As an aspiring professional, real-life experience is an invaluable and necessary part of my personal growth. I would like to present the work that my colleagues and I completed at the end of our Fall 2018 semester that reflects that growth. This project essentially consolidated everything we learned in our CAT class and put it to practice, forcing us to make decisions about how to approach and conduct the localization process from beginning to end.
First thing’s first, our client: Blablacar is a German ride-sharing company established in Europe that my group selected. The ultimate goal was to localize the “history” and “about us” pages into US English so that Blablacar could theoretically begin expanding into the US market.
For the first part of our project, we were responsible for coming up with a statement of work as part of an official project proposal. To that end, we drafted up the following document:
In order to make the project readable for the client, we created a simple timeline/flowchart to illustrate how the processes would proceed without confusing the client. We did learn a few lessons from the kickoff meeting with the client. The primary lesson learned, however, was to discuss client preferences during the kickoff meeting and to plan to sort through them at the beginning of the project, if approved.
We also developed a list of potentially problematic words for the translation process that we brought up to make the client aware of any pitfalls that might occur as a result. (e.g. words such as Nutzerführung, Mitfahrzentrale, Gesprächsfreudigkeit, etc.)
One other important takeaway was the need for brevity in our documents. Including as much information in as little space as possible while maintaining clarity was a significant factor in our meeting with the client.
After client approval, then, we could proceed with the actual localization. As part of our strategy to complete the project, we divided the approximately 600 words evenly between us and translated the documents using the translation management tool Memsource. This process naturally involved the creation of a termbase and translation memory.
Also included was the pseudo translation which, as we have learned, is a crucial part of the translation process to identify problems before beginning translation.
But there were some unique challenges to this setup. We had to translate each of our sections separately, and, as a result, we had to collaborate afterward to ensure that our final translation was consistent in style and tone. For the small scope of our project this approach was acceptable and beneficial, even, since it allowed us a glimpse at the habits and preferences in the process of translation of our teammates.
Some of our work:
But in the context of a larger project, this approach would be ill-advised if not downright messy when producing the deliverables for the client. However, at the end of the project, we were able to consolidate our translations effectively and produce a quality translation suitable for the debut of a European website to an American market.
For our deliverables, we included the translation memory, termbase file, source text in a word document file format, target text in the same format, and our pseudo-translated file for future reference. Ultimately, this project demonstrated our ability to communicate with clients throughout the proposal process for a project as well as our ability to negotiate with the client to determine preferences and key details to allow the project to be smooth and without major setbacks.
It also demonstrated our ability to coordinate our efforts and function as a localization team.
Here is a link on Google Drive to our final deliverables:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1I6VVUoVjBUEvB96IvEwEQqzmvyh-LFvn
And, of course, here is the video presentation of our lessons learned:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=11u5X0toYJ4v-8HgejGjPQ7Avuqz5h7gf