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Willem Stoeller Featured in
Client Side News
Magazine
Excerpt Below. For the full
article, please contact willem.stoeller@welocalize.com
CSN
is pleased to offer another insightful and useful article from Willem Stoeller,
a former professor of localization principles. Willem is now a VP at
Welocalize. However, he still frequently teaches localization topics at the
Localization Institute, Localization World, the CSN Expo, and LISA. In this
article, Willem addresses the first two questions in the standard
"path of localization."
THE PATH OF LOCALIZATION
The path of
localization consists in addressing the following questions:
• Is my
organization ready for global software?
• Is my software
ready for localization?
• Which of the
localization activities should I outsource?
• Which vendors
should I use?
• How do I
optimally manage the localization process?
• What are the
major pitfalls in localization?
IS MY SOFTWARE READY FOR LOCALIZATION?
A corporate globalization
strategy provides you with specific localization requirements for each
product-market pair. Nowadays, few companies apply the same localization
requirements to all products and markets. In order to optimize the use of a
localization budget, it is necessary in the early stages of product
definition to define requirements for each product-market pair in terms of
the following:
• Components to
be localized – Core software, install, help, documentation, licenses, etc.
• Degree of
localization – Beyond mere translation, there are varying degrees of
cultural adaptation. The target user profile and the intended features of
the software should drive this.
• Release dates
-- Simultaneous release might be a necessity for a web-based application,
while a two-month lag might be acceptable for a technical application with
a relatively long product lifecycle. These localization requirements in
turn drive the internationalization requirements for the software.
Tech Tip
Producing Edited Video, Integrating in Flash
In Camtasia, produce AVIs with
the same frame rate as the Flash file (usually 12 fps). Colors should be set to Automatic. Other settings should be left as default
unless otherwise specified.
Be careful when sending videos
produced in Camtasia to users on another system – Camtasia’s codec must be
installed on their system if they are to view the AVI properly.
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