Introduction

For many at MIIS, the first semester of TLM is our first exposure to project management. Though I have worked in teams to achieve goals set by management at my various jobs, I have never been able to study and implement the “best practices” involved in an efficient workflow of an office. From the very beginning of our course in localization project management, we were place into project management teams and commissioned with running a simulation of working as a team of project managers at an LSP. We collectively chose the client “Amazon Watch”, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing support and assistance to indigenous people of the lands surrounding the Amazon river. We used various organizational tools to plan out and implement our commission, such as Trello, Slack, and DokuWiki, and the 6 of us acted as LPMs so that we would all have the opportunity to learn what was involved in all the steps of the process.

Trello

Trello is the office management tool we used in order to plan and complete every process of our project. Here we can see the tasks that needed to be completed each week and we were able to use checklists to keep track of every step of the process and whether or not each step was completed.

We were also able to create and edit the checklists or tasks in very easily and quickly to optimize the time spent on organizing our workflow and make the whole project run more efficiently.

DokuWiki

Our Wiki page was used to document and keep a write up of every step of the process. Within the “administrative” section you can see our list of translators we commissioned to do the translation work of the AW homepage into 6 different languages. Also within this section you can notice our templates we created for job requests to our prospective translators, an internal quote template, a specification form, and a list of screening requirements for our various translators.

Next you can see where we house our clients, namely Amazon Watch, and within that section you can also find our quote and specification form specific to that client as well as client specific style guide and project faq.

Lastly you can see we have more pages introducing our client, our team and our company.

Execution of our Translation Commission

After we received the commission to translate, we divided up our translations by language, one for each member of our team. First we needed to find translators to complete the translation. We chose to translate in to Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish and Italian, based on what we thought the target audience would be of this organization.  Using the ATA database, we each found highly qualified translators to complete this work based on their ATA certification and their experience in the areas of ecology and environmental science. Though the translations were not very complex, for the purpose of the exercise we picked over-qualified individuals. I sought out an Italian translator and was able to find one with 20+ years of translation experience and had previously worked for National Geographic.

Next, we had to complete the translations. We did this ourselves since this was a simulation. We used the CAT tool Memsource and machine translation to complete it. The important thing that we needed to check for after translation was any errors in translations and formatting. The formatting does not always transfer over so upon completion we had to recheck for any issues. Finally we wiped the properties from the files and prepared the translation packet for delivery.

Lessons Learned

Upon finishing our project we completed an analysis of the time spent on the project through the tool TopTracker. We used it to keep track of how much time we were spending on which task. We realized that our biggest issue was that we did not use our time  efficiently. It was understandable given the nature of our simulation but the experience taught us of the importance of being efficient in time use.

I feel this project was a realistic simulation of the responsibilities involved with being a localization project manager and has prepared me to undertake these task in my future career as a PM.

Post Mortem Presentation

Introduction

Finals for courses in the Translation and Localization Management graduate program are not your usual multiple choice exams or 6 page essays. Rather, because our program is a professional school, our assignments are usually more of practical application and group based. They simulate future tasks and projects we would undertake as career professionals in the localization industry.

Our course in Computer Assisted Translation Tools was an introduction to various CAT tools and how to apply them in our future translation projects. We became familiar with tools such as SDL Trados, Memsource, MemoQ, and Wordfast.  More importantly, because every company does not use the same tools, the course made us familiar with CAT tools and gave us a template on how we might learn the future tools we will come in contact with. We were given various tasks to complete using these translation tools to show that we sufficiently understood them in preparation for our future careers.

For our course final, we became a LSP who had a commission for an imagined translation job from a client (an actual client in our case) to translate. We were grouped based on what language of study was part of our degree program, so our group of three were all studying Russian. Fortunately for us, one of our group members had previously worked as a freelance translator and had completed many translation projects in the same format as we were to.

Project Overview

Our client to be was The State Russian Museum. In our scenario, the museum had commissioned us to translate a catalog, newspaper article, and website post on the topic of art of the sculptor Dashi Namdakov. Because our group consisted of two native English Speakers and one native Russian speaker, our company was able to undertake both Russian to English and English to Russian translation. Our Team project files will be included here in this blog post.

Lessons Learned

This course has given me an in-depth introduction to the localization industry and  helped me become familiar with CAT tools and their importance in the translation process. We have also learned the process of quickly adapting to new tools, as the industry is always growing and changing and we will most likely be expected to quickly master new tools in our careers. I have learned the importance of teamwork and that when we come together, we can complete our tasks much more smoothly and efficiently with the help of others.

 

Proposal

Deliverables

 

 

 

ORBIUM

Of all our various assignments throughout the semester of Website Localization, I enjoyed the process of localizing these JavaScript games the most. Though it is difficult to sift through the different .cms and .js files and troubleshoot issues and make sure you delicately make changes to the files for editing strings etc, it is rewarding to be able to put your work into practice and see the fruits of your labor.

Our group included Seongjin, Janet and myself. We agreed that we should choose to localize a JavaScript game, but it took us some time to finally come across a game called “Orbium”.  Many online games had already been localized, so we had to dig deep into some different places until we found our game. One thing I liked from the beginning was the large text on the opening screen.

 

Here we can see if our localization is being performed correctly. The large text on the title screen contrasts the game itself that contains no text while the game is being played. From the initial play-through of the game, I could see the texts that needed to be translated. There was the title screen and the various menus, which seemed pretty straight forward, since these were embedded in the various menus. Then I started playing the game. In the first level, there is a tutorial that can be played. That is were the tricky text presented itself. These various texts would pop up during the play-through. This would also include the texts that would show when losing, winning, pausing, etc. I knew that these texts would be the strings we would need to translate.

As in our first JavaScript game localization, I knew from our previous experience that we would need to localize two separate files:The HTML file and the JavaScript file. The HTML file was pretty straight forward since we had separate ones for separate languages. All we needed to do was find all the static text and export it for translation.  The .js file is more difficult to deal with. First we need to externalize the strings so that we can create a separate file for translation. After doing this, we were able to make 3 separate .js files for our respective 2nd languages.

 

This process immensely simplifies the localization process and standardizes it for any future localization. It eliminates any need to go in and individually change every single string for each respective file.

One issue we unexpectedly ran into when we started localizing was that there was no audio. We were confused at first but we quickly realized that this was due to the fact that since we had created the new language specific HTML files, we also had moved them into their respective new folders. Since the audio files where now not in the same folder as the HTML files, we had to change the file to look in the subroot folder. It didn’t take too much work once we figured out the error.

Next was our language picker. We decided that we wanted to have the game localized into 3 other languages besides the default English. We decided to go the efficient route and create an “if – then” statement that would say something like if a language was not present, then the other languages should be included in the drop down list. For example, if you are on the Russian page, then the Russian language would not be in the picker, and if it was not in the in the drop down list, then the other languages should be there.

The last issue we had was with the Asian languages. The box for the text was not big enough for the chinese and korean characters, and needed to be extended. So we wrote another “if-then”statement for line height.

Finally, I enjoyed the process of localizing a game because it is satisfying to troubleshoot the various coding issues, especially when we are successful.