Web Localization and the Cobbler's Children

"Why don't we have our Web site localized?" my business partner asked. "We're in the business, and a localized site would show that we're willing to put our money where our mouth is."

Excellent question. Why not get our site, or at least the pages that pertain to localization, localized? So I looked into it.

It was going to cost about US$2000 per language, when all was said and done, so I asked my partner if he'd be willing to split the cost with me. Perhaps you can guess his answer.

It was an interesting issue, though. Assume that a prospective customer, who doesn't know much about the industry, goes shopping for a vendor. She finds a vendor whose site is in only one language, and another whose site is in eight languages. Which vendor has more credibility, especially to somebody who doesn't know (or even want to know) a lot about localization?

Mind you, I'm not completely representative of the entire industry. I'm not a "language service provider," so that bit of credibility is of no great advantage to me. Still, it brings up the old chestnut about the cobbler's children running barefoot: Isn't it odd to be in localization, yet not have a localized Web presence?

My rationale, aside from the expense, is that almost nobody who would want our services would want to read about them in any other language besides English. That's probably the case for almost everyone in the American localization industry, where the dominant language conveniently matches the world's current lingua franca. Other languages just confuse most Americans anyway, so one could argue that it would be a needless distraction in the sales cycle.

What do you think your customers and prospects want to see? Can you get by with your marketing presence (Web, collateral, datasheets) in one language?

If you enjoyed this article, have a look at "Why Localize at All?"

Low Quotation - Four Questions to Ask

Have you figured out how to add value, even when you don't get the job?

A client asked us to look into quotations on taking some marketing materials in MS Word and Adobe InDesign into Traditional Chinese. Our preliminary word count was around 15,000 total, and we spent time educating the client on how to deal with all of the graphics that had embedded text. Since they were marketing materials for an upcoming trade show, we put on our best neckties and helped the client think through the project as far as possible.

As we were preparing to analyze the files for a proper quotation and statement of work, I received this message:

"I wanted to let you know our Taiwan office has located a local translator that has quoted us $1800 for this job. Do you think your quote will be a lot higher? If so, there's no need for you to proceed. Just didn't want you to spin your wheels."

We suspected our quotation would be 3-4 times higher than that. What would you do? Would you:

1. Doggedly pursue the business, refusing as a matter of principle to be low-balled?
2. Upbraid the prospect for falling for such a low price?
3. Do nothing, considering it beneath your dignity to reply?

You'd have good reasons for any of these responses, I suppose. I gave it a good, long think over last weekend and replied Monday:

"That is quite low. If price is your paramount criterion, then you'd better go with that quote. In any event, you should make sure it includes:

• second set of eyes (besides those of your in-country reviewer)
• translation memory
• glossary (terminology list)
• desktop publishing + PDFs

Let me know how it goes."

We in the industry stand to gain nothing by scaring prospects, but since power in the Web 2.0 age seems to come from a delicate balance between giving everything away and keeping your families fed, perhaps our real value-add lies in helping prospects ask the right questions.

Your thoughts?

If you've enjoyed this article, you might like another one I wrote called "Why Are You Charging Me For That?"

Localization - Investment or Expense?

Would you rather expend or invest? Would your company rather expend or invest?

You walk into a pastry shop, buy a slice of cake and eat it. That's an expense because it doesn't last long and you can't use it to make anything else. You walk into a bank, buy a certificate of deposit and reap interest a few months later. That's an investment because it has some durability and you use it to make something else (more money).

A new client is testing the waters in Europe and Japan. To appear serious to prospects there, they asked me for a proposal on some multimedia projects they've hosted from their Web site. It took lots of phone calls and e-mail to ascertain exactly what they expected back, then lots of phone calls and e-mail to ensure that they had sent us everything we needed to estimate costs for a full, end-to-end solution.

They're a small company with solid domestic revenues and negligible overseas sales to date, so they felt sticker shock at the $3-4000 per language that this was going to cost. One of their executives tried to think nimbly: "See whether they can just do the voiceovers and give them to us. We can have our in-house editors replace that layer in the media files."

I don't mind nimble thinking, and I appreciate her attempts to save money, so I won't go into the many technical and quality-related concerns that this approach violates, but when I sent an adjusted quote, I wrote, "I understand that you had $1500/language in mind, but the original English media probably cost a good deal more than that, and you've likely forgotten what you spent on them because of how many prospects have clicked on them. I encourage my first-time clients to regard this is an investment, not an expense. If you choose your overseas markets and partners carefully, and handle translation and localization correctly from the start, your ROI will not be long in coming."

Do you agree? Have you spent time trying to convince your company's executives that good localization practices are an investment, not an expense? What's your favorite argument?

If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy another one called "Why Localize at All?"

"Why are you charging me for that?" - Part 2

Do you have manuals, resource files, help projects or entire Web sites that you've been localizing for several years and through several versions? Have you thought about the "permafrost" in those files; i.e., the sentences, paragraphs, pages and chapters that haven't changed in ages?

Are you being charged for them in your localization efforts?

In my experience, vendor pricing includes discounts for segments (usually entire sentences or bits of text surrounded by paragraph markers) with high match rates to text that has already been translated. So, a new 30-word sentence at $.25/word may cost $7.50, but a 30-word sentence that does not change at all from one version to the next may cost $.03/word, or $.75.

But why are you charging me for that?

Vendors have different rationales (and they are welcome to post them here) which often boil down to the necessity to "touch" the words in one way or the other: either in engineering unchanged paragraphs into the new manual, or in translation memory maintenance, or in the human editing pass when eyes land upon them. These words are the spare tire of localization, in that they haven't changed, but they're still along for the ride, and moving their weight requires some modicum of additional gasoline.

As a localization manager, try explaining that to your boss.

So, if I don't want them to charge me for the words, or for any words that don't require translation, what should I do?

• Perform your own triage. Pull out code samples, for instance, which will never need to be translated, and hand them to your vendor in a text file. Ask that they be aligned to themselves in TM so that the words fall out as 100% matched. The translators won't touch them and you won't (shouldn't) be charged for them.
  
• Move to a CMS. Deploying a content management system is a long-haul solution; but if this is a long-haul problem for you, look into it. With a CMS in place and an interface between your vendor and the system, it becomes easier for you and your vendor to separate matched from non-matched segments. That which is easier, should cost less.
• Give instructions, not words. If you suspect that there have been only a few changes to a 40-page manual, use a diffing tool to find them, write up the changes, and hand them off to the vendor with instructions to charge you hourly for the spot-changes. If the vendor knows exactly what to change where, it eliminates the guess work, the TM analysis, the file preparation and the engineering. This lowers your costs of localizing the book.

You should be able to have a calm discussion with your vendor about these jillions of unchanging words, and arrive at one or more methods for eliminating unnecessary work. Try to go beyond "Why are you charging me for that?" to "What can we do so that you don't have to charge me for that?"

Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I've written called "Why are you charging me for that? - Part 1"