Before

This is the another project showcase I did with my group for the 1st semester. Undoubtedly, this is the most technique class that I have encountered in this semester. The stuff I learned, or, to be more exactly, get to know include HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT.

In fact, when talking about or think about website localization, I was always thinking about how to use HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT to write more fancy code to make the website looks more pretty. But, I just came to realize, there’s much more things left to be localized instead simply translating and localizing the content on the website page — that is something that is not that easy to notice: social media difference, or to be more general, cultural difference.

How we came up with this idea?

At the very beginning, I was planning to localize a website of my friend’s, which I actually a non-profit one. However, after talking with our professor, we were told that we could do something more creative, or really teach our fellow something useful when localizing a website. When we were looking at my friend’s website, we found there’s some social shared button linked to external website like facebook, twitter, etc. Then we thought: why don’t we work on a project which will be mainly focus on the difference of social share button in different countries.

My group members Xiaoyi Lyu, Yuchen Han and I went through all internationalized company’s website to compare what kind of social media they are using and whether they have been localized according to different locales.

3 steps of the showcase

Firstly, we did some research on those companies who are already or have been localized into different market (in this showcase, we mainly give examples of English and Chinese) The following are the good and not-that-good localized examples summarized by Yuchen Han.

Starbucks

（Chinese version: Wechat, Weibo)

（English version: Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Pinterest, Instagram)

Fujifilm

（English version)

（Chinese version)

Lionbridge

（English version: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube)

（Chinese version: Linkedin)

Walmart

（English version: Wechat, Weibo)

（Chinese version: not localized)

From the research, we found out that, not all the companies did a good job on the localization of social media. However, this could be a really vital part of a website, because you will need this to keep in connection with your potential customer and audience or even turn them into your customers.

To make the showcase more understandable to our audience, we wanted to give a simple example based on a static website. I then chose one of the assignment we did before to illustrate the localization of social button, in which there’s already the language picker so we don’t have to bother rewriting it.

During our research, we accidentally found a website called ADDTHIS.COM, which could simply give a short code based on your settings for the social share button. The steps are the following:

click the WEBSITE TOOLS button

Click Add a New Tool

Based on your settings you can then get a code and use it on the platform listed

Copy and paste this one in your HTML file, before the ending BODY tag</body>

This advantage of using this online tool is that you don’t literally need to know everything about coding, especially about javascript. Because of the huge database of his website, all you have to do is that you need to set up your preference of which social button you like and how you want to display it. How this code works is that it links back to the back stage of the javascript file created by this website’s web developer.

However, there’s still disadvantage of this method. One thing is that you need to get a premium account if you want to get more social buttons you want to use in different languages. Also, since you can just get ONE code for your account, if you want to localize into other language, you might need to use another account to set a different tool and use that code into the other file in different language. Another disadvantage is that, this is only an example for a static website, but for future use, you might want this to be used in a server mode, which can be seen by the audience whenever they visit your website.

One more thing we need to consider is that can we use this combining with WORDPRESS? Since we all know WP has a huge amount of plugins that could be used, my group member Xiaoyi did find ADDTHIS in it. And the situation was exactly the same as when I used it alone on a static website. However, there’s another plugin called EASY SOCIAL SHARE BUTTONS (which needs to be paid for using) which is more advanced. Although it can localized the language of each social share buttons into different version, you would still have to select all the button you want and all of them will together be displayed on your website, which is not what we want. The ideal situation is that, there would be a language aware function, for which I mean when you change the language, different social share buttons being used in different countries and regions can be displayed. This must be one of the problem we need to fix in the future.

Ending

Localizing a website doesn’t mean only translating and making the website looks fancy. Cultural aspects must be taking into consideration if a company want to internationalize and localize into another region/country.

This post will mainly discuss lessons learned in one of my first year first semester, Introduction to CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) tools. Several points will be illustrated, including the CAT I learned from this class and the final project showcase, for which we formed a group and got to get some real experience. I truly welcome all of you to give me some advice!

Contact me

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Have you every encountered this situation: you’ve been using a platform to perform your work since you are in the industry. One day, one of the customer or the vendor might ask, “Why don’t we use that platform? I think that platform is better.” You said,” Um… We can have a try!” Because they are the customer. However, you said to yourself,” I’ll never use that tool! It’s such a pain in the ass!” In my opinion, what you might do to help solve the disagreement between you and your customer/ vendor is that you can illustrate the advantage and disadvantage of the tool and then decide what you might want to use for that project.

• As a newbie in this industry and because of the limitation of what I have learned from class and random learning from the Internet, today I am going to briefly discuss three kind of platform, or say, tools, when you are doing a project.

Email project management

Before getting to know any kinds of professional tools in the localization industry, or even for those who wants to launch his/her own small project, will use email to inform members involved in it. For the second year’s localization practicum, I was volunteering  to be a translator and PM is contacting me through email. For a relatively small class project, this might work really well.

Advantage

The advantage of using email is that literally every body can do this without any guidance, since we have been exposed to the Internet for a long time and email must be one of the tools that we’ve been using on a daily basis.

Disadvantage

• Using email to do a project with a huge work load apparently seems not feasible, since it is very hard to track all the email back and forth just in your email inbox.
• Even if you have created a new email inbox, it’s hard to track them. To do that, you have to follow the name system for the document from/to different people.

Basecamp

This is one of the TMS that we use at the very beginning of my Localization Project Management. Overall, this is pretty much more functional compared to the Email project management. But the thing is, it is not that user-friendly.

Advantage

• There are two separate parts for contacting the client and the inside team (including translator, editor and proofreader, etc.), for which you don’t have to worry that you will accidentally send the undone file to your client.

• There are 6 main sectors/functioning parts in the Basecamp. You can communicate with your team members in Campfire. You can also post on the Message Board if you want to inform all the members in your group. Thirdly, by using To-dos, every member in this team could check any work they’ve done. The time overview could give everyone a general overview of the workflow. As for the Automatic Check-ins, it might be more useful with the PM or AM, which can remind of keeping in touch with the client. The document can be uploaded on to Docs & Files part.

Disadvantage

• You need to check the To-dos by hand, which is not that user-friendly, either.
• As for the Doc & Files, the same problem should better be paid attention to – the naming system.
• The client doesn’t not have the right to request a quote or project, which doesn’t make sense. Because for some long-term cooperating clients, they might want to just request a quote if they have a project to do instead of sending an email to ask for a meeting talking about this.

Overall, this is much better than the email management system when you are launching a small and not that professional project.

XTRF

When we are doing a big project with a very complex workflow in the real world, XTRF, a highly-specialized enterprise-class software solution, would definitely be a better choice!

Advantage

• Three different portals: customer, vendor and home portal. The advantage of XTRF of this point is that different roles can log in different portals, which could further reduce the risk of sending wrong file or message to the wrong person.

• The work flow of XTRF is really clear and there are generally two workflow:

In the class we’ve practiced the Classic work, which types of projects are more complicated than Smart projects. Every group member shall pick up one role as a VENDOR, CUSTOMER or PM.

Once you logged into the home portal as a PM, you should add a new project:

After this step, you need to add a language combination:

 

Next step is prepare launching the project. Based on the workflow, all that the PM should do is to assign the file to then engineer first and once the engineer accept and finished his work and then upload the finished file on the Vendor portal, the status of translator, editor, proofreader in the workflow will be automatically updated. But for these vendor rules, you have to use a Request first to assign specific job to a specific person.

During the process, all the vendors in this will be notified of a new job available or status change through email. And in the email, there’s a link you can click and directly guide you to your portal and start the work.

After you complete the whole workflow and the final work goes back to the PM, the PM could send it to the client for review. And all the project is finished.

Disadvantage

Overall speaking, XTRF is a really great good TMS, which can make the work much more organizable. But again, this system would better be used when there’s a huge project to do. For a small project, in my point of view, there’s no need to go through all the process and ask the vendor and customer to register an account for it, although in XTRF, the PM in deed could customize the workflow to be relatively shorter or longer, depending on the complexation of the project.

According to what I have illustrated above, I think everybody should have a general idea on which to choose a platform to do a project. And hope this could indeed help you!