For our final project in Software & Games Localization this semester, my group decided to localize a mobile game called Western World, available in the App store and the Google Play store, into Japanese, French and German. Aaron Szucs, the creator of the game, kindly made the source code available for download on GitHub.

The game is a dressed-up version of rock-paper-scissors in a wild west setting, available in single player and multiplayer versions. The amount of text to be localized is moderate to high, with the most words appearing in the shop and the instructions. When we analyzed the source code, we found that the game was not at all prepped for localization; user-facing text is found in many different parts of the code, not just scripts, and most of the words the player sees are hard-coded as images. This meant that internationalizing by wrapping strings and externalizing the text would not be enough, so I took responsibility for creating images with corresponding Japanese, English and German text via desktop publishing (DTP) in Photoshop.

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On December 7th I moderated a panel at the MOFA-XINHUA Forum on the MIIS campus. The theme of the forum was “Innovation in China” and the panel was on the question, “Does the Internet connect us or isolate us?”. I learned a lot from all of the speakers and really appreciated the interpreters’ efforts.

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Dubbed Version

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What is Microsoft Translator Hub?

Our big project this semester was using Microsoft Translator Hub to build our own machine translation system to translate museum guides from English to French. The Hub uses statistical machine translation to produce target documents similar in style and tone to the sample documents provided. (Microsoft released a preview neural machine translation option this month.)

How Does It Work?

A lot of data is required to train the machine. We uploaded pairs of documents that have been published in English and French versions. The Hub can handle pdf files, but the segmentation can be off. In later rounds we often converted the pdfs to .txt files to check alignment and delete information that was different between languages, for example, if the guided tour in English meets in the atrium at 3 while the tour in French meets at coat check at 1:30. Finding and cleaning appropriate data was very time-consuming. The Hub suggests a minimum of 10,000 parallel sentences of training data, 2,000 of tuning data and an additional 2,000 of testing data. The testing data is what the machine produces after a round of training. It displays the source sentence, the parallel target sentence provided in the data, and the target sentence produced by the machine. The machine compares the parallel target sentence provided to the one it produced to produce a BLEU score.

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Group Translation Project in Worldserver

To gain experience using translation management systems, my group and I translated an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about Stephen Hawking into three languages: French, Chinese and Japanese. We set up the project so that we would all be using the same workflow and reference files. Our proposal, deliverables and conclusions are available below.

Proposal

Deliverables

Presentation

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If you’re part of a company that does a lot of translation and transcreation and are considering picking out your first translation management system (TMS),there are a lot of factors to consider. These include how much you want to automate your process, process management, how centralized you want your system to be and who should have access to it, integration with your current content management system and machine translation, access to linguistic resources (TMs, glossaries), options for vendor management, and of course analytics and reporting capabilities so you can track the status of ongoing projects and see what’s working and what can be improved.

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The following is the first exam I took during my first semester of French to English translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. The source and target documents are included. Many thanks to Professor Johnson for giving her kind permission to reproduce the text here.

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For our final project in Intro to Website Localization, my partner Meng and I chose to localize the JavaScript game 0hn0 into Chinese and German by adding a drop down language selection menu and translating the text. The game is playable here (original version, English only) and downloadable on GitHub here.

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In my intro to computer assisted translation (CAT) class, we undertook a final group project to round-trip the translation process in SDL Trados from beginning to end. This includes the client-facing as well as technical aspects of a translation project, the way a small language service provider (LSP) would handle them. In a group of five students with the same language pair (French and English), we formed our LSP, La Francophonie, and picked a document to translate. In a real life situation, of course, the client would provide the source text. We next drew up a proposal (see document in portfolio) for the client, detailing our process, our workflow, our fee breakdown, and the timeline to complete the project. We presented this proposal to the “client” (our professor) at the client meeting and explained the benefit to the client of using CAT tools, including terminology management, efficiency, and cost savings. The big takeaway from the client meeting for our team was the importance of either getting or working with the client to build an agreed-upon style guide before delivering the target text.

We performed the translation, created a translation memory for potential future projects with the same client, and built a glossary in Trados. You may review these and additional project files by clicking on the link below.

Click here to download the portfolio.

The portfolio contains the project files from beginning to end. It includes the project proposal, the source file, the target file, the TM, the glossary, and the SDL Trados project file.

Subsequently, we presented our work and lessons learned to a group of our peers. The presentation is available for viewing via the link below.

Click here to see our presentation!

The presentation is in Google slides and contains a video. Subtitling for the video is not available.