STAR TS Translation Services Blog

We’re often asked, how to I know that you can translate my website or application? Sometimes developers need to check – will their application still function correctly after it is translated?

Often due to bad coding practices a program might crash or perhaps not all the text is visible to the translator so can’t be translated. How do you test your product without paying a translation company to translate all your product? So how do you check your product can be translated?

Simple: Pseudo Translation.

Pseudo translation is a technique we use at STAR that can model a translation quickly an easily. Basically its a pretend or mock translation. In simple terms what you do is replace all the vowels with accented characters (foreign language characters). So just like the “Hello” logo above we pseudo translated this to “Hélló”. We can do this for free for most clients we work with and it is really fast.  It serves three key purposes:

1. You can see if your product still works with foreign characters.

2. Your English team can check your product out easily as they can still read the text.

3. You can clearly check that all your text is visible to the translation company and translatable.

Visit our Pseudo Translation page for a more technical description.

If you’re developing a product its useful to talk to your language partner early on in the design of your product, we can give you advice on how best to design your brochures, products and websites to ensure they are easy to translate when the time comes.

Enterprise Ireland – eMarketing Workshop

Crowne Plaza Hotel, Dublin 20 / October 2011

Today we attended an excellent event on international web design, marketing and communication run by Enterprise Ireland in the Crown Plaza in Blanchardstown.

The opening address was by Jennifer Condon, Divisional Manager of EI who spoke about the importance of the web in driving Irelands future success.

Aileen O’Toole director of Amas spoke about the growth of the internet and ecommerce sales for Irish companies. Some facts included:

• 72% of households access the internet at home, a very high penetration.
• Your online presence will directly impact your offline sales.
• 90% of people surveyed in Europe prefer to browse websites in thier local language – so translation is important.
• Bad translation will lose you business and advised against using free tools like Google Translate.

Next up was Gareth Dunlop who gave an amazing presentation on how Content Is King!

Gareth Dunlop and Damian Scattergood discuss the advantages on good online content.

Gareth’s presentation style is very relaxed and direct to the point. Creating good content is important. He showed us an example of a stock photograph of a group of people used on 10 different websites. “Surely these people don’t work for all these companies” he said! Creating your own photo’s and content shows an honesty that comes across to your customers.

In the old days websites just had the basic’s – visitors to your site now demand content they can use – however as Gareth says…

Internet Simplicity if Very Difficult to achieve.

Ed Field CEO of Digino Marketing speaking to Damian Scattergood at Enterprise Irelands eMarketing Workshop.

Ed Field from Digino Marketing followed with the next step – communicating your message to your target audience. I found this very thought provoking. Ed had a slightly different spin on the classic USP. We all talk about Unique Selling Points and Elevator pitches, but at the end of the day Ed asks…

What are you brilliant at?

Its amazing how a simple question can show up answers. We all struggle to define what our USP’s are, but I can tell you instantly what we can brilliant at. “We are probably the best technical translators in the world.”  We are excellent at technical documents and technical marketing. Now how do I get that message across on our website and marketing material. Certainly its a lot easier than defining a USP statement.

When clients visit your website you have to get their attention in 6 seconds – and convince them in under 3 minutes. So there is no space on your website for fluffy text. People just want answers. When was the last time you visited an airline website to see what planes they have – never? You just want to buy a seat. Does this apply to your business?

Now – once you have all this sorted out on your website – can you now do it in 12 languages? That was John Coburns topic International Search Engine Marketing

Wow – it was an excellent morning, plenty of thought provoking ideas and work for us to do on our own export sales.

Certified Localisation Professional (CLP) Level 1 training and certification 2011

Registration is now open for Certified Localisation Professional (CLP) Level 1 courses offered online and onsite in Silicon Valley, Boston Area, and Barcelona in 2011. Click here for more details.

• The CLP Programme sponsors include Alchemy Software Development, Multilingual Computing Inc., SDL, and Aquino Translation Software.

The courses consist of a combination of ten self-learning online modules and a four-day onsite intensive training and examinations session.

• Introduction to Information Technology
• Localisation and the Software Engineering Life-cycle
• Software I18N Enablement and Character Handling
• Localisation Kitting and File Preparation
• User Interface Localisation Tools (PC)
• Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) Tools (PC)
• Introduction to Terminology, Term Bases, and Terminology Resources
• Introduction to Test Plans, Scripts/Cases, Bug Reporting, and Classification
• Introduction to Website Localisation
• Introduction to Localisation Project Management

Certification details

• There are two different registration fee levels; one including distribution of permanent licenses for successful participants, and excluding software licenses.
• All successful participants will receive TILP Level 1 CLP Certification.

If you cannot make it this year, please forward to other friends, colleagues, or organizations that might be interested.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

We hope to see you at one of the course locations!

TILP Event Planning

www.tilponline.net

Localization World Silicon Valley promises to be an exciting conference with great networking and business opportunities and many informative sessions.

As per previous years there will be  have a diverse program complete with lively social events and plenty of business opportunities. To relax the location lends itself to easy side trips along the California coast and points inland such as Napa Valley.

For more information on the event visit: Localization World.

The Hatton, London, 17th and 18th November 2011

Translating and the Computer 33 Conference Provisional Programme

The programme content has just been published for the ASLIB conference:

A new machine translation service for the European Commission
Spiridon Pilos, European Commission

Automatic translation tools at WIPO
Bruno Pouliquen, WIPO

NATO Terminology Programme and NATOTerm
Ian Jones, Chairman of NATO Translation & Terminology Systems Advisory Group (NTTS AG) and Chairman of Terminology Sub-Group of the NATO Standardization Staff Group

An introduction to Internationization Activity at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and its Working Groups, in particular with regards to HTML5 and its proposed changes to the markup used for internationalization
Richard Ishida, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

Using seed terms for crawling bilingual terminology list from the Web: Analysing and diagnosing the system performance
Kyo Kageura, University of Tokyo and Takeshi Abekawa, National Institute of Informatics

Machine Translation between Uncommon Language Pairs via a Third Common Language: The Case of Patents
Benjamin K. Tsou and Bin Lu, The Hong Kong Institute of Education

An effective Model for Insertion of Translation Technologies into US Government Translation Environments
Carol Van Ess-Dykema, National Virtual Translation Centre & John S. White, MITRE Corporation

And much more…

For more information on attending the conference contact Helen Evans at ASLIB.

I see this week on Common Sense Advisory’s website the the EC has un-cancelled its tender for CAT tools. Quite an interesting story for those following translation technology and political institutions.

In 2010, the European Commission (EC) opened a tender for bids on computer-assisted translation (CAT) and translation memory (TM) tools to which a number of well-known industry firms responded. In July 2011, a “Corrigendum” was issued declaring the awarding procedure unsuccessful. The reason given? “None of the submitted tenders met the minimum quality criteria.” Understandably, the companies that invested time and cost in responding to the tender expressed disappointment.

For more information visit: Common Sense Advisory

What a long title. However if you’ve ever damaged a string in your code (HTML/JAVA/XML) and need to covert or escape it again here is a great tool that will do the job quickly and efficiently for you.

For Unicode Conversion:

http://people.w3.org/rishida/tools/conversion/

You have the option of working from Mixed character strings, UTF8 and UTF16.  It also will convert and show escaped characters for Javascript and Unicode U+hex notation to name just a view. Should solve most character code conversion issues for you.

Thanks to Richard Ishida at W3 for doing all the hard work for us.

LRC Best Thesis Award 2011 : Call for entries

Closing Date for entries – 02 September 2011

The Localistation Reserach Centre and Symantec Ireland are pleased to announce the 2011 LRC Best Thesis Award, sponsored by Symantec.

The LRC Best Thesis Award is an annual award given to the auther of the best research publication in an area relevent to internationalisation and localisation.

Students who have completed a thesis on a revelent localistion theme within the past two years are invited to submit their work to the LRC for consideration. Theses may be submitted prior to their degree award and will be judged by a panel of academic and in-dustry experts.

The winner will receive €1,000 and one of Symantec’s professional retail products.

The scope of the entries for the award need not be confined to a technical linguistic area, and applications are also invited from students who are carrying out research into com-mercial and management aspects of the localisation industry.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Localisation Workflows
• Crowd Sourcing in Localisation
• Global Web Design and Content Management
• Machine Translation
• Computer Aided Translation
• Terminology Management
• Internationalisation and Global Software Design

For more information on the awards visit www.localisation.ie or email LRC@ul.ie

Proposals may be sent by email to LRC@ul.ie

Or by mail to:

Localisation Research Center,
CSIS Department, University of Limerrick,
Ireland

Did you know that according to Google, a majority of users surveyed felt that having information in their own language was more important than a low price?

Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Often those are going to be pages that are localised for the user’ s location and or in the user ‘s language.

If you’re planning to take the time to create and maintain a localised version of your website, making it easy to recognise and find is a logical part of that process.

Google Webmasters post series takes a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages.

Visit Googles WebMasters page for complete information

STAR Translation helps our clients do more international business by providing website translation services and support in over 40 languages.

1.    English proofreading services.
Language is STAR’s business so we have English proofreaders on our teams. You may not need translation, but perhaps your latest documents could do with a good proofreading.

You may be working on your latest tender submission or updating your website for English readers and need your text checked for consistency or ease of understanding. Our English proofreading teams can help you.
We also provide proofreading in all the languages we translate into.

2.    US English and UK English Translation
Gasoline or Petrol, Zucchini or Courgette? We provide US English and UK English conversions and vice-versa on a regular basis for clients. Ecommerce providers often have different sites for their English-speaking customers around the globe.

Having your website checked for spelling mistakes can improve your online sales.

3.    Voiceovers
Need a video translated? We provide voiceover translation and actors for all our languages.

4.    Document Conversion
Paper, FrameMaker, InDesign, QuarkExpress, PDF, etc. From lost originals to just conversion to the latest document system, we can help you.

Occasionally you may have to translate a project where you have lost your original sources. STAR’s desktop publishing teams have the experience and expertise to recreate almost any document. Even if you only have a scanned image or PDF, we can recreate your documents for you.

You may also have decided to retire some older software and move your documents to the latest design package like InDesign. We can help make that transition easier for you.

5.    Software Localization
Whether you are developing a desktop application or an iPad app we can help you deliver your software in multiple languages.

STAR has its own software development teams. We are a developer of document and information technology ourselves, so we know the challenges of international software design.

We can give you advice on what the best steps are for your project, including enabling and software localization services.

Download our PDF document on first time Localization

Contact us today for a quote:

PHONE:
from USA/UK: +353 1 8365614
from Ireland: 01 8365614