My team, Loclingo, decided to undertake a localization project from a China-based NGO called AITA Foundation for Animal Protection Beijing (or AITA Foundation). AITA Foundation was officially registered in Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau in 2011. It is the earliest and by far the only non-profit animal protection organization in mainland China.

As the project manager of Loclingo, I was responsible for hosting the kick-off meeting between my team and my client to understand their needs and expectations. I learned that since its founding, the official website of AITA has never been localized before. AITA would like its official website to be localized into English as part of the effort to enable the website to be in different languages depending on the IP service of the client. Although more localization projects are to be expected, the website is the priority. The director of AITA specifically stressed his high expectations of the quality of the translation.

One of the main challenges for this project was to correctly extract strings to be localized. Fortunately, our Localization Engineer, Steve, with his strong background and his cooperation with AITA’s engineer, was able to work that through very quickly. Strings were extracted successfully without too much hassle. A lot of time was saved.

As a part of the pre-localization workflow, Steve and I performed a pseudo-localization of AITA’s web content to spot any potential problems that may hinder the success of this project. Thanks to the fact the website is a static website whose number of strings were not terribly overwhelming, no errors were found, thus enabling us to move forward.

I also managed to acquire overall total word counts of the website and directed the results to the Vendor Manager, Lena Zhou, who would then be responsible for recruiting translators according to the number of words needing translation.

After ensuring that everything was in place, the Vendor Manager was asked to start the translators recruiting process, while the Localization Engineer performed essential file preparations to commence the project. Below is an overall timeline for AITA’s project:

In order for the translation management process to be streamlined, I discussed with my team before deciding to use SmartCAT to manage the TEP workflow, Editing and Proofreading processes and the resources. I created an account for Loclingo and individual accounts for each member of my team. A total of 11 volunteer resources were recruited for string translation and editing. They were added to SmartCAT and given limited access to the system, as was configured by Lena, the Vendor Manager. My teammates and I will be proofreading the edited versions before passing the files along to a well-known translation professor in China to perform the final review.

Loclingo is currently in the process of proofreading. To our surprise and frustration, the overall quality of the translated content was low and requires either heavy proofreading efforts or re-translation. The client is very demanding on the quality of translation and we decided to emphasize the message to our volunteer resources that such quality is unacceptable. The discovery also taught Loclingo a lesson that the ideal situation is to have the translation process monitored so that the quality of translation will be put in constant control. Bigger headaches are more likely to be avoided if such measures are taken rather than to attempt to revamp a slew of translated work.

While this project is still on-going, it has already been a fruitful process. Loclingo has established a good working relationship with AITA. Skills in localization project management, computer assisted translation and translation are being practiced in a real world setting, although there are challenges to be addressed. I believe that the lessons we’ve learned so far will help us significantly both with future work from this client and with any other localization projects.