I’m really very honored to have been selected to attend the East Asia Practicum as an interpreter. I wish that all T&I students had the opportunity to join such an event, as it was incredibly valuable.
Continue readingCategory: Portfolio (Page 1 of 2)
Finally, we come to my last hours attending the East Asia Practicum – and I didn’t even have to interpret in afternoon. Once we finished the morning’s interview and had lunch, we rushed to Roppongi to meet up with the rest of the group to visit the Graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA).
Continue readingDay 3 dawned late for most students – but bright and early for myself. The morning was set aside for individual and small-group interviews, for students who had been able to schedule meetings with experts in their specific fields of research. Given our limited availability, I think most students were not able to complete such an interview, but a least one group was, and they needed my interpretation skills.
The interview was set up with a professor who is an expert in immigration matters. Two students who are focusing on immigration in Japan for their research were able to get in touch with him. We weren’t sure until we actually arrived at the institute if he would need interpretation, but it’s a good thing that my partner and I tagged along, because like Mr. Suzuki the day before, he did not speak a word of English.
Continue readingMonday was the first real day of field research. It was a full schedule and a busy day – it wasn’t uncommon that we found ourselves running to catch a train or to get to our next appointment in time, and we only had about 45 minutes to eat lunch and travel 25+ minutes.
It was also my first day “on the job,” so to speak, as an interpreter, although I did not have to interpret all of the meetings.
Continue readingThe remainder of our time on Sunday was reserved for sightseeing. I’m glad that we had some time to simply enjoy being in Tokyo. It was far from my first time, but there were a number of us who were there for the first time and I’m glad they had some time to enjoy it. Also, we were all still jetlagged and walking around outside was probably a lot better for us (and a lot less rude) than attending a lecture and trying not to fall asleep.
Continue readingWe started out bright and early on Sunday with a visit to Yasukuni Shrine and Yushukan Museum… places fraught with controversy. An interesting place to start for those of the group for whom it was their first time to Japan.
For those whom may not know, Yasukuni Shrine is controversial because it enshrines all of the war dead who have fought and died for Japan and its emperor. That might not sound like a problem, until you realize that there’s a number of Class A war criminals counted in that number. It doesn’t help that many of Japan’s prime ministers have visited the shrine to pay their respects – in their capacity as private citizens, they say, but can a head of state ever truly be a private citizen? It’s a place that embodies many of the contradictions of Japan.
Continue readingAfter a couple months of classes, we were to Asia! Altogether I spent about 33 hours traveling (7pm PDT time until 8pm Japan time… two days later). Airbus to plane to train to another train to plane to train to another train to hotel.
Mind you, it wasn’t all bad. There were three other students on my flight, and I’ve always found that a miserable experience is lessened if there’s someone to share it with. But the best part was our layover! I ended up having a 6-hour layover in Taiwan on the way to Japan. One of our number speaks Chinese and had been to Taipei before, so he was good enough to show us around for the brief 90-ish minutes we had to spend in the city.
Continue readingIn my Software and Games Localization class this semester, we’ve covered a wide range of ways and types of programs to localize. We’ve done localization engineering, PHP, Java, Android apps, iPhone apps, and Windows applications. For my showcase project, my group and I decided to focus on Android localization using Android Studio.
To be honest, the most difficult part of this project was finding a localizable app. We scoured the internet, but many open-source games had already been internationalized. After downloading the app and importing it into Android Studio, I would often see that the game had all of its strings wrapped already and a fully-loaded strings.xml file. Back to Google. Other programs we found looked fun and interesting, but had too many strings for the scope of this project. Others were just badly designed and almost unusable. Finally, we found apps that had been made in other programs, like Eclipse. We did try to work with these, first by importing them into Android, and then by trying to use Eclipse itself, but to no avail.
Finally, in the depths of Github, we found the perfect app! It was something interesting, being a Sudoku game, it had not been internationalized, and it was made in Android Studio, allowing for easy importing. It had a good amount of strings for what we planned to do, and it was actually a workable app.
The first step was to analyze the app and discover what would need localizing. I played through the app and noted down all of the strings in a Google doc, which my colleagues kindly translated.
The next step was wrapping all of the strings. It isn’t difficult to do so in Android Studio. The Java and XML files each have their own wrapping method, but it’s quite straightforward. All Java strings are wrapped with the code R.string.app_name, while for XML it is "@string/app_name" (where app_name should be substituted for the appropriate keyword). It’s simply a matter of knowing which is which. While wrapping, I also copied each string into the strings.xml file, and added tildes to each line for pseudolocalization purposes.
Pseudolocalization is particularly useful in software localization, as it allows the engineer to quickly see if the strings are wrapped correctly and if there are any strings missing. Here is a screenshot of the resulting game:
Once all of the strings were properly wrapped, all that remained was to create a new strings.xml for each language and introduce the translated text. Were this a bigger project, no doubt a CAT tool would be called for, but we did not find that necessary.
We had one final step left to us – something that wasn’t necessary but that we wanted to do. There was one image in the app, which we wanted to localize. The game supplied us with two logos: one in the game, and one used as the app button. We actually preferred the app button image, so we decided to localize that one and replace the original. My fearless colleague Chelsea whipped up a quick but very professional Photoshopped version of the logo, which we were able to insert into the app.
As a side note, part of the reason we wanted to localize the logo was the text. The original logo says “Sudoku,” which is thought to come from Japanese. However, the name for Sudoku puzzles in Japanese is actually “Nanpure,” a portmanteau of “number place.” Leaving the image as Sudoku when the rest of the app used Nanpure was thought to be confusing for users.
Actually, replacing was more of a problem than the text localization. When we used Android Studio in class, we did not localize any images, so we were running blind. We wanted to make it so that English users saw the “sudoku” picture, but Japanese users saw “nanpure.”
In the end it was a much easier solution than we had anticipated. It turns out the developers of Android Studio are smart. In the same way that you make a values-XX folder to hold the strings.xml file for each language, all you have to do is make a drawable-XX folder to hold the images for each language. Then the app is smart enough to visit drawable-XX if the phone is set to that language. Simple! I wish we had figured that out earlier and wasted less time playing around with the code, but in the end it worked.
Finally, I’d like to briefly mention localization best practices. The developer of this app did and did not follow best practices. On the one hand, they did not internationalize the app by wrapping the strings. (Of course, that was a boon for us!) On the other, we appreciated that the buttons on the app were set to automatically adjust to the length of the text. Here’s what that looks like:
Finally, I leave you with a couple of before and afters of our successfully localized app, complete with photoshopped logo.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to read my colleagues’ posts about the project as well. I couldn’t have done it without them.
Chelsea Inaba
Kye Teshirogi
Over the past few of weeks, I have been working on my showcase project for my Multilingual DTP and A/V Localization class. For this project, we were assigned to find and complete a desktop publishing or audio/visual localization project on our own.
I decided I wanted to do a project that meant something to me, so I contacted my old employer, the city of Amakusa in Kumamoto, Japan. Amakusa is a city in southern Japan, and is a tourist spot because of its beaches, dolphins, and historical significance as one of the first places in Japan for Christianity to take hold. In 2007, Japan nominated the Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Just a couple of weeks ago, its nomination was officially recommended by a UNESCO panel; it is expected to be confirmed in a vote in June. One of these sites, the tiny village of Sakitsu, is the only one located in Kumamoto Prefecture, and is in fact in Amakusa City.
I asked my old supervisor in Amakusa if she had any ideas for pamphlets or posters that could use localization into English, especially related to the UNESCO bid. She came back to me with a “Discovery Map” of Sakitsu and the surrounding area. Continue reading
This semester, one of the classes I took was Advanced Computer-Assisted Translation. Early on in the semester, we did some work specifically focused on CAT tools, such as pseudo translation and XML filter configuration in SDL Trados. We also looked at some tools like Okapi Olifant and CheckMate.
However, the majority of the semester was spent on machine translation. We talked about the different kinds of MT, such as rules-based, phrase-based, and neural machine translation. The culmination of this was a large project lasting about half the semester, where we worked in groups to train a statistical machine translation engine on Microsoft Translator Hub.
The intention of this project was not to fully train an engine – that would take way too long and require more resources that we had available. Instead, it was to begin training an engine, so that we as budding localization industry members could have an understanding of what that involves, as well as what would be required to train the engine to the point where it was fully usable.
This was a challenging project, but we learned a lot about the challenges and difficulties of training an MT engine. We learned about the kinds of documents that are useful for training and which aren’t, and the types of engines that are more or less feasible. We also learned something about working in a team to complete a long-term project, and about working with a client who might not necessarily know as much about the industry as ourselves.
The following links include some useful files for my mini-portfolio of the projects I completed for Advanced CAT this semester.
- SMT Engine Training Project – includes original “pilot” proposal, updated proposal, and our slides for our lessons learned presentation
- Convert for Windows Demo Video – a short video I made to demonstrate the Convert for Windows tool and how it can be used within the localization industry
