ON WEEKDAYS AND
WEEKENDS
global English
OPEN ALL THE DAYS OF THE WEEK

instead of
In relation to the selection of a firm of
consultants, we are at liberty to make a choice.
(12 miniwords in a 19-word sentence. Too wordy.)
use
The Marketing Team is authorized to select a
consultancy firm.

instead of
At the end of the day, it's up to the Chief
Executive.
(10 miniwords in a 12-word sentence. Too colloquial.)
use
Ultimately, the Chief Executive will make the
decision.
source: Quality Web Content — http://www.qwc.co.nz/

LOC – DEVELOP: ‘Voice’
- Create a style guide and a glossary for
each language
– Product names, feature names, abbreviations,
client names
- Update that terminology
- Think twice before using machine
translation or crowdsourcing
- Make sure your voice talents fit the
purpose

LOC – DEVELOP: Video
- Video is powerful, adaptive, trendy and
easy to cut into slices
- Customize as much as needed
- Redesign scenarios (stages)
- Choose your “talking head”
- Keep body language under control
- Think of it as face-to-face

video

LOC-IMPLEMENT

LOC - IMPLEMENT
- Keep the content centralized and regulate
and track custom changes
- Use an LMS to make deployment and
maintenance as easy as possible
- Use an LRS to track progress, interest and
user adoption
- Test it test test it test it test it

LOC - EVALUATE
- Use data mining, social media, click
analytics, learning records
- Collect feedback and react
- There is no perfect model. Evaluate and
rethink
- Study your audience and convert/adjust
your measurement parameters
– A ‘like’ may just be a polite ‘yes’
- Convert into a report and escalate it

practice

now it’s your turn

THANKS
FOR YOUR
ATTENTION
Jose Palomares
CTO, Venga
jose.palomares@vengagloba
l.com
@localizing

Translation & Localization

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