So, you want to use your web site to market your products outside of the United States. Is it as easy as getting your web site translated into the languages for your target countries? Not quite, and we’ll help you see why.
Read this article touching on some of the costs behind a web site localization project to learn about some pitfalls you can expect, and more importantly, the ones you can avoid!
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Written by NANCY A. LOCKE and reprinted with permission from INTERCOM, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication. Arlington, VA U.S.A.
In the past twenty years, two developments have had an important impact on the creation and design of communication: the appearance of personal computers on every desktop, equipped with “user-friendly” authoring and design software, and the globalization of world markets. The first development means that document design is no longer left to graphic artists. Technical communicators now may be asked to “package” as well as draft copy, designing documents from scratch or working with graphic style guidelines or a prescribed design template. The second development means that, increasingly, documents authored in one language (usually English) serve as the source for countless localized versions destined for distribution in markets around the world. The concomitant development and marketing of computer assisted translation (CAT), translation memory (TM), and content management systems promote the notion that any and all documents may serve equally well as source documents.
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At “The Center for Technical Translation®”, we have bought, trained on and used virtually all of the major DTP programs on the market today – FrameMaker, QuarkXPress, InDesign, PageMaker, MicroGraphics and even PowerPoint (you may not think of it as a DTP program, but there is still a lot to know!). We also needed to learn the tricks of the trade for the accompanying graphic programs such as Illustrator, Photoshop, FreeHand and CorelDraw since a lot of the manuals, brochures and books we were translating had graphic callouts that needed translation.
As with anything in life, each new project is still a learning experience. Each Quark file we get is different from the last. Each Desktop Publisher leaves his or her fingerprints on a file with interesting little quirks we’ll never see again. It keeps us on our toes!
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