It is no secret that localization of software may increase its sales by 100 times or even more as foreign language interface prevents many people from using an application. Moreover, in many countries distribution of non-localized software is banned by law. That is why all major IT companies acting in a highly competitive environment pay so much attention to translation and adaptation of their software products.
Big corporations often spend tremendous sums of money on functionality development to meet the demand of their customers in the best way. Still poor localization can compromise the developers’ efforts.
One may say, “It’s just translation!” And will be totally wrong. Localization is not limited to translation of software components. Correct interaction of the whole system and its new interface in new language environment should be ensured.
Localization is performed in several stages:
- Preparatory stage which includes:
- creating/updating the glossary of terms; and
- extracting translatable strings from the localized resources.
- Localization itself which includes:
- translation
- programming tasks (inserting localized strings, adjusting dialogue boxes etc.); and
- building localized version.
- Testing
- Debugging and errors correction
- Delivering the localized version to the client
Operating systems, embedded software, CRM applications, ERP systems, computer games — all of them result in a huge volume of information to be processed during localization. Therefore, the localization team faces a professional challenge of resolving the following problems:
- choosing most precise equivalents for the names of functions, operations and tools (the more complex functionality the software has, the bigger the challenge is);
- managing large translator teams to deliver the project on time;
- ensuring term consistency throughout all modules under localization (interface, help, user guide, promo materials) etc.
Logrus has a vast experience in software localization (
see our list of completed projects). Our programmers have developed a lot of tools which help to address emerging problems effectively and shorten the projects’ timeframe.
Logrus localizes software in more than 50 languages, including double-byte languages and languages which use bi-directional text.