Internationalization and For Program Localization. i18n

Question

I have several projects I've worked on that are setup for internationalization.

From the programming perspective, I have everything pretty much setup and put all of the string into an xml file or properties file. I wish to get these files translated into other languages, such as: Italian (it), Spanish (es), Germany (de), Brazillian Portugese (pt-br), Chinese Simplified (zh-cn), Chinese Traditional (zh-tw), Japanese (ja), Russian (ru), Hugarian (hu), Polish (pl), and French (fr).

I've considered using services like google translate, however I feel that this automatic translation tools are still a bit weak.

In summsary, I'm curious on if others have used professional translation services for their programs, if so which ones would people recommend and how did you coordinate the translation updates with the translation teams? Any idea on what I should expect to pay? Or is there a better way of doing this that I'm not aware of?

Answer 1

Machine translation services like Google, Bing etc. are not a good choice. As you mention, these services are in reality still in their infancy, and more importantly using them will most likely give your non-English customers a bad impression of your application.

If you want top quality translation, you will need to employ the services of a professional translation agency. Translators need to understand your application in order to translate the text correctly, so providing them with the application itself or screen captures of the English product will help.

You will pay per word - the rates vary from agency to agency, and also from language to language.

The other alternative is using crowd-sourced translations, from GetLocalization for example.

To summarize, proper localization is not just a matter of translating the text - you need to build a relationship with your translators, and ensure they understand your application and the context of the strings that they are translating, otherwise you will end up with a linguistically poor application, that will reflect badly on your company.