The localization phase always starts with terminology glossary development.
If there is no glossary yet, it is strongly recommended that its creation be outsourced to professionals. Although in-country subsidiaries, business partners, or distributors may have the advantage of better product understanding, they can hardly be considered language professionals. They are unlikely to be fully familiar with current industry terminology standards; they will frequently use English words instead of correct target-language terms; their results may be incomplete or inconsistent; and they are rarely as responsive to time constraints as appropriate professionals are.
A newly created or updated glossary prepared by our terminologists is sent for review to an independent evaluator, for example, to one of the client's business partners with extensive knowledge of the product.
All materials are translated using the finalized glossary.
To attain necessary quality, it is essential to have a style guide that translators and editors will use. This guide should focus primarily on the language, culture and specifics of the target audience perception. It also needs to contain certain details and requirements of a particular project, field and client. In addition, this kind of guide must provide for some basic translation rules, including the use of quotation marks, dashes and fonts, guidelines for translating proper names and abbreviations and so on.
If you have no ready style guide for the project, our specialists will develop a new project-specific style guide or will help you to adapt your existing style guides to fit your current translation needs.
In common cases, localization is done using Translation Memory (TM) technology. TM not only makes it possible to translate faster and more cost effectively but also secures high consistency of language and terminology in compliance with product developers’ instructions. Combined with a glossary and a Logrus-developed query database (both available on the Internet), the technology ensures project scalability and complete integration of internal and external teams involved in your assignment.
We use TM wherever possible and make the resultant database a part of the delivery to our client. In many cases we create a single TM database for several languages instead of one per each language.
We also support TM and EBMT terminology databases and explore them for translation terminology QA check and fuzzy matches capabilities extension.