Professional translation for companies is not limited to legal, technical or commercial documentation: nowadays, software development is among the most interesting international markets, and bringing a software to a foreign country inevitably requires creating a version that "speaks" the local language. But what requires the most attention in the software localization process, and what precautions should be taken during its implementation to facilitate that process?
One element that is often overlooked is that different languages need different quantities of words to express the same concept - and that this can become a significant complication when dealing with software in which the developer must anticipate how much space to devote to a caption, an explanation, or a series of instructions. On average, for example, linguistic analysis reveals that a message written in English takes up 30% less space than the same message written in another language (with interesting exceptions: Japanese takes up 60% more space than the 'English, and on the other hand the Thai language is even more concise and takes up 15% less space).
Planning these visual spaces together with a translator will allow you to avoid problems in the implementation phase, and not incur the risk of finding out at the last moment that necessary text has been truncated.
The choice of graphic elements such as icons might seem totally alien to a process, such as translation, which ideally has to do with texts, but this is a limiting vision. Translating is in fact making a message accessible to those who speak a language other than the one in which that message was originally created, and this concept is applicable to all forms of communication. An icon, in fact, is nothing more than the condensation of a textual message and its reduction to a significant symbol, which summarizes its description - like the stylized floppy disk that we find in many software sums up the concept of "store this data permanently ".
With the expansion to an international market, however, advice on local cultures becomes necessary to know if an icon will be recognizable, if it will convey the right message, and if it will even be acceptable for the target culture: all of this is information that a good localization specialist will be able to process.
In a similar way to what has just been said for texts and images, it is necessary to face another important aspect in software localization, namely the multiplicity of formats used in the world to express the same data - not to mention the difference between the ways in which the same concept is expressed or clarified. Regarding the first aspect, let's just think about how many different ways there are to write a date - even in the Western world alone there are differences between the Anglo-Saxon method and that of other cultures - or how many different currencies exist in the world; for the second, for example, let us reason on the fact that in some countries an address can include concepts such as Province, which in others has no equivalent. Good software localization must absolutely take these specificities into account in the preliminary phase, and a software must be programmed by creating special libraries for the typical elements of each of the regions where it will be disseminated.
Still on the subject of the software’s technical organization, careful programming for subsequent localization needs must include the creation of a structure that makes it much easier and cheaper to carry out the various translations in the different languages required and to implement the latter in the software. The best solution in this case is the creation of external files for textual resources - from titles, to tooltips, to any software message - and the assignment of a unique value to each string of text: this will on the one hand make it very fast to schematize and provide the translation of texts in many different languages, and on the other hand make it equally simple to associate the right translated text with each local version of the software itself.
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