Internationalization is important for any software product that wishes to compete in the global marketplace. If it’s done wrong, it can be a hassle, but if done right, the investment is minimal, and everything goes smoothly. Like cooking and SEO, preparation is all important…

I finally hired a French translator to internationalize our software and add another language to our website. French is the test case (for me, since I’m new to this – we already have English, Simp. and Trad Chinese.) But we will be hiring Russian, Korean, Japanese and Spanish now that things are rolling, if you want to translate for us, or would like to request another language, let me know.

Here’s an outline of my prep:

Translators get paid by the word, so keeping word count low saves money – especially when you pay for each word five times! Aside from that, the most important thing is to have all things that are written kept in separate files.

The software has a language pack, which is easily editable (so there is no user-facing language hard coded into the programming.) The flash is internationalized – it too has a language pack. And, our key to good website work-flow, the copy is kept in a word doc separate from the HTML – that way, when I want to hire an editor, I don’t need to teach them HTML (and the people editing the other languages don’t get passwords to our web server.)

Now that that everything is ready, hiring up and getting ‘er done should be a snap!

Tags: chinese, easy, english, french, hiring, important, localization, notes, russian, tips

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under localization, marketing, seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.