Taking a well-earned coffee break this week, my friend Jen challenged me to draw a Venn Diagram of what I actually do, for whom. I accepted the challenge.
Especially if you have a portfolio business, where you offer more than one service, can you draw out your customer base and services? How many attempts do you have to make (four for me!)? Can you see any patterns?
I’ve written about setting expectations with service providers and I’ve explained what your editor needs to know here, and transcribers here – now it’s the turn of localisation services (or localization providers).
I have talked about what localisation is in this article, and about careers in the area here.
In brief, localisation involves turning one variant of a language into another variant of that language. For example, text written in Portugal might be localised for Brazilian Portuguese, text published in France localised into Canadian French. In my case, I work from US (or other non-UK) English into UK English.
Some quick characteristics of localisation:
Who needs localisation?
All of my localisation work comes through third-party agencies rather than directly. These will be translation or editing agencies which have clients around the world. Therefore all the advice I have given about agencies in my original article applies here, too.
Sometimes, localisation is combined with another skill such as editing or keyword insertion for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes. Clients should expect to pay extra for combined services, as they involve the service provider concentrating on more than one service. Not everyone can offer this, either!
Your localization service provider will need to know in advance:
If you work for an agency, you also need to provide this information, to be fair on the localiser
… and then let the localiser know whether or not you have succeeded in getting the job, so they can stop saving space in their schedule for it.
Your localiser needs this information because without it they can’t give you an accurate and fair price and turnaround quotation.
For example, if you contact me to say you have 10,000 words of localisation to be done and you think it’s in a Word document …
The more information that you can give your localiser / localizer before they quote for you, the more accurate their quotation will be, and the more likely they are to be able to do the job once they’ve committed to it initially.
In this article, I’ve discussed what information your localiser or localization service needs before they can prepare a quotation and let you know if they can do a job. I’ve also probably annoyed you with my inconsistent spellings – but short of writing two entirely differently worded articles for US and UK searchers, this is what I have to do to be found by people who might find this article useful!
I hope you’ve found this useful – do hit the share buttons or comment if you have!
Setting expectations with your service provider
Working with an editor 1: Asking for a quote
Working with an editor 2: Negotiating and booking in
What information does my transcriber need?
I’ve written this post primarily to help myself work with Trados translation software (and the screenshots are with the permission of my client). However, one of my most popular posts ever was written for that purpose and gets hundreds of hits a day, years later, so I’m making this public in case it can help other people!
So, this is about the very basics of importing a package into Trados, opening the package and its files, editing the files, doing things like spell check and sending it back. I may well update this as I do more processes. Note this is from the point of view of someone who edits the English translations of texts, so I’m in Review mode. Other experiences may differ.
This doesn’t always work from double-clicking the file you’re sent.
Open Trados, go to the Projects tab, click on Open Package:
Choose your package and it will come up in a dialogue window: click Finish:
Then click close to get back to the main menus:
Go to the Files tab and you can see all the files in the package.
If the package contains subfolders then when you go to the files screen you won’t see any files or folders. You need to look at Project folders in the left-hand navigation to see any open folders [Thanks to Vikki for this info].
Right-click for the contextual memory, and choose Open for Review. This will open the Edit view
If you come out of Edit, click on the Editor tab and there’s the file you’re working on:
When you’ve finished editing, click File (top tabs) and Close. This box will come up:
Choose yes.
If the font is really small, go to the View tab (top tab), look to the right, click Font Adaptation Options then change the minimum sizes to 11 or more. This will change the size of the font in your editing screen.
You can find spell check in the Review tab (top tabs) under Quality Assurance – if your window isn’t really wide, it will appear under the drop-down arrow.
You can get to find and replace using Ctrl-F and they work as in other packages.
Auto filling identical segments in Review mode is apparently not consistent so don’t expect to be able to do that in this mode.
Save the edits (Save icon) Then go out of Editor into Projects and click Create Return Package
Choose where you want to save the file and then remember to click Finish.
I was recently asked for some hints about developing a career in localisation, and so here I share a bit of information about this rather specialised area of work.
I covered the definition of localisation in an earlier post, but basically it’s all about changing content (whether that’s content in a novel, a website, marketing materials, dialogue in a computer game, instructions for operating equipment, etc.) so that it works in a different geographical location.
Typically, being a British English native speaker, I am asked to localise from American English into British English, for the British (or British English influenced English speaking) market.
“Oh,” you might cry, “that just means you change color to colour and organize to organise, right?” Well, there is a bit more to it than that, and I really don’t think it’s something that just anyone – even any editor – can do.
As well as the classic attention to detail and background in perhaps editing, or indeed translation (it is actually often seen as a branch of translation, which brings its own issues, as we’ll find below), I think that it is vital to have experience in the language out of which you are localising: the way it works, its vocabulary, its punctuation, its spelling.
I used to work for an American company in its UK office. I spent a lot of time working on documents aimed for the two marketplaces. I travelled to America and had a lot of dealings with American colleagues, as well as travelling to America at other times, and got a good grasp of the difference between the two cultures. Still, like translators are meant to do, I will only localise out of US English into UK English. I do edit American English, so I see it and am made aware of its differences and special rules on at least one job per week.
Because of the links with translation, you also need a very special set of skills to do with operating specific, specialised translation software – which is very often not easy to use. I’ll talk about that in a minute.
I’ve also got a number of reference books – the New Oxford Style Manual is good on the variants in spelling, and I have other books in addition to the resources I use to edit in US English.
As I mentioned above, it’s not just a question of changing the or spellings to our and taking out some zs (actually, British English of the Oxford variety does allow zs; however, I’ve found that all of my localisation clients or those who ask for work in specifically British English prefer to have the s spellings which they associate with British English – I do as I’m asked!). American and British English differ in terms of their spelling, punctuation and other grammar, and terminology. Here’s an invented example (US English on the left):
Now, of course, English is nothing if not subjective, and you might not agree with my choices here, but this serves as an example of the level of work involved in localisation. I might not change so much in every sentence, but there are an awful lot of issues to be aware of.
Another important issue is the range of texts involved in localisation projects. Most of mine have been under Non Disclosure Agreements, but I can tell you that I’ve worked on instructions for medical devices; dialogue for computer games; error messages for software; marketing materials for various large multinationals; and quizzes for people who sell a particular brand of product. So you need to be aware of the different registers involved in English writing, perhaps more even than when you’re editing.
Herein lies the rub. As I mentioned earlier, localisation is often seen as akin to translation. And very often, a British English localisation is just one of a whole slew of translations into other languages that is being done, or it’s being handled by a company that handles translations and is used to dealing with translation software.
So, while pretty well all of my editing and proofreading jobs come in Word or PDF files, just one document to be annotated or changed, my localisation jobs come in the form of:
I’m not going to go into the details here, but basically any work done in a translation management system can be a bit frustrating for the localiser, as typically you’re not changing words in every segment, yet you will have to mark each segment as translated, often by hand and using a repetitive set of actions. All very well if you’re a translator, poring over every word, not so great when you are only changing one segment in five!
I tend to get my localisation work in two ways:
I have several regular localisation clients. However, I don’t think I would want to do only localisation, as it’s quite a specific field and the projects involved can be quite long and complex.
In conclusion, localisation is something I would only suggest you go into if you have …
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Related posts on this blog:
Read all of my careers advice posts here!
I’ve been doing some localisation for some new customers recently and, mentioning this on my Facebook page, etc., I realised that this isn’t a well-known process. So, for those of you who are interested, and people who might have documents they would like to work in different regions of the world (there’s a clue!), here’s a quick guide to localisation.
One of the dictionary definitions of ‘localise’ is “to make local in character”, and that’s basically what it’s all about. Say a website, or a brochure, or an advert, or even a novel, has been produced in America. Obviously, the language is going to be American, rather than British English. Eggplant, freeway and optimize, as opposed to aubergine, motorway and optimise. Now, sometimes, the company or publisher putting out that document will want to adapt it for different markets, so that the reader feels comfortable with the text and can understand it without any strain. If the markets are in countries that don’t speak English, then a translator will be called in to translate it for their country. And if the markets are in countries that speak English, but slightly differently, then someone like me is called in to “translate” the text into British, Australian, Canadian (etc.) English.
It’s not just a matter of turning all the “ize”s into “ise”s. There are grammatical differences (“different from” vs “different than”), spellings (“colour” / “color”, “anaesthetic” / “anesthetic”), and terms (“pavement” vs “sidewalk” and so on). Then there are trickier things – would a British reader understand immediately what “resumé boosting” or other very American terms mean? The aim, as with editing in general, is to make the reading experience smooth, so that the reader absorbs the words and their message, rather than being jerked into consciousness that they’re reading a created text, and coming out of the immersion.
Not every editor, or every translator, can do this work. It’s more like translating than editing, and I can do it because I’ve got particular and useful experience working for the UK office of an American company, where I dealt with the two Englishes almost every day for a good few years. Add to that my editorial experience and general language skills, plus attention to detail which means making a list of the words I’m looking out for and making sure I change them all – and that’s why I’ve been praised and will be used again by the two companies I’ve completed localisation projects for so far.
It’s fun, too!
Read more about localisation as a career
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