Month: May 2021

How to Prepare Your Localization for Success
19/05/2021

How to Prepare Your Localization for Success

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on How to Prepare Your Localization for Success

Navigating the localization waters for the first time can be scary. You may be launching your product or expanding your services to markets that are unknown to you. And while it can be quite challenging, the benefits and the growth that it can lead to are worth it. Having a roadmap before you embark on this endeavor will definitely give you peace of mind. Here, we lay out some steps that will guide your localization project and ensure a smooth process.

1. Analyze the Project 

Before actually starting a localization project, it’s important that you first identify what steps will be necessary according to the specifics of your project. Translation companies can help you accomplish this and establish the right workflow for the project. It’s also advisable to analyze the target market to ensure that the translation and localization efforts would make sense. You should also study whether internationalization services are required or not. To come up with the right strategy all of these factors should be taken into consideration.

2. Select the Right Team

Everyone on your localization team will play a key role in the success of the project. The team selected should have expertise on your subject matter field and should be well-versed in the language and cultural idiosyncrasies of the target market. 

You should strive to maintain a long-term relationship with them. Your team will be your most valuable asset as time passes, because they will learn how to handle localization projects in line with your preferences. Ideally, your localization team should consist of a project manager, translator, editor, and quality assurance manager. 

3. Create a Style Guide 

Consistency is key! You need to specify your desired tone, style, preferred units of measurement, and other key language details so that linguists can study those preferences beforehand. That way, when they begin working they will know exactly how to translate those materials from the get-go. This will help avoid spending time going back and correcting text that is not aligned with your preferences.

Creating a translation style guide can help improve the quality and speed of a translator’s work and will encourage consistency.

4. Create a Glossary and maintain terminology 

Alongside a style guide, creating a glossary (also known as a termbase) is a great way to ensure consistency and can benefit both parties. With a termbase, linguists can work faster knowing that the terminology included is already approved. A termbase is a database where terminology is managed and published and it contains words and expressions that have specialized meanings. The terms included — that may be prominent in any customer-facing materials — can be technical, scientific, market-specific, or political. 

You can ask the linguists to build the termbase with the important terminology or you can select the terms and work with them to find the most accurate equivalents in the target language.

5. Use technology to your advantage 

When it comes to localization, technology is on your side. Both CAT tools and quality assurance tools can make a localization project more streamlined, more accurate, and more effective. Select a CAT tool so that your team can make the best use of them while translating. CAT tools segment the text that requires translation and then present the segments in a way that is easier and faster to translate. Using a CAT tool has many benefits, as they can help increase productivity, catch mistakes, achieve consistency, and eliminate repetitive translations. 

For an even higher level of quality control, you can utilize a quality assurance tool, such as Xbench and Verifika, that instantly performs quality checks of bilingual files or translation memories. Many quality assurance tools can check for the accuracy and consistency of the following elements: spelling, grammar, number or tag mismatches, missing translations, formatting, repeated words, double spaces or punctuation marks, untranslatable terms, and inconsistencies throughout the text.

6. Maintain a Translation Memory

Once you’ve picked your CAT tool, it’s time to start building and maintaining a translation memory that stores all the translated material. A translation memory is a database that can store text that was previously translated and can help support the localization process by improving the quality and consistency of a translation project and making the work faster to complete. 

7. Define and Measure Quality

It’s essential to identify what quality means to you, so you can set clear expectations that the localization team can strive to meet. Understandably, accuracy will be an important factor, but accuracy doesn’t guarantee quality. The final text must reflect the meaning of the source text accurately, have the same intended effect, and should accomplish all project parameters. When it comes to localization, accounting for cultural differences is important as well. All clients will have different ideas of what quality means to them, so it’s vital that you lay out your expectations before beginning a localization project so your translation team knows what standards to work towards. For example, a commercial project that is customer-facing will likely have much greater quality needs than internal documents will. 

8. Handle Queries and Avoid Miscommunication

One of the best ways to ensure that throughout the whole process you have open lines of communication that lead to the best results is to communicate effectively with your team. Query sheets can be a great tool to achieve this. A query sheet acts as a centralized location where those working on complex translation projects can organize any questions and comments from all parties involved in the project. Doing this can not only help ensure accuracy and efficiency, but it can help keep the client and the translation team on the same page.

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12/05/2021

Ubiquitous Automation: Quality Assurance Tools

Posted on | by Marisol Pérez Laglaive | Leave a Comment on Ubiquitous Automation: Quality Assurance Tools

It’s true that, at least for now, no computerized tool can replace the linguistic knowledge inside a reviewer’s mind; AI solutions have difficulties reading tone, register or the nuances of context and how it affects meaning. However, they can assist translators and editors in different ways. For example, there is software that detects errors that the human eye may fail to catch. This is why these tools have become necessary in order to comply with quality standards.

Automated quality assurance software is part of the wide range of technology solutions that addresses different needs within the localization industry. Basically, they allow reviewers to instantly perform quality checks of bilingual files or translation memories, supporting a variety of different formats.

Linguistic Checks

Quality assurance tools scan bilingual files in search of linguistic and formatting errors. This can be specifically helpful to perform a final check on a very large project that includes a considerable amount of files and/or text to review. Furthermore, they are also a useful resource to spot and remedy inconsistencies among files translated or edited by different teams of vendors.

Most of the tools perform the following checks:

  • Spelling
  • Grammar
  • Number or tag mismatches
  • Missing translations
  • Formatting
  • Repeated words
  • Double spaces or punctuation marks
  • Untranslatables
  • Inconsistencies: identical source segments with different target text; identical translations for different source segments

Extra Help

Auto quality assurance tools also allow reviewers to check terminology issues. Users can import glossaries or term bases into the software, so that it can find any key term mismatch. On the other hand, quality assurance tools always update and redefine their settings to reduce the amount of false positives on their evaluations. False positives are correct segments wrongly flagged as errors. In this regard, quality assurance applications include features that allow the user to create rules in order to reduce the number of false positives in a report.  

One Feature for Every Need

Different quality assurance tools offer the same core function, but vary in other aspects. For example, some are specifically intended to integrate with other CAT tools (e.g., LexiQA’s special integration with Transifex or Memsource), while others only work as an independent program. There are other quality assurance tools that are part of a more comprehensive solution, such as ContentQuo, a quality management platform that can integrate into translation management systems (TMS). Besides that, if considering opting for a quality assurance tool, price is also a factor. Some applications are free, like Okapi Framework CheckMate, or paid, like XBench or Verifika.

Ubiquitous Automation: Quality Assurance Tools

Another salient factor to consider is the internal editor of some of the applications. While all the tools generate reports of the errors found, only some offer the possibility to correct those mistakes directly from the report, like Verifika does. This refrains the reviewer from having to be switching in between applications: detecting the error in one working environment, applying the correction in another. In any event, reports are a very necessary function of these tools. They can be used as a required deliverable, since they ensure that a quality control has been performed and that most of the evitable errors have been avoided.

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Hispanics, Latinos, and Latinx Are They the Same
05/05/2021

Hispanics, Latinos, and Latinx — Are They the Same?

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on Hispanics, Latinos, and Latinx — Are They the Same?

We live in a very big world that is full of diverse and rich cultures, places, and people. There are many differences between our many cultures that we should celebrate, but far too often overlook. One such example of letting lines blur too easily, are the terms Hispanic, Latino, and Latinx. All three of which tend to be used interchangeably and incorrectly. These three terms are not the same and necessarily don’t represent the same groups of people. Let’s explore what each of these terms means and the one unifying factor that links these different groups together. 

Hispanics vs. Latinos vs. Latinx

Before we look at what unites these different groups, let’s look at how they differ and where some of the confusion about their differences may stem from. In many cases these terms overlap, but they do mean different things. 

  • Hispanic. The term hispanic is used to refer to those that come from a Spanish-speaking background and does not reflect their geographic location. 
  • Latino. This term does in fact relate to location and not to language. In order to classify someone as Latino, they generally need to come from the geographic region of Latin America. The term Latino includes people from many areas in Central and South America, alongside the Caribbean. In many cases people identify as both Hispanic and Latino, as both terms apply to their backgrounds. For example, someone from Brazil is a Latino, Latina or Latinx because they are from Latin America, but their language is not Spanish, it is Portuguese. Whereas someone from Colombia is both a Latino, Latina or Latinx and also Hispanic (because they speak Spanish).
  • Latinx. While the term Latinx is relatively new, it is becoming an important term used in conversations about gender equality and inclusion. Spanish is a gendered language, which means words are associated with the female or male gender. A Latin American woman is a Latina and a Latin American man is a Latino. Latinx has appeared as an alternative to being inclusive of people who don’t associate with either gender. Essentially, Latinx is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina. If someone is Latino, they are also Latinx and vice versa. The primary purpose of this term is to be inclusive of people who don’t consider themselves to be female or male.

A Diverse Presence in the US

The US Census Bureau counts anyone who says they are Hispanic as Hispanic, which allows residents to choose how they identify. As cultural norms evolve surrounding what it means to be Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx in the US today, this enables those self-reporting to identify as they see fit. As of July, 2019 it was estimated that almost 61 million Hispanics lived in the U.S. accounting for 18.5% of the nation’s total population. 

What Unites Them

Ultimately, all of these terms are labels and very wide labels at that. Within each label, there is so much diversity and many countries of origin that fall under them. Sometimes, the only thing that unites these groups is a shared language — Spanish. In the US, many Hispanics from different countries are united by their shared language. Because all these Spanish speakers of different nationalities coexist in the US and interact with each other and with English speakers, the language has and continues to evolve and adapt. The Spanish language one can hear in the US is known as US Spanish.

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