Looking back, Website Localization has taken me on a journey of localization which is a new and exciting field for me to explore. I’ve learned basic computer languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as other localization tools such as WordPress, Polylang, WPML, Drupal 8 and Proxy. They were pretty overwhelming to me at the very beginning, but now I can see that our professor, Max is helping us pave the road, as I can see when we get to WPML, Drupal and Proxy, the localization process is becoming both more efficient and easier.

There were a lot of roadblocks. I made a lot of mistakes and there were quite a few times that I doubt that if I can handle it. I’m glad that I didn’t give it up. As now I can say that I am a linguist who knows how to use the tools above to localize a website. I definitely need a lot more practice though, but now after the whole semester’s course and the immediate help that I always get from both the professor and classmate, I have a lot more confidence and motivation to keep going on.

As for our final project, our team, composed of (Alex)Mengyun Guo, Shitong Kang and Me(Lina), Alex as the localization engineer, me as the translator and Shitong as the tester. we decided to localize 3D Hartwig Chess Set from Github developed by Julian Garnier. It’s a web-based JavaScript game and we would like to explore more about JavaScript and try to apply what we’ve learned in class to this project.
Here is our completed project

I am the translator of this project. Our target language is Mandarin Chinese. Before we initiate it, we ran an analysis of the game. After we downloaded the game zip we examined all the files.

Firstly, I played the game and located all the texts or Strings that need to be translated. I make sure I clicked into each tab to find all the possible strings. Then I looked into the HTML file to pinpoint each text and note down the location, which could facilitate the wrapping process.

Most of the texts are pretty visible and easy to be found. Some of them in the js files and since the code is not that organized, it did take me a while to find all the texts.

After I located all the texts, I started the translation. Translating these texts I need to take the context, which in here is a game into consideration. There are also some hyperlinks, and slangs that need to be translated properly into Mandarin.

This is a minor game, so I put the translation into the table for the localization engineer to refer to.

I did the translation manually, as this is not a huge project. But I also tried the way we did in class, use Find and Replace to hide the non-translatable text, and save it as RTF. So I can use the CAT tool that I prefer to translate. I do wanna make sure that I know how to deal with heavy workload efficiently in the future.

After the translation is done, together with Alex’s wrapped strings, we managed to localize this game into Mandarin Chinese. Shitong tested the game in different themes, so far the only problem we can’t seem to tackle is if we go straight to ‘play’ without choosing a theme, ‘White’ or ‘Black’ is not translated. However, everything is fully translated if we pick a theme before we go into the game. We’ll keep working on it as that’s the fun part of learning.

The whole process is challenging and demanding but thanks to our team member’s hard work and help, it’s fulfilling to see our completed project. Most importantly, I feel that it is in the process of actually using these skills and knowledge that we get to understand them better.