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Million-Word Projects

We’ve been there, done that…translated localization projects involving hundreds of thousands and millions of words…

We have been working successfully on localization projects for years and understand what troubles a misplaced hyphen can cause in the translated source code.

One of our major Clients is a leading European IT provider and industry specialist in the airline and aviation sector with their headquarters in Germany. Another Client of ours, based in France, is among the largest personal safety equipment manufacturers in the world with several dozen subsidiaries in Europe, Asia and the Americas. They operate in different industries but had the same need recently: localizing and translating their IT systems and documentation from German to English and from French to German. It took months and never ending information flow among team members to complete each project but, ultimately, both Clients were satisfied. Why? Because we understand that localization exceeds the requirements of standard translation. The layout, the format and all software-specific instructions must be preserved in the target language documents. The two projects were similar because each included about one-million-word, months of translation and tons of documents but were different in nature, vocabulary and terminology.

When it comes to localization of this size, the Client, the Project Manager, the translator and the proofreader must work together as a team, clarifying all questions on the go. Continuous information flow among team members is crucial regarding the success of the overall project. Our role as Project Managers is more important than ever, because we have to “pre-digest” the material for the translators. The preliminary project phase consists of examining the file structure of hundreds of folders and subfolders, selecting and categorizing the files based on extension and file type and forwarding the files to the translator. We also have to identify and convert special file formats depending on the system.

Experience in translation is always important, but when it comes to localization, it is crucial to co-operate with translators who are not only native speakers of the target language but IT experts at the same time and are aware of the complexities of localization. Our best IT translators have worked for several years as IT specialists before they started their translation career.