My Team:
During my localization practicum at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies I have had the opportunity to showcase both my knowledge of translation and localization by teaming up with four other students to create the team Locspire, which is currently working with the non-profit foundation Naked Heart. The senior members of the team are Russian, Chinese, and Korean translators who also have the knowledge and experience to double as localization specialists. Other members consist of junior translators who are involved with translation, editing, and review. I am a senior Russian translator and localization specialist.
The Client:
Naked Heart is a Russian based organization which is aimed at helping children with special needs. It was started by Natalia Vodianova in 2004. It was started with the goal of providing parks and playgrounds that are accessible to children with special needs. As of today the program has built over 175 parks and playgrounds. Additionally, Natlia Vodianova started the program entitled Every Child Deserves a Family in 2011, which Locspire has been involved in localizing video content for.
Project summary:
While Naked Heart is already holding events internationally, they have accepted Locspire’s help in localizing and translating content, developing terminology, as well as building a team of volunteers among other things. Naked Heart has shown great interest in releasing more content in both English and Chinese, and Locspire is helping them achieve this.
Accomplishments to Date:
Naked Heart already creates many promotional videos for the foundation in Russian, and as a member of Locspire, I personally had the great fortune of translating one of their most popular videos from Russian into English. This video explains the details of the new program Naked Heart has launched, “Every Child Deserves a Family”. The Russian version is embedded below, and the English version will be posted as soon as it is finalized.
Additionally, since Locspire has started working with Naked Heart, they have been able to publish a press release for a London based event in simplified Chinese and also follow up with a post release. The first page of the Chinese press release is shown below, and Locspire’s team of junior Chinese translators are credited with this translation.
Working towards the Future:
Locspire has not just been helping Naked Heart subtitle videos and release event materials. We are continually helping them grow a team of volunteers to be used now and in the future. This includes translators, editors, reviewers, and specialists to help with desktop publishing issues. Furthermore, we are developing a consultation plan for them which will involve some detailed suggestions about how to manage translation projects and interact with volunteers.
Naked Heart has also shown a need for terminology development, and my team is stepping in to fill this need by developing a multilingual (Russian, English, Chinese, and Korean) glossary for the foundation to pass along to both their translators and writers.
Challenges:
Currently, we have been experiencing challenges related to communication both within the team and between our client. Right now all email communications made with the client are in Russian, so the rest of our team is relying on the two senior Russian translators to relay important information. In general, it is hard to keep everyone “in the know” via email, and threads quickly get out of control so I feel that internal communications could be more streamlined by using a service like Slack instead of email.
In the vein of communication issues, we have had some struggles with getting our client to grant us timely access to certain client-side systems (for example, access their subtitle editor) to finalize the translation of the video. This, unfortunately, forced us to use a more undesirable workflow when producing the English translation of the video, but it has also highlighted the need to educate our client about proper workflows so that this issue can be avoided when we receive another subtitling project.
Conclusion:
Despite the previously mentioned communication issues with the client, we are encouraged by recent messages from Naked Heart promising timely access to their subtitling editor and also more projects for translation! They have communicated that they have been very busy hosting event after event, and Locspire is excited and prepared to help them with localizing the materials that are undoubtedly coming about due to these activities. Upcoming Projects include translation of three news articles from Russian to English for Naked Heart’s website, as well as the translation of slides for one of the Foundation’s presentations.
