Software localization is tricky. Starting from this year, I have been working as the localization project management intern at Wordfast and managed several localization projects, including the localization of Wordfast Pro 5, the localization of Wordfast product brief, training video and website. Among these projects, the localization of Wordfast Pro is the most challenging.

Invited by John Di Rico, the Sales and Marketing Manager of Wordfast, I went to Cascais, Portugal as a speaker at the Wordfast Forward User Conference and made a presentation on the Wordfast Pro localization project. With this blog post, I’m going to share some of my own experience localizing the Wordfast Pro 5 and what I’ve learned from the trip to Portugal.

Workflow

The localization project can be divided into four steps, including getting the product localization ready(sometimes can be called internationalization), which was mostly done by developers, translation and review, localization quality assurance and product release. Since I was mainly involved in the translation and QA step, I’m going to explain more about these two steps which you will probably be doing if you are going to localize Wordfast Pro.

 

Translation & Review

The following picture shows the tools that we used. We use Wordfast Pro 5 as the CAT tool for translation and review, because you can get familiar with the software in a short time and refer to listed functions immediately. Brackets and Notepad++ are text editors for coding. They may help you locate the string and figure out its meaning.

Four json files will be given from Wordfast developers with the total word count of 21,275. These files can be imported into Wordfast, and you can start translating. We two split the task and each of us translated two files. Each segment is very short compared to what we normally translate, which mostly will be a sentence. It seems easier or at least faster translating short segments, but we did encountered many challenges.

 

Translation: Challenges

1. Lack of Context

We can only get a list of segments which are really short. I still remember I was really frustrated when I saw an orphan word like an “of”.

Solution: When you’re not sure of its meaning, leave it blank, add a note so that later you can export the notes and send it to developers for feedback.

But what if you don’t want to wait?

Solution: Use the code editor notepad++ or brackets to locate the term. Thanks to developers, the code is easy to read, so I can figure out , this segment is related to case sensitive, so I may leave it the way it is.

2. Terminology

(1) Inconsistency of terms: Since the translation was done by different people, there were many terms ended up with different translations.

(2)  No corresponding Chinese term: There are some words that are hard to translate simply because there’re no corresponding Chinese terms that can express the same meaning in this UI context. I was struggling with terms like “penalty”, for the Chinese of this term means punishment.

Solution: We searched for existing terminology database for answers but couldn’t find satisfying results. What I did was to open the Chinese version of SDL Trados for reference.

3. Polysemy

There are many terms with more than one connotation. For example, without any context, “mouse” could refer to an animal or a device we use to move the cursor.

4. Tags & Word Order:  There are a lot of tags in the segments. There is a tag at the end of the sentence below, you don’t know what exactly will appear in this place holder. Most importantly, you don’t want to move the tag away from its original position. Because moving tags may cause a concatenation issue, I would not want developers to rewrite the code because of my translation.
   

   Tag in a Segment

   Solution: When the translation seems need to move tags around,  we translators should really use our brain to come up with a better and safer way to translate.

Normally, if I translate this sentence into Chinese, it would be like the upper left one. Although you don’t understand Chinese, from the arrow lines, you can see how the Chinese word order differs from the English one and you need to move the tag into the middle of the sentence. You don’t want it to happen. So, in this case, we should really use our brain to come up with a translation that keeps the same word order. What’s shown in the upper right was how I finally translated this segment. You can see, the word orders stay almost the same, and you don’t need to move tags.

5. String Length

We need to pay attention to the length of your translation. Chinese is a very compact language, however, if you want to localize Wordfast into European languages, eg. German, make sure it would not be too long since we don’t want the developers to rewrite the codes for the software UI.

Localization Quality Assurance (QA):

The localization QA can make the final product really shine, personally, I think it’s as important as the translation process. In the past, when much of translation was focused on documentation, final reviews were typically completed by translators just before the files were sent to publishing. With the rise of digital content and localization activities for mobile applications, software and websites, localization QA became a necessity in the translation process and ensures the quality of the localized product.

Usually, a QA tester will analyze the product in three ways:

Linguistic Testing:

Accuracy of translation within context – Some words/sentences may need to be translated differently depending on their usage.

Consistency of terminology – “Submit” or “Send”? While these two words are quite similar, they can confuse a user if they are used inconsistently. (Especially the translation is done by more than 1 person, solution: term base, glossary, TM)

Missing content – Engineers who build a localized product most likely won’t speak the target language. If they miss part of the text, they’ll never know it until someone who can understand the language notices. Testers make sure that this “someone” isn’t the end user!

Format and Layout Testing:

Consistency with the source – Is everything laid out properly? Is there any truncated text? Misplaced line breaks?

Images – Are the images localized properly? Culturally appropriate? Remember the famous Microsoft photoshop slip?  Testing is your chance to avoid similar disasters.

Proper character display – It’s not uncommon to see corrupted characters in localized products. Typically, they’re displayed in the shape of empty boxes or question marks, but in some languages, such as Arabic and Vietnamese, it’s almost impossible to detect corrupted letters if you don’t speak the language.

Functional Testing:

Links – Do the links within the localized content point to correct pages?

Behavior – Is the application behaving as it is supposed to?

Input/output validation – Do the forms allow target language characters to be input? Are the error messages localized properly? What about the postal code?

Usually, the LQA process consists of four parts.

But for localizing WordFast, based on my personal experience, you will be mostly looking at the following aspects.

1. Linguistic testing:

• Accuracy of translation within context
• Consistency of terminology
• Untranslated Strings

2. Format and Layout Testing:

• Typos, punctuation, format, spaces, line breaks
• Truncations, text expansion

3. Functional Testing:

• Link, button, menu functionality: make sure each functionality works and they will not direct you to a page in English.
• Character display: No corrupted or shown as a missing blank tofu character.
• Error messages: Error messages should all be localized. In this project, we failed to do this because we didn’t receive the file containing strings from error messages.

 

Localization Quality Assurance: Challenges

No Existing Test Script

This is the 1^st and biggest difficulty: we are the first who did the localization of Wordfast Pro, so there was no existing test script that we could follow to conduct the LQA.

Solution: The user guide of Wordfast Pro 5 was very helpful because it outlines may necessary steps when using the software. We also simulated a translation project from the very beginning to the end and went over each function tab by tab.

Terminology  Consistency

Like the translation step, LQA also needs to deal with the inconsistency issue. Since we only have two people involved in this step, two of us did the QA together.

Locating Strings in Source Files

It’s not realistic to go back and forth with developers whenever you run into a term and wait for their response, especially when you have a short turnaround time.

Solution: Use code text editors like Brackets or Notepad ++ and find the term in the editor. Thanks to the developers, the code looks clean and easy to read. You will get a hint by looking at these codes.

Best Practices

Based on my own experience, I’d like to share the following best practices with those who also want to localize a software like Wordfast Pro.

1. Create a glossary and add terms into it from the very beginning.
2. Add notes while translating or doing QA.
3. Use Wordfast as the CAT tool.
4. Update the TM frequently while translating collaboratively.
5. Document every bug you find with a screenshot.

Demo

All the localized products have been put onto our localized website, please click here to view or download the localized Wordfast Pro 5.

Last but Not Least

Visiting Europe never came to my mind until I received the invitation message from John in February. Traveling alone in a non-English speaking country and presenting in front of a group of international audience who are mostly very experienced translators sound challenging. But if you also get a chance like this, I would say, go for it, because what you can get would be more rewarding than you may expect.