Systems and Technology

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IT systems have an important impact on the quality and speed of the localization process. Their use improves the consistency of translation by means of translation memories and the speed and overall success of the project by improving the communication between clients and suppliers.

Main types of localization tools include:

• Computer Assisted Translation (tools, why?, benefits)
• Desktop Publishing Software (tools, why?, benefits)
• Terminology Management (tools, why?, benefits)
• Localization Tools (tools, why?, benefits)
• Internet Communication (tools, why?, benefits)

The following sections explain these tools more in details.

Computer Assisted Translation

• TRADOS 5
• IBM Translation Manager v. 2.5

These tools basically record all translation activity and store source and target language sentences in such a way, that a single sentence is never translated twice.

The benefit for the translator is that the translation speed is increased. The benefit for the user is consistency and quality: The same sentences and words are translated always the same way, reducing the error rate by a factor of 2-5. Also, the maximum project size per translator increases, leading to fewer errors due to communication between groups of translators.

Desk Top Publishing

Examples:

• Adobe FrameMaker v.6
• Adobe PageMaker v.6.5

DTP-Tools are frequently used in translation projects because certain components of the product documentation (marketing, brochures, sometimes manuals...) tend to put emphasis on layout and graphics. So these tools are necessary to deal with text swell in these documents.

Terminology Management

Examples:

• TRADOS MultiTerm’95 Plus v.1.52

Terminology management allows to coordinate the work of several translators both in the case of large projects and over time when working on similar projects. MultiTerm allows to maintain a single terminology even within large projects.

Localization Tools

• Corel CATALYST Enterprise v.3.0
• Pass Engineering Passolo
• Accent Locale v.2.0
• Jargon v. 4.1.2
• Microsoft RLTools v.1.88
• RC-Win Trans v.5.6

Localization tools allow to localize software that was not designed to be multilingual. These tools take finished .EXE and .DLL files and extract all resources that might need to be localized (strings, logos, ...). This is particularly convenient if a software product needs to be localized as fast as possible (time-to-market).

However, on the long run it is advisable to change the software design to include a multilingual architecture because of issues such as date, time and currency formats. Also, software releases can be made much faster and cheaper if the software is designed to be multilingual. Ask us for advice if you are interested to hear more about internationalization issues.