Get Localization is shutting down on May 31

Get Localization is shutting down on May 31 2019.

In 2009 we started Get Localization as a side project to support our own mobile app development. Soon many new developers and companies found us and started to crowdsource their localization efforts and also use our network of professional translators.

During these years, Get Localization was used to localize over 10.000 apps, including many popular top apps, games, and titles.

We also helped companies and organizations like Nokia, Microsoft, Ikea, and Schneider Electric to translate their products. Plan International used our platform to translate letters to sponsors with the help of volunteers.

Unfortunately, even though we experienced nice growth for a while, we were not able stay on that track long enough and remained too small to stay ahead of the competition. All the time, we relied solely on self-financing, and this was as far as we got.

We reached a point where we noticed that we had lost most of our competitive edge and had to decide, if we should invest heavily to regain it. We decided that this is not our game anymore – it’s time to call it quits and move on to something else.

We would like to thank all our over 150.000 volunteer and professional translators and all our clients during these years.

Our localization service will be fully closed on May 31 and all the remaining subscriptions will be canceled automatically so that they won’t be renewed in May. You will have access to your Workspace until May 31.

We are paying out final invoices to professional translators right now, so make sure you have set the invoice to “sent” mode in the system. Thank you.

Please note, that we do not accept new professional translation orders anymore.

Writing Content for Localization

Localization in any organization doesn’t limit only to translating and adapting source texts and other materials to a target market. A good and also cost-effective localization process starts earlier than in the moment when the developers send texts to translators. It naturally contains all necessary technical steps, but we’ll skip them this time and focus on the translatable texts themselves and what you can do to make them efficient from a localization point-of-view.

Many of these tips are quite general so they will help you improve your original texts too. They have been written especially with UI, help and support materials in mind – writing for your landing page might be a completely different ballgame but many of the rules apply there too.

Fluent and Correct

Would you trust a linguist to do code for you? I wouldn’t either (and I’m a linguist). Don’t put too much trust in your developer’s linguistic ability either.

Software and other web content are nowadays mostly written in English, which often is a good choice for localization and translation purposes, as the most translators around have English as one of their source languages. But other languages are used too.

Whichever your writing language of choice is, make sure the texts are well written. If your own or your developer’s English is not that good, have the texts edited by someone whose knowledge is more solid. “Engineering English” might create misunderstandings for your users, and those misunderstandings will get multiplied in localization.

Consistent Terminology

Stick to the terminology you choose and make everybody who is writing content also aware of it. This also means not using one term for several concepts. This might in many cases leave the translator wondering which of the concepts you’re referring to – and even get yourself in trouble when you want to mention those two concepts in the same sentence. Put a system in place to manage and spread terminology in your organization.

Reuse

At school, you learn that you shouldn’t be overly repetitive when writing, so you don’t make the reader bored. This is mostly true, I don’t want to argue with your elementary school teacher, but when writing software texts, repetition is your best friend. And this goes for basically any help and support texts too – or anything you write with localization in mind. Identify parts of text that appear in many places and don’t rewrite them. The commonly used localization tools identify what has been translated earlier and you can usually have those parts translated automatically. The more similarities the new texts have with old ones, the less their translation costs. Repeated terms and structures are easy for the translators.

Using the same terms and structures also makes things easy for your user: they will be more familiar with different parts of the UI and have a more fluent experience.

Be Concise

Don’t write overly long texts unless you have a true motivation for that. English is often shorter than many other languages, e.g. German translations tend to be around 3o% longer than English texts, so don’t aim at filling all available space already in the English version. Other than that, concise texts are mostly user-friendly, too. You don’t want your users to leave your page because of texts that take ages to read and are difficult to understand, right?

Localization cost is almost always directly tied to text length, so this point is also directly linked to your bottom line.

Text in Graphics

If you want to make localization easy, embed as little text as possible into graphics. Each time you localize texts that you have as graphics means manual labor, which means more costs. Each time you add a language you need to update all graphics manually.

Cultural References

Funny slang words can nicely spice up a text, as will idiomatic expressions. And make you sound like someone who really masters the language. But at the same time, they make localization more difficult and might even be nearly impossible to translate. For translators, there are ways to get around that, but you don’t want to make translating more difficult and error-prone. The same goes rid of jargon and metaphors, you need to get rid of them.

A Final Pointer

Being customer centric pays off in localization too: if a text is optimal for a user in your own language area, it probably is easy to localize.

Photo by Thomas Lefevbre.

Improving SEO Rankings through Localization and Correct Use of Hreflang

Google needs a bit of help to detect your website’s localized language versions. To do this correctly, you need to be aware of the hreflang attribute and how to use it.

Let’s now assume that you have ordered professional translations from Get Localization for your site from English to Spanish. You define an alternative version of your site using the link tag and hreflang attribute like this in your English website:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />

This means that your Spanish website will be found at http://es.example.com. But now, hold on! This is not the whole story, and some precautionary measures should be taken to do this correctly.

First and foremost, make sure that Google Search Console is tracking your website property (https://www.google.com/webmasters/). This is important as it lets you see whether your hreflang tags and international targeting are working properly.

Furthermore, you need to use these tags correctly – if you just go and add hreflang tags into your site, I bet your Search Console will show “Hreflang Tags with Errors”.

Most common hreflang error is “No return tags”. This happens because your English page links to Spanish page, but your Spanish page does not link back to your English page. Why must it do that? Well, Google uses this to verify that the content really is an alternative version of your site.

So, you also need to add this tag into your Spanish page:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/" />

After this you’re good to go. Google will now process your site. However, it will take some time. Google’s indexing is otherwise fast, but not so much for international content.

The wrong language code is also a common error. You can find a list of language codes and region codes on Wikipedia. From us, you will receive the correct language codes along the translations.

How to Utilize SVG in Localization

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is an XML-based file format for vector images. It’s also a great tool for creating responsive localized graphics for the web.

There are also several other methods for creating localized graphics, like our Get Localization for Photoshop plug-in. If you want to externalize all the texts from your images, you can also use HTML and CSS but it will get difficult if your site is responsive (it’s possible though).

SVG however, is a great alternative as you can use a single base background asset (bitmap or vector), externalize textual content and also leverage the scaling of the SVG image to create a responsive graphical asset. In our example, the background is a single bitmap and looks like this:

old_way_arrows_blank

Following piece of XML is actually the SVG image and using the above PNG as a base background image. You can also use full SVG background as well if you’d like. I’ll use the background bitmap image here just to keep the markup simple and easy.

In this example we use Django’s i18n framework for internalization so the texts will be translated the same way as the rest of the website. If you are using some other framework or CMS, the SVG can be embedded into your HTML code which let you employ the same process you have in place for localizing the HTML content.

	<svg height="100%" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 1200 598" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink= "http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
	<image xlink:href="//dxuu1kmv6dm3n.cloudfront.net/frontpage/old_way_arrows.png" x="200" y="0" height="598px" width="800px"/>

	<text x="530" y="110" text-anchor="end" font-family="'Bad Script', cursive" font-size="35">
	{% trans "Cut'n'pasting" %}
	</text>

	<text x="320" y="275" text-anchor="end" font-family="'Bad Script', cursive" font-size="35">
	{% trans "Manual work" %}
	</text>

	<text x="360" y="480" text-anchor="end" font-family="'Bad Script', cursive" font-size="35">
	{% trans "Developers" %}
	</text>

	<text x="750" y="510" text-anchor="start" font-family="'Bad Script', cursive" font-size="35">
	{% trans "Plug-ins" %}
	</text>

	<text x="880" y="280" text-anchor="start" font-family="'Bad Script', cursive" font-size="35">
	{% trans "Time & Money" %}
	</text>
	</svg>

view raw

example_svg.xml

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

When the SVG is rendered in a browser, this is how it looks like:

websites_en

And this is how it looks in Japanese:

It is also fully responsive; image and text both scale correctly and keep their correct positions when you resize your browser.

There are also few important points which you should consider when creating localized assets. Text length varies in different languages, so make sure you have enough space for the translated text. Also, think how the lengthier or shorter text appears in your image. Ask yourself a question: if this text is longer or shorter, what is going to happen? Is it going to overlap the elements or will there be an ugly white space between the text and the element when text is actually shorter like in this example:

anchor_example

You need to make sure that text extends in the correct direction. Luckily SVG lets you define an anchor position for each text element. It’s used to align the text relative to a given point. For example, you may want to set the anchor point to middle if you want the text to always be centered, no matter how long it is. Or if you want to position the text based on the end coordinate, then the last character will always stay in the same position. This is how we can fix the problem in our example.

If you want to use Google Fonts or similar web fonts, make sure they support the languages you want to translate your site into. Google Fonts lets you search fonts by their supported languages.

So it’s not that hard, really! If you need help with your website translation & localization, let us know. Along with professional translation services, we also provide consultation and various tools for workflow management.

Get Localization offers professional translation services and managed translation & localization solutions for all kind of businesses.

Cloud, Crowd, and Professional Translators

Stas Kalianov – Localization Manager at Schneider Electric – spoke at the GALA conference in New York in March about the role of translation agencies in software localization, and about who are the most important people in this workflow.

Through a mix of technology, their internal crowd, and professional translators Schneider Electric has achieved a safe and robust process that gives them both lower costs and more user-friendly translations.

Listen below to how they achieved this with the help of Get Localization and how they chose to leave unnecessary steps out of the process (this re-recording of the presentation has been previously published by Stas Kalianov).

How to use Apple’s new Media Manager

Apple has rolled out a new Media Manager that simplifies screenshot management in iTunes Connect. This is a long waited feature as managing screenshots has been a notoriously painful process for developers. New iTunes Connect Media Manager lets you prepare one set of screenshots and they will be automatically scaled down to appropriate sizes for smaller screens. But even more awesome is that this also works for localized screenshots. According to Apple, if your app is developed for iPhone, iPad and Watch you may end up having a total of 980 screenshots if your app is localized to all the supported languages. So this is a huge time-saver. Let’s take a look at how the new Media Manager is actually used:

You can find a small link to Media Manager right under the App Preview and Screenshots section:

When you have opened it, you can simply drag and drop your screenshots to each device family separately or click “Use 5.5-inch Display” check box to let Media Manager downscale the screenshots for you.

That is great and simplifies the process a lot! You can do this also for localized versions: simply prepare localized versions of your screenshots and then select the appropriate language in the top right corner. The process is the same for each language.

But how do I create the localized screenshots?

Unfortunately Media Manager is not doing this for you. It will simplify the submission process a lot, but you still have to deal with the actual localization yourself.

You have basically a couple of options: either take the actual screenshots of your localized application for each language or use Photoshop to create the screenshots. Most screenshots contain marketing and demo content so they are often created in Photoshop to represent the actual app. It’s also often easier to manage updates when you don’t have to take screenshots with each release cycle. Simply modify the few base screenshots that are then used for all the devices and languages.

To make it easier to produce localized versions of your screenshots, we have published a Photoshop plug-in called Get Localization for Photoshop. It exports the textual content from your PSD file into a resource file that can be uploaded to Get Localization Workspace or Go service. When you get the file back from us, you simply create the localized PSD versions automatically with the plug-in. We just recently introduced a new version that also supports Artboards.

So it looks like managing screenshots is getting easier over time – so don’t lose hope! You can always contact us for help, our Sales and Support team is eager to answer your questions. You can get professional translations from Get Localization – also for your other content like the actual app UI, website and other marketing materials.

Get Localization Testfront 4.0 for Websites

Get Localization Testfront 4.0 for Websites allows translators, proofreaders and QA teams to translate, test and optimize translations in their actual context.

Contextual mistakes are the most common issue in the world of professional translation. Get Localization allows fast and intuitive translation in our CAT editor and then quick localization quality assurance in the actual context.

With Get Localization Testfront you are able to discover contextual issues and issues with UI elements quickly and effectively. Your team is able to report these issues directly to the translators.

Get Localization Testfront 4.0 is part of Get Localization Professional Suite. You can contact us for more details or try it out for yourself at https://www.getlocalization.com

Get Localization for Photoshop Updated

Get Localization for Photoshop received a facelift and update for Photoshop CC 2015 today. This add-on allows you to easily export text layers to separate XLIFF resource files and also to generate translated PSD and PNG files automatically from resource files. This is handy for example for screenshots and marketing material.

Download Get Localization for Photoshop add-on here

Get Localization Workspace Updated

Get Localization Workspace received an update and facelift today. We have been refactoring our existing system profoundly. The new version brings multiple improvements to various functions. Most of the improvements are actually in underlying infrastructure but the Workspace UI also got a complete overhaul. I’ll highlight few of the improvements now.

Workspace Dashboard is now completely different, as we have made the timeline into the most prominent element. It’s a great tool for following in detail how your project is moving forward. You can now see at a glance what is happening.

Statistics

Statistics have been completely rewritten: they are faster and it’s easier for you to find detailed data. We know that companies use different units in their invoicing: words, segments or even characters; and have now taken this better into account. You can also inspect the data based on different attributes like language or date and get those results as a nice graph and also in a tabular format for additional manipulation. Due to the nature of the existing statistics and new stats system, it doesn’t make sense to bring the old data to our new system, so those who are working with old analysis page and data can still use it for invoicing until the new statistics system contains enough data for your billing period.

New order system for professional translation and cheaper prices for Workspace customers

We have now unified our order infrastructure which allows us to bring more cost-efficient translation also to Workspace customers. Packages (Silver, Gold etc) are gone and now you simply pay per word. There will be also new Order API which let’s you streamline the ordering process even more so that it’s fully automatic. It will be out later this summer. However the new Order UI and cheaper prices are available already today.

And more…

New notification system, faster file imports, announcements & better information sharing are just a few of the new features we’re featuring here. The new underlying technology and user interface allows us to add and improve new features faster than ever. We listen your feedback as always, so please keep it coming.

Personal Language

Research states that even newborns can recognize their own mother tongue, the language they have heard already before they were born. In the end of 2012 this was confirmed by a study at the PLU in Washington. It is actually quite astonishing that we have this kind of a sense for language so early on in our development. The way a newborn identifies sentences of her mother tongue might not be identical to how we grown-ups do it, but how they do it doesn’t matter, most important is that the special relationship is already there.

The same process might happen at the other end of our lives, but the other way round: Alzheimer’s patients might lose their ability to speak other languages than their mother tongue. We might forget all other languages we have spoken for years and perhaps mastered close to perfection, but the mother tongue stays with us.

So what do we do with this information? Maybe not that much in every day life, unless you work within geriatrics or are a language teacher. But this is yet another indicator of how important the mother tongue is for each one of us, how deep the connection to our primary language lies within ourselves. However, this is not something we would necessarily be aware of. Some of us might be more comfortable with speaking for example about professional topics in English than in our native language. Or we might consider ourselves even bilingual despite having learned a language only later on in their life. But deep down these newer languages won’t be so close to us as our mother tongue(s).

Then what, is all of this important to you? Well, for one you can take it for granted that merely understanding your message doesn’t guarantee that it will stick with your users. Common Sense Advisory’s research shows that people are also more inclined to buying from websites that speak to them in their mother tongue.

One of the ways to better attract users and make them stay longer on your website or use your app is to talk to them in the language that they have the longest lasting relationship with. And for most people on our planet, that language is not English.

Get Localization helps you talk with your clients by providing an easy solution for managing software localization and ordering professional translations.

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Get Localization is shutting down on May 31