Our team, Loong Localization, has taken up two projects for the course “Localization Practicum” with professor Max Troyer offered by Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. For the first project, we are localizing Mojito, an open source automation platform for continuous localization developed by Box. For the second project, we are helping VIA Programs, a non-profit organization that offers innovative experiential learning programs in Asia and the United States for people around the globe.

Better Tools, Better Life 

The tools that have made our life much easier in this case are:

  • Email: for communication with the clients
  • Asana: for Project Management
  • WeChat: for communication
  • Box: for internal documentation and collaboration with Box team
  • SmartCAT: for translation and  vendor management
  • Google drive: for document sharing, internal documentation

Project I: Mojito

We are helping Box to localize the Mojito website and web app into 8 different languages, which are, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese, Korean, Spanish (Latin America), Italian, German and Portuguese.

The Web App

All the files have already been extracted as .xliff files by the Box localization team from the web app.

Lessons learned from the way Box markup their .xliff  file:

  • ‘Id’ and ‘resname’ are important attributes that point to the location of the string in the original resource. When vendors have questions concerning a translation unit, it should be reported to the client with the corresponding id and resname.

    A glimpse of the source .xliff file.

  • There’s slight difference between ‘id’ and ‘resname’. “The id attribute is used to link a <trans-unit> or an inline element to its original location in the source file from which the XLIFF document was produced. The id attribute values are determined by the tool that created the extracted document, they may or may not be the same as the values of the resname attribute. The resname attribute holds the original identifier of the text item extracted in the <trans-unit> element.” (https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xliff/FAQ)
  • When a unit is translated and/or validated, the ‘state’ of the unit should be changed. Most of the CAT tools change it automatically, including SmartCAT.
  • ‘Note’ is a comment for the translator to better understand the context of the unit.

Progress

So far, we have already received the translated files for four languages for the web app. Because that the Mojito website is mostly about instructions on using the web app, we have decided to extract terms from the translated web app to create a glossary, which will be one of the project deliverables. One minor issue to pay attention to is that some of the terms may appear as part of an attribute or variable name, as shown in the screenshot below: 

Project II: VIA Programs

For this project, we are localizing seven sections of VIA’s website, five program videos, as well as a number of brochures into four languages, namely, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese, as well as Thai.

The Website

VIA Programs built their website in WordPress. After our discussion with our client and having made sure that they have their website backed up, we have decided to use q-Translate plug-in to translate their website. The main reason is that our client wants the visitors to be able to refer to the original English website when necessary, and q-Translate allows us to add language pickers on the English website, for free. WPML offers the same solution, but with a price. We also expressed concern that activating q-Translate and making modifies on the original website might affect the layout of it or even result in some of the sections being destroyed. But our client gave us the go ahead on the original website, stating that they already have the original website backed up and can reset it if necessary. However, they want us to document any changes we make. Therefore, we are doing documentation for this process in a word document, as suggested by our client. 

The Infographics

A website filled with data and plain text bores the audience. VIA Programs team is obvious well aware of this and has featured about twenty infographics in their Programs Introduction sections.  We have received the original files of the infographics,  which contain the original Adobe Illustrator (AI) files, exported PNG files, and images they used to create the AI files. However, the files we received were not the original package generated by Illustrator, which should include the AI file itself, a Link folder with all the images used, and a Fonts folder with utilized fonts. Taking into consideration that the client has minimal experience with localization and to avoid misunderstanding of what items are actually missing, I compiled an Excel document with the missing file names in one column and the reference images in the other, as shown in the screenshot.

Progress

For the web texts, we have thus far extracted all the texts into word documents. The corresponding translation tasks have also been assigned to our translators on SmartCAT. With regard to the infographics, the texts have been externalized and converted into picture lists. However, if our client is unable to locate the original images and fonts, we may try to localize the infographics in Photoshop by creating text masks on the background layers.