[:en]This is a little reflection on the midterm presentation we did for our Localization As A Profession course. In this scenario, we are the Localization team at Miriam, a Personal Assistant software that runs on both iOS and Android. The problem we encounter is the poor localizability from product team. They keep writing UI strings with placeholders, concatenation, spelling errors, and incomplete sentences which are hard to translate, and they claim that there is no negative feedback or complaint from both translation team or customers. As we are soon launching a product in Arabic market, what we are facing is to come up with a localization strategy to make sure future rollouts into new and existing languages are high quality.
Our team rolled out a scalable solution and presented it to the “manager”. Here is the link of the presentation slides. In this proposal, we summarized the challenges at both organizational level and micro level, provided a scalable solution for all languages comprising improving documentation processes, offering training sessions, and setting workflow processes.
In reflecting on the presentation, I found out that there were a few things that we did well on. First, we gave a very concrete example of lacking internationalization. We demonstrated how the localized version of a Right-to-Left language would look like without proper internationalization when flipping around. This would surely give our audience a vivid picture of the negative consequences. Also, we took a comprehensive approach to this business problem, meaning, we not only focused on the localizability issues but also tended to look at problem from a micro perspective. For example, when talking about challenges and forecast, we took the whole organization into consideration. We not only listed out short-term but also long-term end goals. These strategies could help to better convince our audience to adopt this proposal.
However, there were also things that did not go so well. We talked too much of jargon which may mean nothing to our audience even if we have a briefing at the beginning. For example, we emphasized too much on the localization maturity model towards the end. This is something less relevant to our audience. They may easily get overwhelmed by the overflow of unfamiliar information and then lose interest. Also, we may cover too many aspects in one presentation and lose our focus. For example, we started with an intro of the company, briefing of jargons, then we continue to talk about summary of challenges, our end goals, solutions and finally forecast. Covering a wide range of aspects may risk distracting our audience from more important things.
If we had a chance to redo this, we would filter out those jargons and talk more in the language our audience understand, meaning speaking their languages. For example, instead of mentioning localization maturity model, we can talk about reducing costs and saving time and resources with better workflow and more automation. Meanwhile, we would focus on topics which are more relevant to our audience, like the feasibility of implementing such proposal. Bringing more like marketing, sales, branding to be more appealing to our audience might also be a good strategy.
I would also like to talk some take-aways of this mid-term pre. It occurred to me more that, we as a team are more powerful than working as individuals. Group work can sometimes generate brilliant ideas, especially when brainstorming since everyone gets to contribute their thoughts. It also gives you a completely new perspective of viewing things, as you on yourself would never have thought of that. Therefore, it’s always a great opportunity to learn during group project. Meanwhile, you can always get inspired by your peers’ idea and build on that to form your own unique ones.
Secondly, I came to gradually realize that localization is not a destination, rather, a process. It’s a process which we need to keep working on and improving. Having seen all the presentations of localization scenarios, I kind of have the idea that each organization has their own localization problems. There is no such perfect model ready to follow. It is a process of exploring, experimenting and improving. Instead of discouraging me away from this process, it draws me near and drives me to be more committed to improving it. When it comes to my own scenario, what I learnt is that we need to be more open to suggestions and different opinions. We can easily turn a blind eye to things we don’t see as a problem especially when we are at a spot where we think ourselves professional enough to know every part of it. Yet, others in their shoes may notice a problem that we easily ignored. That’s why we need to keep an open attitude to opinions and sometimes we may even need to “change hats“ to gain ourselves a new perspective.
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