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In today's digital age there is an increasing demand for localization, and we consider software localization to be the most prospective trend in the international marketplace. The international software market has become more and more important for software providers. Many U.S. software providers obtain more than half of their revenues and profits from international sales.
For most U.S. software providers international sales is the foremost vehicle for growth in revenues, profits and market share.
The freedom of exchange between countries, and the growth of truly worldwide networks (CompuServe, Internet), has raised the awareness and computer literacy in many countries.
The opportunities for international sales are enormous, but the competition is fierce. A user will always prefer an application which works in his language and cultural environment. Now, often the user has a choice due to competition.
Regulatory requirements in the European Common Market will make it mandatory that a software application is adapted to the local language and culture.
The actual cost of localization, when correctly done, is usually a minor cost component when seen over the lifetime of the product.
Translatel has successfully executed several large software localization projects and we are looking forward to more localization orders.
Localization is almost never just translation. This is a much more complex set of measures. Defining the term, localization is the process of establishing information within a computer system specific to each supported language, cultural data, and coded character set combination, or, speaking more generally, all of the tasks needed to adapt a foreign language product to a local market.
Once you are aware of the need to sell your products or services in a different cultural environment, there is a need to consider every aspect of the new culture to be adapted to:
- Different language - For a software developer it could mean switching to a different character set, creating new fonts and often rewriting whole parts of software code. There are three different widespread Cyrillic encodings, not to mention Apple Mac and ISO 8859-5.
- Different traditions - Do everything it takes not to hurt national or religious feelings of your customers. Otherwise this would mean total failure of your project.
- Different system of technical standards.
- Different legislation system.
- Anything else, even different sense of humor too!
Therefore major localization activities include:
- Translation of all natural language strings that can be displayed or printed;
- Adding locale specific features such as spelling, hyphenation and grammar checking. This can also include additional locale specific functionality to the core application;
- Adjusting objects containing natural language strings such as menus, dialog boxes, buttons, etc. The expansion which occurs when translating the natural language strings often causes visual corruption of these objects (or truncation of the strings);
- Managing changes to the original application in order to reflect these changes in the localized versions;
- Testing the localized software on the target platform
Once again, to take part in a localization project it is not enough to be just a great translator. This involves much creativity and experience in the field of information technologies as well as some knowledge in cultural science, psychology, PR, jurisprudence, and sociology.
So what's so special about localizing a product for the Ukrainian market? The languages we are working with are Russian and Ukrainian. This means a lot of responsibility for us. Why? Standardizing of technical terminology is still in progress - this is especially noticeable in the IT sector and especially with the Ukrainian language. The acceptance of modern technical terms is being done thanks to large-scale localization projects, rather than by the state. That's why you will need a strong experienced team to hit the local market with your product.
The majority of the Ukrainian population speaks Ukrainian as its native language. It is the official language of Ukraine, however the Russian language prevails in Eastern and Southern parts of the country. Ukrainian is being introduced in every school, university and government establishment as a working language - this means that educational and government institutes are most likely to choose localized software to use on their computers. It should also be noted that such institutes, as well as large companies, have the highest percentage of installed licensed software.
Our team offers a wide range of localization services - from the translation of small user manuals to large software localization projects. Our aim is to take an active part in the development of national localization standards for the benefit both of our clients and the users of their products.
Alexander Morotski,
Head of Localization Department
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