Gearing up for Web Localization? Five Must-See Presentations

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Patrick Yip

Introduction

For English speakers, it’s easy to pretend as if the internet is just a giant English-language playground, ruled by American companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. But that sense of dominance can be misleading. Only 28.6% of internet users are native English speakers. Major new markets—and major new internet companies—are growing around the world. There’s a huge demand for products that bridge language markets.

The lesson here should be fairly obvious: every business with an online presence should at least think about localizing their product for languages and cultures outside the English-language market.

Web localization can be profitable. But you need to be savvy. You can’t just run your text files through Google Translate and then launch your snazzy new website in another country. Translation is an art, and it requires partners who have an intimate familiarity with other cultures, as well as an awareness of the technical challenges that crop up when you’re taking a website global.

Fortunately, there are some great resources out there to help you access the 70% of web users whose first language is something other than English. In this post, we’ll show you the five best SlideShares presentations for people looking to globalize their site.

Know the global landscape

1. Yiibu: The Emerging Global Web

In this top-notch SlideShare, Yiibu—a user experience design and consulting firm—traces the emergence of the global web. With beautiful graphics and a stylish layout, Yiibu shows how the internet went from a niche tool, mostly used in developed countries, to a widespread global phenomenon, all in the space of 15 years.

This SlideShare also offers a great introduction to global social media platforms, and to the ways in which people around the world are harnessing digital tools to commerce. Have you ever heard of the livestock merchant in sub-Saharan Africa who uses Instagram to sell sheep? Have you ever wondered about the e-commerce scene in China? Yiibu will give you a one-of-a-kind world tour.

2. KPCB: Internet Trends Report

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufied, & Byers is one of the world’s top venture capital firms, and their 2014 report on internet trends is a must-read for anyone who works in the internet business. In the report, KPCB give a comprehensive view of internet trends worldwide. They cover everything from global internet traffic to the future of TV to the rapid growth of Tinder.

They also hone in one of the decade’s biggest trends: the epic growth of the Chinese market. More generally, if you want to understand the globalization of the internet, the KPCB analysis is key.

“Only 6 of the top 10 global Internet properties are made in USA, while >86% of their users are outside America.” -KPCB

Incorporate localization into your content strategy

3. Dot-Connection: Issues in Content Localization

Sure, a lot of people speak English. But in this presentation, Lise Bissonnette Janody, a consultant at Dot-Connection, points out that most internet users prefer to read online contents in their native languages.

Janody lays out the essential details for making web localization an integral part of content strategy, and not just a parallel process tacked on at the end of development. She gives tips on how to make localization simpler, talks about how to set localization targets, and shares strategies for monitoring the localization progress. With just 50 slides, it’s one of the best quick-guides to web localization that we’ve seen.

“Ability is not preference – 9 of 10 Internet users would access [the] web in their language if given the choice.” – Lise Bissonnette Janody

Globalize your SEO strategy

4. SurveyMonkey: Stop Playing Soccer When The Rest of The World is Playing Football

SEO is a delicate game: play it right, and your website will get major traffic, because it’s highly visible on search engines like Google and Bing. Play it wrong, and you can slide into obscurity. When you take your site abroad, SEO gets even trickier, but SurveyMonkey marketing manager Eli Schwartz will show you how to drive traffic in whatever part of the world you wish to go.

Schwartz covers technical-sounding topics like subdomain/subdirectories and HREFLAND in an accessible way. He discusses how Google works differently in other languages, and he offers some tricks for testing out multilingual keyword searches. He also offers some good advice—namely, to be careful about your translations, as Google may penalize the poorly translated websites.

“Don’t machine translate. Google can recognize machine translated content AND you will offend real users.” – Eli Schwartz

Develop a front-end solution that fits the global web

5. Booking.com: 2200+ different ways to view a website

There aren’t many businesses more global than Booking.com, which helps people find hotels around the world. The most remarkable thing, though, is that Booking.com has a single, coherent front-end solution that works for 42 different languages and 54 different currencies.

How do they juggle that many localized versions of a single site? Eduardo Shiota Yasuda, an engineer and designer at Booking.com, will show you how. Shiota covers technical subjects like CSS and language selector tools, as well as the ways that engineers can deal with local currencies, right-to-left languages (such as Hebrew), and local laws and cultures. Don’t get swamped by the technical details, though. Shiota emphasizes, adapting website contents into local culture is always they key of localization.

“[When it comes to localization,] keep the customer at the center of everything you do.” – Eduardo Shiota Yasuda

Any suggestions?

Are there any great presentations that you feel like we’ve missed? Any questions or ideas that you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!

Why On-Device Testing Is Essential for App Localization

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Patrick Yip

“I AM ERROR” – Nintendo’s famous localization error.

Back in 1987, gamers playing the English-language version of Zelda II encountered one of the most confusing messages in gaming history. Link would walk into a room, and a speech bubble would pop up. It read “I AM ERROR.”
Was this a poorly translated error message? Was it a joke? Was “Error” the name of a character?

Zelda was originally in Japanese, and, as it turns out, the game’s translators had decided to call a character “Error.” The awkward translation is now something of a classic. It’s also a good lesson: when it comes to translation, something that makes sense on paper can be totally baffling in the context of a game or app.

Localization is worth the effort. But you need to be smart.

For mobile app developers, going global can be lucrative. It can also be tricky: without a good localization effort, an app won’t thrive in a new language market, and you might end up with a 21st century version of “I AM ERROR.”

Fortunately, with a little know-how, it’s easy to turn your mobile app into a multilingual globetrotter. You don’t need to be like Zelda. In this post, we’ll share one of the most important tools for globalizing your app. It’s called on-device localization testing, and it’s essential for bringing any digital product into a new language.

So, what is on-device localization testing?

Basically, on-device localization testing is a way to test-drive your app in a new language.

Let’s say that you’re translating your app into Chinese (which isn’t a bad idea; the Chinese market is HUGE). Obviously, you need to take all of your app’s text, and you need to find someone to translate that text into Chinese. Then you need to plug the text back into your app.

What comes next? You could just throw your translated app onto the Chinese market and see what happens. It’s a better idea, though, to find a qualified on-device localization tester.

This person won’t just be fluent in Chinese. She’ll also be familiar with app design, and she’ll be ready to go through every single part of your app. She’ll tell you if the translation is bad. She’ll also tell you if the text doesn’t fit the page, or if you’ve accidentally used characters that spell something profane, or if the color scheme that you’ve chosen is likely to remind Chinese consumers of death. In other words, she’ll pick up on all the potential localization problems that it’s easy to miss the first time around. She’ll catch something like “I AM ERROR.”

Why isn’t translation enough?

Look, translating an app into a new language market is not the same as doing your 10th grade French homework. Even after you’ve found someone qualified to translate your text, there are a few common problems to watch out for:

1. The translation may not fit the context.

In isolation, a phrase may make perfect sense. In the actual app, next to a particular image or serving a particular function, the phrase may sound awkward, or it could have connotations that your translators didn’t foresee.

Remember, when it comes to translation, context is king. Even if you provide your translators with screenshots or other reference materials (which is a good idea!), it’s easy to mess up. On-device localization testing will help you catch these mistakes in real-time.

2. Some strings may not have been wrapped for translation.

It’s easy for a bit of text to slip through your engineer’s fingers, and then to be left out of the translation process. As a result, when you go back through your mobile app, there will often be chunks of untranslated text floating around, especially inside graphics files. A good on-device localization tester will catch that text. That way, your new-language users don’t have to wonder why, for example, all the error messages are in English.

3. Translation may not fit user GUI elements.

A sentence in English may be much shorter than a sentence in German (where words are, on average, 50% longer than in English) but much longer than a sentence in Chinese (which uses square characters that don’t take up much space). A good on-device localizer will identify places where the translated text may be taking over the entire page, or leaving lots of empty spaces.

How do I get started with on-device localization testing?

It’s not hard. You first want to plug your translated text into the app, and then send the beta version to your testers, along with a step-by-step walkthrough guide. Platforms such as Testflight and HockeyApp can be especially useful for sharing your beta version.

On-device localization testers will go through your app carefully. They’ll let you know if they catch any bugs—translation errors, UI display issues, untranslated strings, or translations that don’t sound natural in their actual, in-app context. Then they’ll let you know what you need to fix. Some of them can even fix the translations themselves.

Any other tips?

Of course! If you want to localize like a pro, here are a few pieces of advice to keep in mind:

1. Write your walkthrough guide very, very clearly.

Make a list detailing which parts of the app you need to have tested. And remember: some screens, such as error messages, may need a special trigger.

2. Hire a professional translator for the job.

Just because someone is fluent in two languages doesn’t mean that they can give you an accurate, readable, consistently excellent translation. And it doesn’t mean that they’ll catch every error during an on-device walkthrough.

People with translation backgrounds tend to do a better job test-driving your mobile app. It’s fine if you want the same person who translated your app to test it, but keep in mind that sometimes a blind tester, who has never seen the app before, will do a better job.

3. Testers can also tell you if your app fits their local culture.

It’s not just about the language. Fonts, graphics, and other details that jibe well in one culture may not be as popular in another. Your Japanese on-device localization tester, for example, can tell you if your little cartoon character will creep out Japanese users, or if your logo reminds him of a brand of toilet paper, or other cultural quirks that you might never be able to foresee.

Your turn!

Have you had experience with on-device localization tests? Are there any tips that we missed, or questions that we should have answered? Let us know in the comments! We always love to hear from readers.

P.S. We offer on-device localization testing services. Please check this out if you’re looking for help.

Why Game Translation Continues To Strive

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Patrick Yip

Gamers are constantly seeking new games to “destroy”, I mean to complete and if it’s in the language they speak in, then that’s a plus. In the past recent years, game developers have gotten smarter and taken the smart route in finding some of the best translation services to help localize their games and making sure translation are up to scratch.

You see, back in the days, Japanese game developers didn’t have the budget nor manpower to provide good translation, which resulted in bad Engrish and not to mention the terrible grammar that caused amusements amongst gamers as well as the general public. At least, it got people talking about Zero Wing. This definitely got game developers to think about hiring a team of professional translators to avoid humiliation especially since they’re planning to break into an international market. Trust me, no one wants to see a big red flag on their first product launch.

Good Translation is Needed in a Game Environment

One of the things a hardcore gamer would tell you (besides all of the latest cheat tricks) is that it’s all about the whole gaming experience. Gaming is a way of inviting players into a virtual world, where to a certain extent it needs to provide satisfaction and excitement. Not only do players expect to see high definition and compelling graphics as well as enthralling music, the text on the screen and the characters’ dialogue all play a vital part. This vital part refers to perfect translation of course! When a mistranslation appears on the screen or in the character’s dialogue, this automatically dampens the player’s mood and the whole gaming experience is lost. That’s when you know it’s definitely game over (no pun intended)!

Localized Games is the Way to Go

According to a 2010 study by Distimo (PDF), localized apps received more downloads (up to 128 percent) per country. It’s much more likely for customers to buy your game if it’s available in their native language. Good quality translation equals increase in purchase obviously.

The Impact of Terrible Translation

Gamers are certainly likely to react more emotionally to any translation fails than a mistranslation or spelling error on a Chinese menu. No joke, but gamers, who are dedicated and committed will take everything seriously when it comes to gaming. Even a slight mistranslation is a big NO-NO!

Be Wary of Game Jargon

It’s no surprise that the gaming business has its own specialised terminology or slang if you would prefer and this can be difficult to translate. For example, in a gaming world, the word “tank” occurs when the target is intended to be the one taking direct damage. However, this could be confused with the noun meaning: ‘a large receptacle or storage chamber’ or even the verb meaning: ‘the bus stopped to tank up’.

To avoid these kind of silly mistakes, hire a professional game translator, who will have a clear and strong understanding of the gaming industry.

What Are Needed for Best Game Translation?

Translating a game for your localized market is important and might seem like a lot of work. You must have nailed the following to ace the best results:

Get a Real Gamer Translator
- The gaming world is full of slang. A translator without any gaming experience will be lost in tons of mysterious words – HP, MP, gank, etc. To make your and your gamers’ lives easier, get a translator who is a hard-core gamer.
On-device Testing
- In translation, context is the king. In current scenes, game translators usually work on 2-column spreadsheets with some reference materials. However this cannot ensure that translators is 100% informed with the context. So on-device testing can secure any translation gets wrong.
Experienced Localization Manager
- There is a proven process to deliver good quality of translation for games. An experienced localization manager helps avoid the quality issues caused by missing steps in the process.

Do you need more resources about game localization? Get our new ebook “The Beginners’ Guide to Mobile Game Localization” for free.

Getting Started with Mobile Game Localization

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Patrick Yip

Updates: We just published our new ebook, “The Beginners’ Guide to Mobile Game Localization,” by the end of December 2014. The ebook offers a step-by-step guide to localizing your mobile game. Get it free.

Introduction

What is the best way to acquire multiple growth in gamers? Well it’s without a doubt that mobile game localization is on the checklist of things to do. After reading this mobile game localization tutorial, you will be aware of the 6 key things to consider before you get started on your next project.

The ROI of mobile game localization is very promising. Take QuizUp, for example, the hottest and revolutionized trivia game around. Its game developer for Plain Vanilla Games has localized QuizUp into four languages (German, Spanish, French and Portuguese).

Not surprisingly, QuizUp’s user growth quickly skyrocketed to 20 million international users.

Of course mobile game localization is not rocket science. You don’t need to hire a few PhDs for that, but there’s still some work that needs to be done.

Below are some crucial steps behind the localization process.

1. Decide Which Languages to Localize

It should be the dream of all the game studios to conquer as many gamers worldwide. But you must first decide where you want to begin your localization journey.

Languages determine everything in a localization project: ROI, budge as well as your target audience.

Here are some questions below that will help you before beginning your localization project.

How many users can you reach by localizing into your desired language?
What’s the (ROI) profitability of localizing into a language?
How are your competitors doing in localization? How’re you going to beat them (competitor analysis)?

Tips: Use Analytics Tools to Judge

Using analytics tool would be useful in dealing with all these above questions. App analytics tools such as AppAnnie and Sensor Tower would be a great choice to guide your app market analysis. These tools provide you country data and competitor intelligence by vertical, so that you can study and judge the results.

If you’re looking for a free option, OneSky’s AppGrader is a small tool that helps you check the localization progress of an app. We would also provide an estimate of how many users you can reach with a designated localization plan.

2. Choose the Best Translation Method

Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to get your game translated. Traditionally people rely on translation agency or have to build their in-house translation team. But thanks to crowdsourcing technology, gamers could also become your translators now.

If you have launched your game and have already built up a strong user base, you can crowdsource your translation project. The work of crowdsourced translation can be excellent with the showcases of Whatsapp and Facebook.

However, quality assurance is still a concern in most crowdsourced projects. Knowing a language does not mean you’ll become a good translator. Having a single translation problem may induce serious issues. When Minecraft crowdsource its Afrikaans translation, a crowd translator added a racial slur in the game. The Minecraft developer had to apologize for the issue.

Tips: Combine Crowdsourced and Pro Approaches

So you have to carefully pick the translation method that fits your case. A nice mix of crowdsourced and professional translation method may achieve the best translation quality and promotion outcome. Options include:

Translated by your gamers (Crowdsourced translation)
Translated by professional translators (Professional translation)
Translated by gamers, reviewed by professional translators
Translated by professional, voted the best by gamers, and so on.

Tips: Treat Crowdsourcing as a Marketing Campaign

A brilliant crowdsourced translation project should be also a marketing campaign. Crowd translators build a sense of ownership when helping out your project, and grow loyalty to your game (Hey! I helped translate this game… at least partly!).

You just need some tricks to motivate your translators. The key is making the experience fun and rewardable. Give your contributors some gifts, be it virtual items or actual products. Make a leaderboard to honour the most dedicated. Share the pre-launched content with volunteers. You name it. Only you know how to treat your gamers good.

3. Set a Reasonable Timeline

Translation is art. All art takes time to harvest, unless all you need is just something like a poorly photoshopped meme. Even if your game is a small one, you need to be patient to expect with pro level quality translation.

A rule of thumb is that a professional translator can translate up to 2000 words per day. So the basic formula of days required to complete your translation project is the total word count divided by 2000. The number of days required increases with more QA measures taken, the expected translation quality and the difficulty of translating the source content.

Tips: Reserve Your Time for Translator’s Inquiries

Many people would think translation is a solo quest, thinking that a translator sits behind a laptop, murmuring about your game in a foreign language. But the truth is, translation is best with co-op mode. Translators often needs clarification of the meaning of the source text. For example: The word “Kill” is it referring to a verb or a noun? Is the speaker of the dialogue a male or female? So its important to assign a team member to feed your translator info. Provide more context to your source strings, so that translators can craft for the best outcome (See #6 for details).

If your game is large with as many as ten thousands words, your team members may take up to a day to reply translators’ inquiries. Yeah, translation is tough, but it’s worth your time when you get millions of installs.

4. Isolate All Text Strings from Source Code

Localization process is to translate all of the text strings displayed by your mobile game. To do this, you have to extract all text from your executable code into resources files.

Resource files should consist of one or more key-value pairs along with optional comments. The resources files should be separated by language. The resources files are able to be integrated into your app when correctly stored.

It means that you should avoid “hard coding” any text into your source code. Ask your engineers for strings extraction programmatically or manually.

There are different file types for different platforms. iOS uses .string file format, while Android support .xml file format. You may follow Apple’s and Google’s guidelines respectively.

Tips: Wrap Strings to Support Various Grammar Rules

Well-extracted strings help preserve the meaning of source strings, and let translators produce better quality translations.

Sometimes, the extraction may depend on how the source code is written and therefore it may distort the grammatical structure of a string. Since language is a highly complicated matter, what sounds correct in English might not be correct in other languages. Therefore, engineers who work on localization must be very careful. The trick of the trade here is make wrapping supports various grammar rules. Major items include (a) subject-object-verb order, (b) plurality and (c) gender.

Subject-object-verb order

The sequencing of subject-object-verb in a sentence can affect its meaning. English adopts the order of subject-verb-object (SVO, like I eat an apple), but the most common order by number of known languages is subject-object-verb (SOV).

If the process of string wrapping does not consider the issue of SOV order, it might incur a translation problem. See the examples below:

<?=translate(“You have got”)?><?=$Item?>
<?=translate(“You have got %{Item}”, array(‘Item’ => $Item))?>

Example 1 will encounter translation issues in languages like Japanese. As for Japanese, the object should be put in front of the verb: あなたは%{Item}を持っている。

Plural forms

English simply have two plural forms: singular and plural. But some languages contain complicated plural forms. Let’s take Russian as an example.

The Russian word of “sword” would have:

Singular Form: меч or 1 меч
Plural Form
- No number: мечи
- Number ends in 2, 3, 4 excluding 12, 13, 14: 22 меча
- Number is 11-14 or ends in 11-14 or ends in 0, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9: 111 мечей
- Number ends in 1 excluding 11: 131 меч
- Fractional number: 125.5 меча

Gender

There is approximately one fourth of the world’s languages that possess grammatical gender classes. In these languages, every noun contains a gender value (such as masculine or feminine). The gender class of noun will affect the use of agreement or an article in a sentence.

Let say French for example. The word “bicycle” carries a masculine noun class, so “where is the bicycle?” should be “Où est le vélo”, and the response might be “Il est là” (“He is there”).

If the sentence “where is the bicycle?” is not extracted correctly, such as:

<?=translate(“Where is the”)?><?=$Item?>,

then it requires a lot of efforts from the translators to make the translation grammatically correct in terms of gender form.

The golden rule of string wrapping is to include the full sentence of a string, and consider all plural forms and gender. You may refer to our previous blog post, 4 tips for developers on preparing strings for localization for more engineering tips.

5. Prepare Style Guide and Glossary List

Both style guide and glossary list are essential for a localization project. They both provide clearer instruction for translators. A style guide is a framework for understanding how a company’s content is presented, while a glossary is a list of approved, standardized terms that are specific to your product.

Both style guide and glossary list, if they are well prepared, can help improve translation quality. With a good style guide, translators are able to adapt the game content into local culture well, consistent with your brand sentiment and tone. Glossary can greatly increase translators’ awareness of important terminologies from start, and increase translation consistency.

Typical elements in a style guide include:

Punctuation (spacing, quotation marks)
Branding elements (unique to the country or language)
Formatting (bolding, fonts, trademarks)
Tone (formal vs. informal)
Local Adaptation (how to deal with currencies, addresses, phone numbers)

6. Prepare Contexts to Translator

Translation is all about meaning, and as we all know, meaning varies with context. So giving enough context to the translator is important unless you want him/her confused.

Context becomes more significant with mobile game localization. Text within a mobile game is usually short word or phrase. So its meaning highly depends how user see the text from navigation. Whether the word “kill” means an action (to kill somebody) or a number count (how many kill does the player have) is about how it is displayed on the game screen.

If you just provide translators with dozens of anonymous phrases, they might end up their translators in just guesswork and miscommunications. No good work can be done for sure.

Therefore, providing context is necessary for translators to do their jobs right. As the project owner, you need to indicate where the associated strings are located on the screen and all necessary elements that may influence the translation process. Preparing reference materials or relevant screenshot would be very helpful for them.

Tips for RPG Games: Prepare a Dialogue List with Sufficient Information

In some languages, how the same meaning is expressed may vary with the relationship between the narrator and the listener. For languages like Japanese that highly respect for social hierarchy, you use different tones when you are speaking to senior or junior fellows.

So if your game is RPG with tons of conversations, don’t forget to prepare a dialogue list with sufficient information. You’d better prepare a detailed list of game conversation. Your list should contain the below info:

What is the dialogue?
When and where is the dialogue shown in the game?
Who is the narrator?
- Gender
- Social rank
Who is the listener?
- Gender
- Social rank

Takeaway: Always Plan Ahead

Yes, localization is not a simple task as many people would think. Good quality translations require both engineering and project management skills and efforts. But it’s worth such kind of investment as what you can get from localization is a large increase in reach of your product.

As a takeaway, I could only advise you to plan ahead. Planning at advance can save you from many troubles due to poorly preparation such as incomplete context. Please reserve sufficient time to do the planning and the preparation. Even partnership with a vendor is no excuse from all preparation tasks required, unless you just want to get poor results.

BONUS: a free beginner’s guide

We have gone through a few useful tips to kick off a game localization project in this blog post. But these tips might be not enough for you to fully go for the project, right?

We understand. That’s why we have put together a comprehensive beginner’s guide to mobile game localiation to you. This 29-page eBook teaches you how to run a game localization project step by step. From planning to coding, you will learn how to bring your game to the world.
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About OneSky

OneSky provides seamless end-to-end localization solutions for thousands of mobile apps, games, websites, and businesses worldwide. We offer professional translation services in 50+ languages and a translation management system (TMS) with API integrations and plugins to streamline your workflow. We hire and carefully screen our own translators to ensure the highest control over quality. Using OneSky’s powerful QA features, cross-functional teams collaborate efficiently to deliver faster release cycles and higher quality translations. See how you can go global at www.oneskyapp.com

Introducing New Translation Tool

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Patrick Yip

OneSky cares about the productivity and happiness of our translators. That’s why we’re excited to be launching a brand new translation tool with many improvements based on our own translators’ feedback.

The new translation tool will help translators deliver more efficient and better-quality translations.

Here are some of the major improvements:

Clean Interface

Translators may need to work on a translation project for hours. The new interface is designed to focus more on the translating itself and show the status of translations in a better way.

There’s no distracting irrelevant information—so the translators can focus on the task at hand.

Keyboard Shortcuts

We have added keyboard shortcuts for most of the common actions in translation. Experienced translators will be able to work on a faster pace by being familiar with the shortcuts.

The shortcut list will be found either at the bottom of the menu or simply pressing “?” in the tool.

Invisible Characters Made Visible

The invisible characters like spaces or line breaks are hard to spot. In our new tool, translators will now be able to make them visible by switching on the highlight feature.

Built-In Review Features

Admins or moderators may have some translations that require the translators to clarify. Disapproving translations will make it disappear from the output files. So we have added a new features to mark the translation as “Needs Revision” without disapproving it.

The translators will be able to filter by those that “need to be revised” translations in order to resolve them easily.

There are other improvements as well, including faster performance, which will lead to less errors.

Here at OneSky, we want to empower translators to provide better translations in a more efficient way through our translation technology. Thank you for everyone who contributed feedback to our new and improved tool!

Interested in our latest product developments, or more localization resources and tips? Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop and learn the best ways to go global.

How TrekkSoft Localized into over Eight Languages and Acquire Customers in 70 Countries

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Patrick Yip

This is part of our series “Bring it to the world” which profiles websites and apps that offer localized versions to reach happy users from many parts of the world.

We’re following OneSky famous users to discover their experience and philosophy of localization that makes their products so awesome to global users. This week we interviewed Valentin Binnendijk, CTO & Co-founder at TrekkSoft Ltd.

Q&A with Valentin Binnendijk, CTO & Co-founder at TrekkSoft Ltd.

1. How did you get the idea of localizing your product?

We were founded in Switzerland, and we still have offices there, in the town of Interlaken. Because Switzerland is a small European country with four official languages, we’re used to working with clients who have diverse language needs. So localizing our product was never really a question. It was a necessity.

2. Did you try any other solutions before using OneSky? What were the results?

We tried two other solutions briefly, but we didn’t go through the hassle of integrating either product through the API. We’re a startup, and one of the localization providers we considered was way too expensive for our needs. The other was just far too complicated. The user experience didn’t seem good.

3. What were the biggest challenges you encountered while localizing your product?

When you have a big, constantly-evolving app in multiple languages, it can be difficult to keep track of all the different translated versions, and to keep track of who has to translate what.

Also, we have multiple strings with only tiny variations between them. So, one challenge has been figuring out ways to merge these strings, or to change the sentences, thereby decreasing the amount of translations required.

Finally, because we have a large app, we have many different parts to our software, not all of which need to be translated into every one of our languages. It’s a challenge to keep those parts separate, and to avoid unnecessary translating. We’ve tried to use different *.po files to keep track, but that hasn’t worked especially well, so we often end up translating content that we don’t really need.

4. How did OneSky help to make your localization process more efficient?

Although there have been some caching issues, through OneSky’s API integration and syncing process we can translate and update our software on a constant basis, allowing us to keep up with the needs of our ever-evolving product.

5. Why did you choose to crowdsource your translation?

First of all, we’re a bootstrapped startup, so we don’t have a large documentation team or a huge translation budget. But we do have an engaged customer base. Crowdsourced translations let us draw on those passionate customers in order to get high quality, affordable translations. Also, crowdsourcing our translation means that the process isn’t dependent on the development team, but can involve other TrekkSoft Ltd. staff.

6. What are the top three things you love about OneSky? Why?

First, the user interface is simple, so we—and our translators—don’t have to wade through a cluttered or confusing system. Second, OneSky’s support services respond very, very quickly. And, more generally, it just works well. As a young company, we can’t waste time on clunky interfaces or unreliable platforms. We need to be able to get cheap, fast, high-quality translations. By keeping our content organized and by providing an accessible platform for our translators, OneSky makes that possible.

7. How has localization helped your product so far? Any statistics you can share?

Today, we have customers in more than 70 countries, and we are offering services in more than eight languages. We are constantly adding new languages and improving our product. OneSky helped us set up a system to make this internationalization easy, and they’ve allowed us to lay the groundwork to scale up our localization efforts.

8. Any advice for someone considering localization?

Do it as early as possible. And be sure to integrate a crowdsourcing system, even if you only have two languages. That way, your product will be set to scale up and go global, and you’ll starting thinking about entering international markets much earlier.

About Valentin Binnendijk

Valentin is CTO & Co-founder at TrekkSoft Ltd.. Follow him on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.

About TrekkSoft Ltd.

TrekkSoft Ltd. was founded in 2010 to provide exemplary online booking services for the tours and activities industry. Its service is available in more than eight different languages with clients from more than 70 countries.

What Are the Best Languages for Your App?

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Patrick Yip

What Languages Should I Translate?

You have a great app and you know by localizing that app will boost revenue and bring your product to consumers around the world. But where should you target first and which language should you start with?

Those aren’t easy questions to answer. It’s been estimated that there are more than 120 languages in the world that have at least 10 million speakers. Among this enormous diversity, choosing the best languages in which to launch your globalized business is a major decision. Fortunately, there are a number of simple steps you can take in order to select the best new languages for your product.

Two Metrics to Determine Your Next Locale

In a recent talk at Startup Asia, Google’s Tuyen Nguyen made a strong case for the importance of localization. As part of her talk, Nguyen identified two criteria for choosing new languages for an app: which language is used the most on the web and which language has the highest potential revenue. Together, these two metrics indicate the profitability of a potential market. A widely used language implies a large market size, and the potential revenue of a particular language is an indicator for the profitability of that market.

Top languages used on the web

Internet World Stats tracks internet usage statistics all over the world. According to their latest report, from June 2010, the top ten languages used on the internet are (1) English (no surprise there), (2) Chinese, (3) Spanish, (4) Japanese, (5) Portuguese, (6) German, (7) Arabic, (8) French, (9) Russian, and (10) Korean. You can reach a massive user base just by getting your product translated into these ten languages.

Which language group has the highest potential revenue?

Note that the keyword in this question is potential. In other words, it’s not the actual revenue distribution that you’ve experienced in a given market that matters, but the projected demand for apps localized to that particular place. For instance, the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) certainly have high potential revenue. These countries have in common a rapidly growing middle class, skyrocketing numbers of mobile users, and a passion for trying out new apps. We have already reported on the tremendous rise of these countries in the mobile economy (focusing on Russia and China). Clearly, BRICS are big markets with big potential—definitely markets that you do not want to miss.

Smart Way to Guide your Global Quest #1: Geo-specific Traffic Data

Overall usage and potential revenue are great metrics, but you still need to figure out how to apply them to your particular app. Yes, the top languages used on the web should always be the highest priority, but they might not be 100% accurate for your business. Certain apps do better in certain places. And there are some great tools available to help you find the right markets for your app.

Traffic data offers an easy snapshot of which regions are most interested in your product. For web apps, it’s pretty easy to analyze the geographic location of your visitors through traffic data. Both Alexa and Google Analytics offer simple displays to help you get the data right. By checking the “Audience Geography” of the Alexa index or the “Demographics” section of Google Analytics, you can view the geographic distribution of your visitors with a single glance.

(Image: Alexa index)

(Image: Google Analytics)

Smart Way to Guide your Global Quest #2: Use Competitor Analysis Tool

Another approach to get which languages for translation is using competitor analysis. By tracking competitor’s effort in internalization, we can tackle markets that are less competitive among their competitors. For mobile developers, you may use Sensor Tower’s internationalization tool to compare your progress in internationalization with your competitors. You can also compare your global efforts with other apps to see if your move into a new market has been successful.

We also offer a free localization grader to help mobile and web developers to keep track with their competitors. The difference between our tool and that of Sensor tower is that we enable you to calculate the cost-effectiveness of localization for specific language. We also provide a potential user estimate for reference.

Last Takeaway: Leverage Your Translation by Making It into a Campaign

So, just to sum up: when it comes to choosing new languages for your app, you want to start with languages that are widely used on the internet; that are associated with growing markets, such as the BRICS countries; and that are used in regions that may have shown particular interest in the untranslated version of your product.

One last takeaway: whatever the languages you choose, keep in mind that translation can be a great opportunity to generate publicity in a new market. By turning your translation into a marketing campaign, you can gain media exposure and attract more potential users who will know about, and feel invested in, your business. Everland, with its marketing campaign #CrowdfundCanada, offers a great example of a company that turned a localization project into a full-blown community effort, with impressive results.

Do you have any idea about turning a translation project into a campaign? Have you gone through the process of choosing new markets for your globalized app? Feel free to let us know by commenting below! 🙂

Feature photo credit: Horia Varlan

Reference: InternetWorldStats

Lost in Translation: How an IKEA Toy Became a Political Symbol

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Patrick Yip

A Toy by Any Other Name?

Despite being known as a city of luxury goods shopping, we saw something unusual this Monday: shoppers scrambling to get their hands on an ordinary IKEA doll. It had all started with a bungled translation, and an act of political protest against Hong Kong’s unpopular government.

The toy is called Lufsig, the Swedish word for “clumsy.” Based on the villainous wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, Lufsig is being sold by IKEA to raise money for education in developing countries. Cute, right? Until you get to the translated name.

In IKEA’s website for mainland China, Lufsig was featured with a Chinese name (路姆西). That name sounds perfectly fine in Mandarin. In the Cantonese dialect, though, it sounds quite similar to a profanity (mother’s c***).

The mistake became a viral sensation after a town hall meeting on Sunday, when a protester threw a Lufsig toy at Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-Ying. Cantonese speakers won’t have much trouble getting the joke: the phrase “throwing Lufsig” sounds like “f*** your mother.”

(Image source: Pentoy)

The photograph of the Lufsig-throwing protestor quickly gained media attention, and people dissatisfied with the current government rushed to local IKEAs to buy the toy and express their dissent. Within a day, Lufsig had sold out. It even got its own Facebook page featuring spoof pictures of the wolf in various locations.

Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese Can Be Very Different

IKEA might not mind the bump in sales. But they obviously did not intend for Lufsig to have an obscene name, nor did they mean to create a political symbol. Ikea could have avoided the whole situation if they had handled their Chinese translations a bit more sensibly.

Cantonese is widely used and is recognised as “leading language in daily use” in Hong Kong by UNESCO. Although Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, it’s very different from Mandarin, the official state language of China. Cantonese and Mandarin primarily differ in pronunciation. While Cantonese has nine tones, Mandarin has just four (and one neutral tone). And although the two languages share the Chinese alphabet, they differ markedly in the words used in daily conversation.

There are differences, too, between Chinese dialects in mainland China and other parts of the Chinese-speaking world. When it comes to writing, China increasingly uses simplified characters with simpler brushstrokes, unlike the writing in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. And phrases and vocabulary can vary quite a bit as you move from place to place.

As you bring an app into Chinese markets, it’s essential that you stay aware of the differences in Chinese dialects. If your budget allows, try to get your localization adapted for different regions. Also, be sure to consult your translators in different language variants in order to make sure that the translations are appropriate for all dialects. Otherwise, you will run the risk of offering a product that’s popular in one place, and a joke somewhere else.

Call it the IKEA Principle: Hong Kong Chinese and Mandarin Chinese are different, and if you’re not sensitive to that difference, you might end up offending someone’s mother when you think you’re just selling a cute toy.

How IKEA Dealt with the Mistranslation Case

IKEA’s may have fumbled their localization work, but their response to the issue was a smart lesson in how to deal with localization mistakes.

Once the story of Lufsig started circulating around social media in Hong Kong, IKEA was ready with a response. Whenever someone used Facebook to ask why Lufsig had such an inappropriate Chinese name, IKEA would redirect the discussion toward the charitable purpose of the toy. After Lufsig became a symbol of political protest and sold out at all Hong Kong stores, IKEA Hong Kong posted a picture to thank customers for their support of children’s education, without making any mention of the political issue. This strategy allowed IKEA to avoid getting involved in local politics while putting a positive spin on the event, and it helped make sure that they didn’t upset their customers and the Hong Kong public.

(Source: IKEA Hong Kong’s Facebook)

IKEA also moved quickly to fix the problem. In just one night, they changed the Chinese translation of Lufsig to a new, inoffensive name (路福西). The bottom line: when you have a translation issue, move quickly.

As a creator or as a customer, have you ever encountered any hilarious cases of mistranslation? Please share with us in the comment section below! 🙂

Reference: Time, SCMP, BBC

The Secret to Speedy Crowdsourced Translation

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Patrick Yip

The Early Bird Gets the Worm

When it comes to crowdsourced translation, the sheer scale of the job can cause problems. The average app or website has so much content, and sometimes the community just can’t translate all of your materials very quickly.

Meanwhile, by the time you’ve translated every part of your product, your competitors may have already moved into that new market and established a foothold that’s hard to challenge. Fortunately, with a few tricks, you can learn to prioritize your content as effectively as possible, allowing for fast, accurate crowdsourced translations. You’ll be around the world in no time!

The Trick: Content Prioritization

You want a crowdsourced translation. You need it fast. Here’s the one phrase you need to know: content prioritization.

Simply put, you don’t need to wait until the completion of a translation project to launch your product in new language versions. It’s much quicker to identify the most important content, get it translated, and then deploy it immediately. The earlier you launch new language versions, the earlier you can test the potential of a new market or a non-English speaking community (for more on testing apps in new markets, see this post). An earlier launch helps you plan a more sophisticated marketing campaign. Plus, first comers in a market tend to enjoy more media exposure and other PR opportunities.

How to Prioritize Content Quickly and Accurately

You can prioritize your content manually—just look at the web portal and mark the content that you think is most important to translate. But is that content really important? Or is it just you who thinks it’s important? A data-driven approach is more reliable. That way, content is prioritized according to the users’ needs, not your gut feelings.

You can get useful data by harnessing user feedback, or through automation. Both methods offer simple and quick solutions.

Solution #1: Feedback and Voters

Always begin a crowdsourcing campaign with your community. Remember that the magic behind crowdsourcing is that the accumulation of small tasks can generate outstanding results. By letting your users choose the content that’s most important to them, you make their experiences central to your consideration.

Voting is a powerful tool for crowdsourcing decision-making. Set up a voting page for members of the community to decide which parts of the work require the most attention. If you prefer to have fewer people involved in content prioritization, you can consider asking for help from your community manager and some of your superusers.

Keep in mind that voting is a form of user contribution. Be sure to recognize this contribution.

Solution #2: Automation

Another solution to content prioritization is to let the data speak for themselves. You can use analytics tools—think Google Analytics—to automatically record traffic data, such as page views. The volume of page views indicates the importance of the content, and thus its priority for translation.

You can also use other web analytics metrics like Page Authority (PA), developed by Moz. PA shows how a given webpage is likely to rank in Google.com’s search results. It is calculated based on data from dozens of factors tracked by Moz, such as the number of backlinks. It can also indicate how important a given part of your content is in terms of organic search reach.

You can also implement traffic trackers for all strings of content that will need to be translated. The tracker is able to record the number of views by user, and it is useful to order the priority of the content at the string level.

Organizing Prioritized Content

After prioritizing content for translation, you need to show the content to your translators in an organized way.

Divide the Content into Chunks

The first step is to split the work into small pieces. The actual size of the chunks depends on the nature of your translating community. If your community consists of a few highly committed members, you can chop the content into chunks that can be finished within a couple days. If your community has a lot of users, you can divide the content into bits that are only one or two sentences long.

Display the Content Priority to Translators

You should then sort the content for your volunteer translators according to priority of translation. You can even display a priority bar for each bit of content. Still, the content priority should only suggest which content you want translated first. Make sure to let your crowdsourced translation team vote with their feet by working on the content that seems most important to them.

Case Study: Airbnb

Airbnb has used content prioritization to get a quick crowdsourced translation. Through prioritization, Airbnb managed to launch a website in a new language in under a week.

As a global travel rental company, Airbnb wanted to launch a natively translated Japanese website. And, because they have a passionate community of Airbnb hosts, they chose to use crowdsourcing.

However, Airbnb’s websites, email templates, and mobile apps contain 400,000 words of English content. That kind of translation can’t be done in just a couple days. As a result, content prioritization becomes essential for a speedy localization.

Airbnb set up a translation infrastructure that counted the frequency with which users saw a particular phrase. They employed a t() method on their Rails server. For instance,

The instrument t() let translators know how to prioritize phrases for translation. If the phrase was seen by a user but had no translation yet, it was automatically recorded on a collection of all strings for translation. The phrase view was stored cumulatively in the server at a site-wide scale. This enabled Airbnb to prioritize the phrases based on their importance in terms of visibility.

Taken together, Airbnb showed their Japanese translators a view of all pages/emails on their site, and ordered the pages in terms of translation completeness in Japanese and importance overall.

(Airbnb’s translation platform)

Airbnb’s features have been developed over the past five years, but their localization team only wanted to get the newer, more important parts translated. Therefore, the ‘importance’ column represented the number of page views in the past 4 days only. That way, Airbnb just needed to instruct their translators to start at the top of the list of pages/emails and work all the way down.

After adopting these strategies, Airbnb was able to launch Airbnb.jp, their Japanese website, in only one week.

Last Takeaway: Study What Local Users Might Really Want

One last piece of advice: know the need of potential users in new markets. The preferences and concerns of users differ from places. For instance, Western users might pay more attention to privacy-related content than Asian users do. Because of these differences, studying your potential user base is an important part of content prioritization. It can help to segment your users by geographical location, and then researching any distinctive patterns.

Your Turn!

Have you ever tried one of these crowdsourced translation strategies? We love to hear what you have to say about your experiences with speedy solutions in crowdsourced translation! Just leave us a comment below.

Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts about the best strategies, tips, and practices for crowdsourced translation. We want to help you make your translation project a success!

Feature photo: Flickr

Reference: Airbnb Engineering Blogs, Wiki4us

Why Did Facebook Change Its Thumb Icon?

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Patrick Yip

Facebook’s thumb has disappeared on websites

As you may have noticed, the iconic Facebook thumb icon has made an exit. Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, seen more than 22 billion times every day and embedded on 7.5 million websites are now getting their first ever redesign.

The new Like button features the Facebook “f” logo instead of a thumb. It is white on blue, rather than blue on white. The same is true for the new share button, which replaces Facebook’s Send button.

The reason for the redesign, according to Facebook developers, is to optimize the new design for high-resolution screens. But that’s probably not the full story.

Another Reason to Replace the Thumb: Cross-Cultural Confusion

Apart from Facebook’s stated motives for the redesign, there are also some compelling reasons for a redesign from a localization perspective. As a general rule, a single gesture may have very different connotations in different cultures. And while the thumbs-up signal is common in the United States and many other countries, it may be seen as inappropriate in some places. Facebook’s users come from more than 70 countries, so it’s important for Facebook to ensure the cross-cultural appropriateness of its content.

A “thumbs-up” can have multiple meanings

While a thumbs-up sign is a positive signal in North America, it can be used to insult someone in West Africa, South America, Iran, and the Italian island of Sardinia. In Iran, it is traditionally an obscene gesture, equivalent to the use of the middle finger in the Western world.

A survey conducted by Desmond Morris, Peter Collett, Peter Marsh and Marie O’Shaughnessy reveals how the meanings of “thumbs-up” are interpreted based on 1,200 informants from 40 different locations from all over the world. The results are as follows:

Thumbs-up meanings

Frequencies

O. K.

738

The Number One

40

Sexual Insult

36

Hitch-hiking

30

Directional

14

Other

24

Not Used

318

A raised thumb can also have numerical meanings. For example, the thumbs-up sign is used to represent the number one in Germany and Hungary; in Japan, it represents the number five.

Other examples: the okay gesture

The meanings of many other gestures can vary across cultures—something that developers of global apps have to keep in mind. Take the okay sign, made by forming a circle with the thumb and index finger. In Brazil, Germany, Russia, and many other countries around the world, that gesture is sexually offensive. The sign may mean “okay” in the United States, but in Japan it means “money,” and it is commonly used to signify “zero” in France. Clearly it is not okay to use in many parts of the world.

Localization is Crucial for Global User Experience

Drawing on the Facebook thumb example, it should be clear that understanding cross-cultural meanings is crucial to building a cross-cultural product. Culturally inappropriate material in some regions can hurt your business, often in ways that the developers would never imagine. For instance, Pepsi lost its dominant market share to Coke in Southeast Asia when it changed the color of its vending machines and coolers from deep blue to light blue, a color that’s associated in that region with death and mourning.

Deliberate research about local cultures and customs is crucial to localization success. Fortunately, there are some valuable resources that can help you learn more about local cultures. Kwintessential, for instance, provide comprehensive country profiles that cover cultures around the world. You can learn about the core values of the target culture and pick up some useful examples of local business etiquette.

You can also make use of crowd power by posting questions on popular Q&A sites. On websites such as Quora, there are always knowledgeable members who are eager to answer any question, on topics that range from astronomy to grocery stores. Put up a question about local customs, and you can have some insider perspective just a few days later.

Don’t accidentally insult your global clients when you launch in a new market! Subscribe to our newsletter to learn the best resources on going global.

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