For example, the translation of software requires specific knowledge with regard to both terminology and format. It is risky to use a vendor not familiar with both. Furthermore, software about warehouse and logistics management, as an example, requires yet additional expertise to know the terms used in that industry. Lack of industry knowledge leads to stilted and literal translations that lack the jargon needed to make industry-specific translation a success.

Art, sports, retail management, manufacturing and medical devices are all examples of very specific areas for which true expertise is needed. First, make sure that anyone providing translation services is a professional translator (not the brother of the friend of your neighbor who studied in Spain one summer, or the admin assistant who speaks some Italian). Second, on top of that, your selected professional should also be knowledgeable about target market terminology and conventions in your industry.

There are a wide range of translation vendors offering services, and not all of them are appropriate for all tasks. Whether your needs dictate that you work with a freelance linguist or a multi-language service provider, take the time to vet your choice and make sure that you are getting the expertise you need to get your project done right.

• Client’s project manager
• Translation vendor’s project manager
• Vendor’s account manager
• Linguists (translators, editors, proofreaders) assigned to project
• Client’s linguistic reviewers
• Client’s engineers
• Vendor’s localization engineers
• Vendor’s desktop publishing staff
• …and other possible professionals, depending on a given project’s requirements.

Make sure that you have the right people working on your project to get you the results you need.

Piecemeal updates during a given project are usually not good practice due to the:

• increased risk introduced by such changes (increased risk of error, changes being lost, inconsistencies introduced)
• additional cost charged for re-translating the same words (even if at a reduced rate)
• number of team members involved
• number of processes involved in the translation process

More time is often required in such cases due to the additional quality assurance steps needed. Unless there is a truly compelling reason, translation should never be started until the English source content is final.

Within translation projects, it is normally most efficient to complete one entire pass of translation and use translation memory technology to identify appropriate changes and leverage in the next project cycle, such as for product upgrades or updates.

Good planning and tight project management are key tools for successful translation projects.

Match Types define which unit is being analyzed in the labels in the row at top of the report (segments, words, percent, placeables).

Context TM matches are “better” match than a 100% match. In a context match, there is a 100% match and the source language and target language segments must also have the same document context (be preceded and followed by the same content).

100% matches are those with a previously completed translation or translations–meaning, those contained in a translation memory that is being used.

Repetitions are similar to 100% matches, but repetitions are only matches within the current document text being analyzed, not with past translations.

The remaining percentages listed in the above sample analysis report from 50% to 99% are normally referred to as fuzzy matches. Fuzzy matches are matches between translated and new content that have some level of similarity but are not an exact match. The percentage noted indicates at what level segments in the new document match the translation memory (or other content within the document).

No match means that there was no match with previously translated content (the translation memory) or other content within the current document. These words are considered “new” content.

Placeables are tags or content that should normally be moved from the source (original) language to the target language (translation), such as tags or numbers.

Use of  ISO language and country codes facilitate communication between project team members, using standardized abbreviations when referring to languages.

ISO 639-1 defines two-letter language codes for many languages and can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes.

ISO 3166-1 defines two-letter country and can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2.

These codes can be used in combination (the standard conventions are used below) to designate a certain locale, or specific region in the world. It is standard to create combinations on the fly, selecting the language code needed, then selecting the region needed, and putting them together in the formats shown below as examples:

fr_FR = French for France
fr_CA = French for Canada
de_AT – German for Austria
de_DE = German for Germany
en_US = English or United States
en_GB = English for Great Britain

Note the standardized use of the underscore and the style of capitalization in the examples: lower case letters to indicate language (ISO 639) followed by underscore followed by upper case letters to indicate the country code (from ISO 3166).

In certain cases, only two-letter language codes are used, but four letter combinations should be used when languages are involved that are spoken in varied locales such as Chinese, where “zh_CN” indicates for Chinese for China (Simplified Chinese) and “zh_TW” indicates Chinese for Taiwan (Traditional Chinese).

Use a dependable webinar host. Having things go wrong on a webinar is very stressful for everyone involved so do yourself a favor and use a hosting company that you know (from referrals or testing experience) will not have technical issues that interfere with your ability to present. Read reviews of various webinar hosting companies and compare the various features they offer (such as how many attendees they can accommodate, how long they store your recorded webinars, etc.). Cheap or free is not always good.

Test before going live. Do a dry run of your webinar before the actual presentation day. Make sure you are familiar with the various technical features that you need to smoothly run your webinar, such as presenter vs. organizer vs. attendee mode, polling features, feedback features, screen presenting features, etc. You want to look like you know what you are doing and make the presentation seamless for the attendees – they do not need to see you fiddling around on the back end.

Keep it short. People’s attention span when attending a webinar is around 1 hour. I have seen 8-hour training webinar sessions offered, but that sounds like an ordeal for the attendees and the presenters. Webinars are a great way to provide remote training but the format does have its limits. Keep the duration to a manageable amount for maximum attention span.

Remember that your attendees can’t see you. Most webinars today are conducted by the speaker showing a slide or other presentation to the attendees by sharing his or her computer screen, and narrating the presentation via an audio connection (through the phone or computer). Present your material in a very organized fashion so that it is easy to follow and review various information more often than you might in a live presentation. Again, attention spans work differently when attendees are not watching you in person and you should accommodate that in your presentation style.

Have a script. Even if you are a seasoned presenter, presenting a webinar is different than presenting live. Having a script helps keep you on track and cover all the information you need to cover. Consider scripting speaker introductions, any technical information you want to share with attendees (such as how they will ask questions or how they can access a recording of the webinar), and how you will close out the webinar. This makes the presentation go a  smoothly during the actual presentation. You can also write a script for the actual content of your presentation (no one will see you reading it), but make sure you do not sound like you are reading. It can be deathly boring to attend a webinar where someone is simply reading over a computer connection.

Buy a good headset. Most webinar hosting companies allow you to present via an Internet audio connection or via phone, while showing visuals by sharing your screen. Have good headsets for both your phone and your computer so you can present either way in case there is a technical issue with either one.

Designate a moderator. In a webinar, there is a lot to manage in addition to actually giving your presentation. Designate someone to be your moderator and run the actual webinar, so you can focus on presenting. This person will start and stop the webinar, introduce you in a professional manner, read questions from attendees to you, and can also deal with attendees who are having technical issues on their end so that you won’t be distracted.

Let people know up front if you will send them a copy of your presentation (so they can adjust their note taking) and how to submit any questions during or after the presentation.

Have attendees submit their questions via the webinar chat screen. Even in person, it can be hard to control audience members who want to talk a lot about a particular issue, in the guise of asking a question. Avoid this totally on a webinar by asking attendees to submit their questions in writing. This forces people to be concise and avoids any awkward monopolization of the webinar audio.

Use the mute button judiciously. Force mute all attendees (the audience) throughout the webinar. That avoids noises in the background such as typing, phones ringing, colleagues talking, or who knows what. Also, mute any organizers or presenters who are not speaking to minimize similar background noises.

Minimize the presenter’s background noise. In that same vein, the presenter (who is, of course, not muted) should take precautions to make sure cell or land line phones don’t ring, people don’t call in on Skype (set it to Do Not Distrub), or other office or household noises don’t interrupt the webinar.

Have a back up plan. Things probably won’t go wrong, but when they do, it is really stressful for you and the attendees. In fact, there are many points in the technology at which something can go wrong. Problems can originate at the webinar hosting service (such as GoToWebinar or WebEx), at the attendees’ point of contact, with the presenter, and at the many Internet stops along the way. Having a back-up plan in place will mitigate any issues that may arise.

Back-up idea #1 – Send your presentation to the moderator and/or other attendee in advance, in case your Internet connection dies and you must call in via phone to present. You can then narrate the slides via the webinar phone connection while instructing someone with a live connection to “go on to the next slide” as needed.

Back up idea #2 – Print out the phone connection information in advance so that you have it right in front of you to act quickly in case your Internet connection is lost. (I did have this happen to me, and once my moderator’s Internet connection went down.)

Back-up idea #3 – If you have more than one presenter, do NOT have the presenters in the same place. Having them “broadcast” from different locations contributes to your “disaster recovery plan” in case something goes wrong: one person can always take over if the other one drops off.

Back-up idea #4 – Consider having more than one person designated as the webinar “organizer.” If the organizer drops off, the webinar will be over, even if your Internet connection is fine. Consider making the presenter an “organizer” too to guard against that happening.

Have faith. Even though things can go wrong, resist the temptation to repeatedly ask, “Can everyone hear me? Are you there?” It is kind of a strange experience to keep talking into what seems like a void, where you get no feedback at all as you are presenting during the webinar (since everyone else is muted and you may not see questions or chat that your moderator is taking care of).

Set up a way for your moderator to alert you (via chat or phone on vibrate or text message) if your audio is not working or your visuals have an issue; otherwise, you should keep plugging away and get past the feeling that you are talking to yourself. There really are people out there listening, so don’t make it awkward for them – keep sharing the valuable information they came to hear.

Ask for feedback. Most webinar hosting companies allow you to ask for feedback from your attendees, on screen with a series of questions, right after the presentation ends. Take advantage of this feature to learn what worked and what didn’t and how you can improve your next webinar presentation.

The article underscores that point that those who are successful recognize that they must adapt their American strategy to foreign markets and are willing to “modify, and sculpt” their model to their new markets’ cultural requirements. Those who do not implement such an approach have a very high risk of failure.

Approaching your target markets knowledgeably is necessary for international success.

Read the original article here.

Q: What do you see as the most challenging areas of business for companies entering overseas markets?

A: Global misunderstandings related to different cultural expectations and assumptions are a big challenge. For instance, a Canadian sales team visited a prospective client in Egypt. Initial talks went extremely well. The Canadians told the Egyptians that they would bring in their lawyer the next day to finalize the agreement. The Egyptians broke off all contact and the deal sank. The Canadians didn’t know that lawyers represent mistrust in Egyptian business culture.

For Americans, our most challenging issue is short-term orientation. International partnerships and deals require time and perseverance. These relationships are typically stronger and more fruitful in the long run, but many partnerships and sales process have been abandoned by American lack of resolve.

Q: In the hopes of avoid the expensive international school of hard knocks, what are ways that businesses can learn how to navigate challenges when going overseas?

A: This is a great question! Even if you spent all your time researching potential overseas markets, business cultures & languages, there’s always so much more to learn. Here are a few places to look for help:

First, find a mentor who understands your industry and has international business experience. What you need to know varies greatly by industry and markets. If you can’t find a mentor, then contact local international business associations (World Trade Centers, international chambers of commerce, etc.) to be paired up with an expert.

Second, use the government resources available to you. Many local, regional and national governments actively encourage and support companies selling overseas. These services are typically free or very low cost.

Third, most entrepreneurs I know don’t have a consistent enough schedule to take classes. So I recommend reading books like Negotiating International Business by Lothar Katz, Managing Exports by Frank Reynolds and Global Marketing by Johny Johansson. There’s also a wealth of information in blogs and articles online.

Q: When a company asks your advice on how to assess their international operations, what do you suggest?

A: I ask questions about the company’s goals, their experiences internationally to date, their products’ positioning domestically, and the company’s work culture and industry characteristics. My patent answer is, “It depends!” This is because circumstances dictate why an approach works for one company and not another. A company should try to align its international strategy with its overall strategy and its strengths. It also helps to set priorities and budget and then track them as progress is made toward international goals.

Get more information by watching Becky’s video on cross cultural communication tips for business professionals. You can also follow Becky on Twitter at @intlentreprenr.

One drawback of the current version (3.0.1) however, is that, apparently it does not provide for straightforward management of multiple language versions of a given WP site’s content, or, in other words, for content localization.

Here are some things to consider if when localizing a (business or professional) WordPress site into 2+ languages.

WordPress is UTF-8 compliant (if this setting is selected in settings) and can therefore display content correctly in most languages of the world, including those that are bi-directional.

Note, however, that UTF-8 compliance may not extend to post/page titles (which are text-only and will not accept HTML), and may need tweaking to display multilingual text correctly.

There are various WP plugins that aim to facilitate translation, but most have automated translation engines attached to them (using free translation tools) and they would need to be separated from such software to be used for commercial websites. In addition, these plug-ins seem to be dated and are not targeted to business users, but individuals who want to share their blog internationally. (Note that various plugins exist to facilitate the translation of other WP plugins and themes, but this is separate from the translation of a given site’s content, and is rather, the localization of small software application that interfaces with WP.)

Another cautionary note about WP “translation” plug-ins is that they seem to be created by people who are not professional linguists and these plugins do not interface with the translation memory tools that are usually required for the production of a professional site. This lack of interface with such translation tools would result in the inability to leverage repetitive translations, which would lead to inconsistencies throughout the content and translation updates, as well as likely higher translation costs in the long-term.

Use of translation memory tools to translate WP content at this time entails giving translators (or a project team member) direct access to a WP page content and code, to be copied or exported from the WP environment, then translated using an appropriate translation tool, and then re-exported into the WP CMS. It would be very helpful if the development team at WP could provide a simple way to export/import selected content for localization (rather than an XML dump of the entire site).

The management of multiplying pages in multiple languages have not currently been addressed by the WP dev team per se, but may be able to resolved using the WordPress Multisite (MS) features. For more information, see http://mu.wordpress.org/ and http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network.

At this stage in the development of WordPress it seems that any localization of content needs to customized per site by the localization vendor and the client’s WP management team, working together to create maximum efficiencies within the translation process. This will all depend on the themes, plugins and level of customization present in a specific site as well as what makes the most sense in terms of translation assets.

Thanks to Ángel Domínguez, Riccardo Schiaffino and Michael Wahlster for their discussions on this topic.

From participation in other ProZ.com conferences, I can attest that they are superbly organized, have excellent speakers, and are very worthwhile. If you are a qualifying professional, I encourage you to attend.

The event will be held on November 10th. This event is 100% free to attend and is limited to verified C-level executives, decision makers and employees working in localization and translation at the end-client level (producers of content to be localized or translated).

Visit www.proz.com/translation3 for registration and complete program details. Qualifying individuals are invited to attend free from the comfort of their home or office, with an Internet connection.

Program highlights include:
Panel discussions with live audience interaction and questions
• The impact of agile development methodology on localization – Larry Kunz (SDI), Jonathan Slaughter (SDL)
• Automated translation trends – Kirti Vashee (AsiaOnline), Jeff Allen (SAP), Douglas Strock
• Forecasting the future trends in localization – Dr. Arle Lommel (Lisa.org), Henry Dotterer (ProZ.com), Renato Beninatto (Milengo), Alison Toon (Hewlett-Packard), Smith Yewell (Welocalize)

Webcasts with live Q&A
• How Much Quality Can We Afford? A Strategic View of the Value of Quality – Alison Toon, Hewlett-Packard
• Reining in the Cloud—A Call for Managed Collaboration – Uwe Muegge CSOFT’s
• From fragmented translation outsourcing to value-added content production – the changing landscape of localization – Suzana Reich and Mika Pehkonen, F-Secure

Join attendees from these industry leading organizations
Dell, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, HP, Canon, TechSmith, Pitney Bowes, Bentley systems, Compuware, Fluke and more by registering today at http://www.proz.com/translation3

For more information, visit www.proz.com/translation3.