When your company sets up a DITA process, you achieve most of the operational targets as far as content re-use is concerned. Two aspects can fall short of expectations: Localization costs remain the same, […]
The DITA bird – on a quest to find its origins
As we are only days away from Christmas, here’s on a lighter note the story we unveiled about the DITA bird.
The DITA bird looks like a common backyard sparrow pecking at the ground for a grain or a […]
Four variants to untranslated content
In our last post, we talked about how we deal with software variants in localization projects. As far as software goes, you have roughly two cases: the software is translated and available in various languages. OR, the software is not translated and only […]
Software options in localization projects
The most common place where you are liable to find mentions of software options is in the online help belonging to the product itself.
The next place is in the product documentation (User’s Guide, etc).
But then, it is also very common that in a localization project, we need to deal […]
Why we hate localizing PDF files
We are very often requested to localize PDF files for brochures and datasheet especially when their creation was outsourced to a creation agency. We always ask our customer to provide us with source files since there are a lot of drawbacks […]
Machine translation, the way of the future?
Machine Translation has long been used as a tool for ‘gisting’, to get an approximate translation for self use. Professional translators are often not willing to accept projects which entail post-edition of Machine Translation. Typical excuses include: “the machine translation quality is too poor” or “it’ll take me less […]
Do you speak International English?
When a customer wants to translate a document into English, the first question to ask is “Do you want to translate it into US English or UK English?”
Most clients didn’t really think about it and will answer “International English”. But do you know what International English – also called […]
Translation, Transliteration or Transcription – that is the question!
Some companies manage data defined and provided by a single, identified source outside the company, usually a standards organisation. These data, called Reference Data, are generally key to the company’s core activities. Most often, they are shared by manifold companies, systems, applications, and/or processes.
Typical examples of reference data are […]
L10N, T9N, I18N or G11N–a new language?
I bet you have encountered the acronyms L10N, T9N or I18N and you’re wondering what they mean. The answer is simple: in our industry, we all look for ways to be more productive. We realized that we kept writing long words such as Localization, Translation or Internationalization and we […]